Lutherans and Saints

I'm a little fuzzy on the Lutheran church's doctrine on the concept of Saints, but I do know that the Lutheran's have a Calendar of Saints that high church Lutherans sometimes acknowledge.

Appropriately, for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America honors Martin Luther King, Jr. day on January 15. MLK, Jr., while named after the man who started the Reformation whom the Lutheran church is named after, was actually a Baptist, rather than a Lutheran, but still surely deserves commemoration.

Martin Luther himself is recalled four days after Valentine's Day, around the time when we reflect on whether our previous romantic efforts were positive, or are at the top of a list of sins that Lutherans need to silently confess and publicly ask forgiveness for.

On April 6, some Lutherans honor artists, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, W Matthias Grünewald, and Michelangelo among them.

But, May 24 is the best day of all in the Lutheran calendar of Saints, when some Lutherans commemorate Nicolaus Copernicus and Leonhard Euler.

Copernicus, of course, a childless and never married Catholic priest and polymath genius who is famous for his (more correct than the prevailing Sun rotates around the earth theory) helicentric theories in astronomy, but also made lasting contributions to the economic theories of inflation and monetary policy, wrote poety in Greek, was willing to consider radical ideas, and worked to cross the diplomatic divide between Lutherans and Catholics. He was a religious humanist and the "Copernian Revolution" named after him is synonomous with the concept of a paradigm shift. He also wrote a trigonometry textbook. If Copernicus had lived today, he would surely have been a Democrat.

Leonhard Euler was arguably the most brilliant mathematican who ever lived, who flouristed in the years just before the American Revolution, had thirteen children (eight of whom died before reaching adulthood, despite what was a decidedly upper middle class lifestyle for his day at a top drawer professor and royal advisor in Prussia) all children of the only woman he ever married (from 1734 until her death in 1773), and was something of a jerk when it came to discussing subjects that he knew nothing about, like religion. He was a strong believer in biblical inerrancy and militant campaigner against atheism (or more accurately, the Enlightenment Deism shares by a plurality of the United State's founding fathers and leading French and British intellectuals). If you've been in physics or mathematics long enough, you are sure to meet the type sooner or later. Much of his practical work has military applications (he won twelve awards for naval ship design), and was known for his unsophisticated tastes, although to his credit he did memorize Virgil's Epic Poem, the Aeneid, which served him well as he lost his vision late in life. In addition to his scholarly work, much of which is reserved for upper division mathematics majors and graduate students even today, he wrote textbooks on what would now be high school algebra and first year college calculus. If Euler had lived today, he would surely have been a conservative Republican.