Today is Sunday, September 20, 2009.

Today is Sunday, September 20, 2009.

On this day in history:

1378 - The Great Schism in the Catholic Church began. It was touched
off when Gregory XI died, shortly after returning the papal
seat from Avignon, in France, to Rome. Continuing for nearly
40 years (until 1417), the Schism at one point produced three
concurrent popes!

1883 - Birth of Albrecht Alt, German Lutheran Old Testament scholar.
"Biblia Hebraica" (13th ed., 1962), which Alt edited with
Rudolph Kittel, became a standard critical Hebrew text of the
Old Testament among students of the Bible for years.

1932 - Four branches of Methodism in England united to form the
Methodist Church of Great Britain and Ireland. These were the
Wesleyan Methodists (founded 1784), the Primitive Methodists
(1811), the United Methodist Free Churches (1857) and the
United Methodists (1907).
1947 - English apologist C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter: 'Those who
suffer the same things from the same people for the same
Person can scarcely not love each other.'

1948 - American missionary Jim Elliot -- eight years before his
martyrdom at the hands of the Auca Indians of Ecuador --
penned in his journal: 'I am Thine at terrible cost to
Thyself. Now Thou must become mine -- as Thou didst not attend
to the price, neither would I.'