For All the Saints: Albertus Magnus, Francis Asbury, George Whitefield

My very first experience teaching at the college level, was the year I served as a teaching assistant at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, CT (1981-1982). At the time it was still a women's college. On the Roman Catholic calendar, that school's namesake, Albert the Great (1206-1280), is honored today.  This site , no longer available, had this: "Students of philosophy know him as the master of Thomas Aquinas. Albert’s attempt to understand Aristotle’s writings established the climate in which Thomas Aquinas developed his synthesis of Greek wisdom and Christian theology. But Albert deserves recognition on his own merits as a curious, honest and diligent scholar…. His boundless interests prompted him to write a compendium of all knowledge: natural science, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, ethics, economics, politics and metaphysics…[He] is the patron of scientists and philosophers."

On the Episcopal calendar, Francis Asbury and George Whitefield are honored. Asbury (1743-1816) was one of the first two Methodist bishops when the movement was founded as a denomination in 1782. He worked for many years as a leader and preacher of the church. Whitefield (1714-1770) was an Anglican preacher who helped spread the Great Awakening in the British colonies and, although Calvinist rather than Arminian in his outlook, was associated with the Methodist movement.