Reflections on God … Man … Life
Thoughts on history and the historical profession. Clio is the muse of history–this category title is a play on that concept.
We’re talking about Puritans in our ongoing trek through American history in this blog. As I mentioned in last week’s post about them, there is this stereotype that is difficult to reverse. But I hope I showed that not only were they earnest in their faith, but that they understood the concept of a covenant with God in which they needed to love one another. Were the Puritans always faithful to that covenant? Did they always treat each other in… Read more »
The word “Puritan” has developed, over time, into a reproach. If someone is tagged a Puritan today, that supposedly means he is an austere, humorless, narrow-minded bigot. Yet what do most people really know about the Puritans who came over to America in droves, especially during the 1630s? Not much. What we have now is primarily a stereotype. Puritans were far more diverse than the stereotype allows. Some, indeed, were lacking humor, but that might be because they were persecuted… Read more »
The financiers who provided the funds for the Pilgrims’ voyage to America had as one of their requirements that the farming in the new settlement be set up communally. No individual or family was to have their own land. Rather, everyone had to work on communal land and receive an equal share of the crops. This wasn’t the Pilgrims’ idea, but they felt bound to the arrangement. For a while, at least. As governor, William Bradford had to make a… Read more »
One aspect of Pilgrim history that everyone seems connected with is the harmony that existed between the settlers and the natives. Was that the case, or is this another legend that has become supposed fact? Let me provide the best analysis I can on this question. Upon arrival, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the Pilgrims made a big mistake by taking some buried corn from one tribe. They did so out of their need, and they comforted themselves… Read more »
My “travelogue” of my Wheaton trip continues today. While researching there, I realized I wasn’t too far from the town of Dixon, which was Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home. The town is quite proud of its most prominent citizen, so one of the houses Reagan lived in has been restored to what it would have looked like in the early 1920s. I decided, once I concluded my Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis research, to journey to Dixon to see the… Read more »
I’ve written previously in this blog about the blessing I’ve received for the coming academic year: a sabbatical to do research and writing. I also promised to provide updates. For the past week, I’ve been at Wheaton College in Illinois, delving into the papers of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and also materials relating to C. S. Lewis. I’ll talk about Lewis in tomorrow’s post; today, I’ll focus on Graham. As a reminder, one of my projects during this… Read more »
The Pilgrims survived the voyage to the New World. They avoided civil disorder by establishing the Mayflower Compact. But they weren’t able to escape the specter of disease and death. How did they handle this new challenge? First, they had to search out a place to call home. They sent out a party of men to try to find an opportune piece of land, but the Cape Cod area wasn’t hospitable to farming, and they also had their first encounter… Read more »