Tag: Religion

I’m rather glad I waited to read the First Parish history

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As a parent, you really try to keep your kids from a lot of painful encounters but they never listen to your advice, as far as you can tell, which seems to be futile no matter how hard you try, and then the next thing you hear is crying.

Maybe that’s a good thing, if from their experience they learn more than you knew.

There are several books that fall into that model. Had I read them before completing Quaker Dover, I might have overlooked some fresh insights. But now that my book’s out, I really appreciate what else I’m finding.

Donald R. Bryant’s History of the First Parish Church is one of them. The 160-page volume, first published in 1970 and enlarged in 2002, offers another side of my argument of the Quaker invasion in town, for one thing, while relating other parts of the early years with, well, perhaps more discretion. And, my, I do admire his resources and tenacity.

One of my favorite sections is the profile of John Williams that Bryant works into the narrative. Williams, a member of the parish, was, as he says “a visionary, a leader in bringing textile manufacturing to America,” and a cofounder of what became the big millworks in today’s downtown.

But he also became part of the faction of 26 male members who announced in 1828 they were leaving the church to join the Unitarian Society in establishing a new congregation. The split among the heirs of the Puritans into Unitarian or Trinitarian Congregational at the time paralleled a similar one among American Quakers into Orthodox and Hicksite. New England somehow remained Orthodox, as far as Friends went.

The plot within First Parish further thickens over the kind of minister it needed along with the construction of a new, and present, house of worship. What follows in the parish history is a turmoil that includes the changing economics of the town I haven’t yet found in the Quaker Meeting.

Bryant’s history then turns largely to the successive ministers rather than the congregation’s members and their influence in the community.

Still, I appreciate the comments by David Slater at the end of the book. He was First Parish pastor when I first came to Dover and quite engaging. He offered a checklist on how church life was changing that remains relevant, though nothing hit me more than this:

“Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural.”

That takes me back to the Quaker invasion into Dover, back in the mid-1600s.

As for the city’s other congregations? I’m anxious to hear more.

Reconsidering a nest for alternative social progressive witness

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the sides my Quaking Dover presentation for Cape Cod Friends awakened in me was a nagging awareness that some of the elements that encouraged social progressive action could also be used to sustain reactionary conservative activism from the other sides as well.

This could be seen especially in the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of the Roe decision, the result of a long-term resistance movement, where reactionary forces could claim  a victory.

Quite simply, both side have deep roots, perhaps unlike the middle.

My big question now is what makes one morally superior to the other.

The answers, I suspect, can be quite humbling. As well as a point of common engagement.

One of the many ways the dynamic of American society has changed in my own lifetime

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As Dover First Parish pastor David Slater wrote in 1983: “Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural. In the 1950s public values were largely Christian values (even Protestant Christian values). Today we are more religiously pluralistic, but even more importantly, more secular. We can no longer assume that the values of the church will be shared by the larger society.”

How prophetic, considering where American society is today.

And how ironic, considering that his congregation embodied the common culture the Quakers in my book were countering.

As a reminder from the dominant side

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The ruling Puritans in New England had reasons for opposing the Quakers, something I need to remember in the midst of my Quaking Dover arguments, They don’t get much sympathy in their objections, at least from my audiences.

As Dover First Parish historian Donald R. Bryant put it, “The Quakers did not conform with the orderly practices of the Puritan churches. They would not join in fellowship, and met among themselves, propagating their own beliefs. Many of them did not do this quietly, but in a manner that was disturbing to regular church members. They were apt to interrupt a meeting or a preacher, or to even interfere with the proceedings of a court. They insulted church order and disturbed the peace. Their conduct was described as ‘indecent and provoking.’”

Some of these points still sting as I look at today’s political and social polarization.

If you missed my latest Zoom presentation

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You can catch up with my insights on “Quaker Meeting as a nest for social justness” via YouTube, thanks to West Falmouth Friends on Cape Cod.

The event, the latest of the special presentations based on my book, Quaking Dover and the New Hampshire city’s 400th anniversary, was recorded and is now available.

Many thanks to all involved.

To see what transpired during the hour, click here.

So where were the Baptists in New Hampshire?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Dover’s third minister, Hanserd Knollys, no doubt laid a foundation for the Quaker message two decades after his brief tenure in the town pulpit. He was beset by controversy and even a physical skirmish or two, but he organized the church as a Congregational society even as his own theology was evolving into Particular Baptist.

Some of New Hampshire’s early Baptists did relocate to New Jersey, where they named a town Piscataway, in honor of Dover’s Piscataqua River. And Knollys himself became the pastor of London’s first Baptist church, once he had fled New Hampshire and the New World.

By the way, the number of colonists who returned to England from America still amazes me. How could they even afford it, much less the time involved?

Some of his challenges to conventional Christianity, like rejecting the baptism of infants, opened the way for Quakers to build on, once they arrived.

Still, I couldn’t get a clear picture of the existence of the Baptists as New England’s other dissident denomination in the colonial era. Was it all down in Rhode Island, where they contended with the Quakers over the governance of the colony?

My own book, Quaking Dover, concentrates on Dover Friends Meeting and its families, once they’re established, but the Baptists seem to be largely invisible until the Revolutionary War or so.

Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts now provides an understanding of the faith north of Rhode Island. Essentially, it was long comprised of one church in Boston, and its members were scattered across the region, rather like a network of solitary souls. The church underwent an evolution over the years, from lay ministry to ordained pastors, and ultimately presented less of a threat to the Puritans/Congregationalists than did the Friends.

Still, their insistence on a separation of church and state and their view of a church being comprised of fellow adult believers rather than a place one had to attend regardless of one’s heart and thinking were liberal and revolutionary.

Pestana’s description of the impact of the Great Awakening on the Baptist movement gives me a clearer understanding of why so many of its churches appeared in and around Dover – and the rest of New England – in the early 1800s.

The 1630s was a most remarkable decade in New England

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

A comment from a professional historian after one of my Quaking Dover presentations has me realizing how much more needs to be seen in fresh light.

New England history, he said, is told through Harvard. And then, to smaller degrees, Yale and Williams College. A more accurate verb might be “filtered” or “focused,” but the implication was clear. The tale is party-line. Even Greater Boston-based.

When I delved into the roots of tiny Dover to the north, from the perspective of its Quaker Meeting, I had no idea how unconventional my stance would be.

The traditional history, I will argue, is Puritan-based and largely pushes aside the earlier settlers and the cultural differences or influence they had.

The well-organized Puritan invasion began full-force in 1630 with Massachusetts Bay and then the Connecticut colonies. Their utopian vision was far more fragile in practice than we’re led to believe. In that first decade, Roger Williams, Ann Hutchinson, and Samuel Gorton were banished, leading to the establishment of Rhode Island and quickly afterward, in reaction, Harvard College. Their own charter was under threat of revocation from the king, and they placed cannon on Boston Harbor to fire on Royal Navy ships, if needed. Think about that. And its Pequot War enslaved Natives who were exchanged for Africans, spurring the lucrative slave-trade.

That’s a lot in a small space in a short time.

Settlement to the north was not immune.

In New Hampshire, two of the four colonial towns were established by religious dissidents fleeing Massachusetts. Dover’s Edward Hilton conveyed his charter (exactly how or for how much remains unclear) to the Lords Saye and Brook for their own management … or mismanagement. As my book details, the New Hampshire province and neighboring Maine quickly became a hotbed of dissidents and misfits – a story that is largely overlooked in the traditional accounts. Let me just say it was a ripe time.

What I’ve also been seeing is that the story of dissent has focused on Rhode Island and largely ignored the north, including Salem, Massachusetts.

Should one of my upcoming presentations redress that?

To those who say God wrote the Bible, let me reply as a writer

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If He’s so perfect, why didn’t He do a better job of it? (See any masculine references here as traditional and object to them as you wish.)

Even in Hebrew, so I’m told, many key passages are unintelligible. As for the King James English, which many Protestant fundamentalists hold as inerrant (meaning flawless, perfect, unblemished), let me object. There’s a lot of clumsy translation – and outright mistranslation. Add to that the ways our own language has shifted in the centuries since. (To wit: I find myself having to retranslate many key Quaker writings from the mid-1600s on for modern readers, even those with PhD credentials. Those early Friends were conversant with the KJV lingo. Does thee understand?)

For perspective. When’s the last time you read Shakespeare? Without relying on footnotes?

More to the point. He (yes, He, in the current argument) certainly could have used a better editor, in any language. As for revisions? Let me contend that no work of language is ever perfect, it is ultimately a human artifact. Including the arcane collection known as The Bible.

For me, the best we have in those pages is all the more exalted because of that edge of imperfection and decay. It allows humanity to creep in. I’m thinking of some very cutting-edge contemporary poets, actually.

My fascination with that divine text has turned to the struggle to accurately record our own, very personal, experiences of the Holy One. Name it as best you can. And, from the other direction, the ways our own lives have reacted to the struggle from our own first-hand encounters with those haunting great mysteries.

I’ve come to see – and treasure – what we have in that book more as a set of deeply personal journals of individual and group experiences, including their failures, than as any set of how-to steps to eternity.

The persecution wasn’t consistent

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Had the Puritan persecution of dissidents been consistent, the Quakers and Baptists likely wouldn’t have survived. Instead, it came in waves aimed more at the traveling missionaries as well as to constrain the political and business prowess of resident Friends.

Further, there were relatively few congregations or ministers in New England. Despite required attendance at worship on the Sabbath, the buildings couldn’t hold them all, had they showed up.

Who was keeping attendance rolls, anyway?

Under its stern exterior, Puritan polity was fragile in nature

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

No, I didn’t expect to be feeling some sympathy for the Puritan authorities in America.

In fact, I had assumed they were a pretty formidable front.

But then, in researching my new book, Quaking Dover, I was rather amazed by the range of developments they faced in the 1630s, their first decade in the New World. It’s like they were being hit on all sides.

In addition, they had no direct representation in Parliament. And they didn’t necessarily represent the majority of the residents in their own towns.

In their tribulations with the Crown, the place was ripe for Revolution from the very beginning, rather than having to wait for Paul Revere’s midnight ride.

The Quaker challenge of the late 1650s hit at some intrinsic flaws in the Puritan mindset. As one challenge voiced it, the flaws were essentially theological rather than focusing on the unfolding news events. The title of the pamphlet?

An examination of the grounds or causes which are said to induce the Court of Boston in New England to make an order or law of banishment, upon pain of death, against the Quakers

As also

Of the grounds and considerations by them produced, to manifest the warrantableness and justness both by their making and executing the same; which they now stand deeply engaged to defend, having already put two of them to death

As also

Of some further grounds for justifying the same, in an appendix to John Norton’s book (which was printed after the book itself, yet part thereof); whereof he is said to be appointed by the General Court

And likewise the Arguments briefly hinted, in that which is called, “A true Relation of the Proceedings against the Quakers, &c.”

Whereunto somewhat is added about the Authority and Government Christ excluded out of his church; which occasioneth somewhat his true Church-Government

By Isaac Penington, the Younger

[1660]

~*~

It’s a remarkable document, actually, well worth reading, even in light of the headlines and news flashes we encounter. It argued, essentially, that the Puritans were falling far short of their true goals and potential.

As for the full title?

It would never sell today.