Moderator's Memos

This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of the Puritans: their history and their ideas about God. You can read the first part of David’s examination of Rev. Edward Taylor’s poetry here. 

Taylor’s Tweedling Praise

Throughout his long career at Westport, Taylor wrote poetry to express his spiritual quests. After 1682, he regularly wrote “meditation poems” before celebrating communion. His common pattern was to present the way sin disrupts the human religious journey seeking wholeness:

When that this

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God’s Poetry –  Rev. Edward Taylor, in his 58 year pastorate (1671-1729) in the frontier/farming village of Westport, Massachusetts, once wrote:
 
Am I Thy gold? Or purse, Lord, for Thy wealth,
Whether in mine or mint refined for Thee?
I’m counted so, but count me o’er Thyself,
Lest gold-washed face, and brass in heart I be.
 
Taylor wrote hundreds of religious poems as part of his ministrations, carefully preserved but essentially unpublished and undated. Taylor willed them with

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This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of our denominational ancestors, the Puritans, and their history and their ideas about God.

Religious Dream and Reality

Early New England is often called a theocracy, but the clergy were explicitly kept from political action. Still, religion did much to rule the day, and it was ministers who were convened about the early theological disputes.

The most disruptive case was the “Antinomian Controversy” of 1836-37. All ministers agreed that salvation was God’s gift

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This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of one of our denominational ancestors, the Puritans.

November 7, 1639 was a bad day for the Puritan’s richest merchant, Robert Keayne, and a good day for Puritan consumer protection. Complaints had been made that prices on imported goods were too high, and Keayne was singled out as the merchant “notorious above others observed and complained of.” Called before the General Court, Keayne was fined 200 pounds—for making sometimes six or even eight

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This year’s Moderator, David Grimsted, continues his exploration of one of our denominational ancestors, the Puritans.

Christian Charity

John Winthrop preached his lay sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” to the Puritans in 1630 as they sailed to create a new and godly community in America. The sermon began by describing the troubled world God had always ordained. He “hath so disposed the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich and some poor, some high and eminent in

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