Moderator's Memos

Here is this week’s Memo from Moderator David Grimsted, continuing his thought-provoking exploration of our church’s roots.

In “King Philip’s War,” 1675-1676, 5,000 Indians died, about half killed in battle and half starved to death. Around 1,000 were sent as slaves to the West Indies, where they quickly died. North American Indians proved non-adaptive to slavery. About 3,000 remained in New England, scattered with tribes disintegrated. White deaths were over 1,000, with eight towns wholly destroyed and over thirty, including

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Here is this week’s Memo from Moderator David Grimsted, continuing his thought-provoking exploration of our church’s roots.

There would never be in America, perhaps in the whole world, a man who did so much to foster and found a free and decent society as Roger Williams. He studied, respected, and lived in peace for forty years with his Native American neighbors. He hated slavery and fought to ban it. And he was Christianity’s first successful advocate for religious toleration and

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Here is this week’s Memo from Moderator David Grimsted, continuing his thought-provoking exploration of our church’s Puritan roots.

As I taught history to college students, I kept a record of the most horrendous “truths” that appeared in exam books, out of good Puritan motives. Theoretically, they kept me aware of my sorry professional limitations; actually, they kept me laughing about our general human capacity for ignorance and the eternal twisting of truth. My clear favorite I think of often

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Here is this week’s Memo from Moderator David Grimsted, continuing his exploration of our church’s Puritan roots.

Anne Bradstreet’s three most intensely beautiful poems celebrate her passionate union with her husband, Simon. One is a “letter” to him when “Absent on Public Appointment.”

My head, my heart, my eyes, my life—Nay, more
My joy, my magazine of earthly store.
If we be one, as surely thou and I,
How stay’st thou there, while I in Ipswich lye?

For me, these

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Anne Hutchinson was one of our culture’s most remarkable women: deeply educated, intellectually acute, socially contributive, disturbingly determined. In her three years in Massachusetts Bay Colony, no one did so much to serve it and to divide it.

She came to the colony in 1634 not for religious freedom, but to practice the true faith. Her father, a minister and teacher, had educated her deeply. She and her husband had become followers of Rev. John Cotton, forced to escape

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