Moderator's Memos

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

Witches and the Mathers

The Revs. Increase and Cotton Mather, father and son, were the influential late 17th clergy keeping witchcraft vital in New England and supporting the Salem Village executions of 1692. They led in the Puritans’ changing world, and believed witchery would help restore an intense piety that they felt drifting away. Son and grandson

Read More

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

Witchery

In the popular memory, Puritans exist most vigorously in the Salem Village witch trials of 1692. These cases were important, though always divisive in the church, and then quickly ended and were repudiated. By then, nineteen alleged witches had been hanged and one crushed to death with stones, while five accused people died of natural causes in jail. By furor’s end,

Read More

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

Read More

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Taylor wrote hundreds of religious poems as part of his ministrations, carefully preserved but essentially unpublished and undated.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

Read More

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

Read More