Tag Archives: Roger Williams
Programmed by both popular culture and experience, we too often think of preachers as unworldly hot-house creatures, ill equipped to face challenges of a brutal real world. In her new book, “Rekindled,” Teresa Irizarry gives us a fresh take on a well-known character from America’s earliest days. Irizarry, who has ties to Northeast Texas, recasts Roger Williams, one of the Baptist Church’s founders, in the pioneer spirit of a Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett while still giving due respect to…..
One of attributes of human language our writing systems barely reflect is tone. Roger Williams observed there was another layer to the indigenous languages he was attempting to capture in that there was not just sound but pitch involved. He never believed he captured all of it. Much of the intonation level information is thought be lost, extinct or reconstructed. The parts of language that are not written phonetically tend to change rapidly between population groups, and that leads to…..
With software we continually improve by removing bugs and adding features. Eventually we get to the point we want to do something dramatically different and we call the last release a terminal release. At that point we don’t spend time on it anymore and it is stable. If you want the next set of improvements, a bigger upgrade is required. Oddly, history has a similar rhythm. The nature of people telling stories in print means they stabilize into the accepted…..
How is that shoveling going? If you are viewing this you likely have at least stopped for something warm to drink. The snow that snuck in under the coat and into your socks is starting to melt and get you wet… Times like this aren’t that different for us than they were for Roger Williams. Especially if the power is out. Except, instead of waiting for the power to return, he had to wait for spring. Or he could go find…..
When Roger Williams began to fight against forced worship it was controversial and illegal to do so and communications happened in code. The code is beautiful — to the casual uneducated eye it looks like Greek, but it isn’t. The code in simple rendition as reproduced here has been cracked, but the original appears to have had a second layer of code around it’s edges that may not yet be fully cracked. It is like looking into a hallway of mirrors four…..
Roger Williams was the first to architect the concept down to a practical level, and to test it with successful implementation in Rhode Island. Here are five points of comparison between Jefferson and Williams to ponder as we consider how or if religious liberty is important to us today. Rekindled tells a Roger Williams story. 1. 132 years earlier than the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Roger Williams laid the foundation for religious freedom in Rhode Island, as an experiment in…..
There are thirteen Thanksgivings in the calendar year of the Narragansett people. Seems other Americans in our day only got 7.7% of the lesson, even though the Pilgrim’s own Bible said to always be thankful. The very same sentence tells us to rejoice always. Notice it is a verb: something you do, as opposed to a feeling. Christmas is a time for rejoicing in memory of the arrival by birth of Jesus. We are joyous because Jesus rescued us, and…..
After finishing the 2015 Boston marathon, Gianclaudio realized his ID was gone and, not speaking English, he could not find his way to his people or his hotel. Being clever, he went for the the airport directly, but he was taken for by many homeless or worse. The story of Gianclaudio P. Marengo’s survival has a lucky ending: he was recognized for the civilized but lost Italian he was and returned to people he knew by an officer who said…..
Three hundred eighty years after Roger Williams put everything on the line to stand for heartfelt worship and respect for conscience, we seem a bit building focused. When we talk of separation of church and state we often focus on which building an organization can meet in, e.g. can a church meet in a public school. There is a sad lament that churches in Europe are being repurposed rapidly as they are empty, but Roger Williams might have been happy,…..
When Roger Williams was banished he set out alone into a blizzard in a harsh New England winter. He would survive to separate church and state in a brand new settlement that would become Rhode Island. Roger Williams wrote little that has survived about his 14 week winter stay in the wilderness of New England. The resulting absence of fact has led to a plethora of theories. There are many alternatives to the one in the novel Rekindled. What we do…..