puritans

Breaking up is hard to do, and I am not at all prepared to discard my deep love and admiration for novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson . Among her novels, I treasure Lila in particular for its…

Within William Bradford’s massive work, Of Plymouth Plantation, composed between 1630 and 1651 while he was occasional governor of the colony, there’s no mention of the eponymous rock upon which the…

Thanksgiving has been marshaled in the battle over what is the proper interpretation of the idea of America. With thousands of refugees looking for amnesty in that “last, best hope of earth,” will the better angels of our nature find room for them at the table?

Personal research conducted among my lefty friends shows that for many liberals, reading David Brooks amounts to a kind of a guilty pleasure. Brooks is witty, urbane, occasionally brilliant, and he…

May 1 st 1628 was the second time that Thomas Morton had erected a Maypole at his colony in Merrymount; but it was to be the decisive event in getting him arrested and exiled by his fellow Englishmen…

Another Christmas, another string of outrages about the supposed “War on Christmas.” In November there was the social media furor about Starbucks’ red cups, as Ed Simon relates here in RD. Then this…

Or, why we’re glad American culture settled on “Thanksgiving” over “Fasting and Humiliation.”

In a quiet part of the London borough of Southwark, on a street running parallel to the Thames, there is an old, dark-wood paneled pub with leaded windows. Formerly known by the borderline obscene…

It’s a news story that contains the ingredients of a paperback thriller, the sort of thing that reminds readers what they find so evocative about archeology. Researchers sifting through the ground at…

Throughout US history the perpetrators of religiously-inspired violence have usually been white Protestant men fearful of non-Protestant communities.