![]() ![]() Forced worship "stinks in God's nostrils," he wrote. He objected to the way in which the colonial government legislated what he felt was properly God's to dictate. Williams agreed with the Massachusetts governors on most points of theology. Roger Williams, an early resident of Massachusetts who would go on to found the colony of Rhode Island, was uneasy about forced conformity to the Puritan mold, though not because he didn't like the mold. Barry, author of Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul. Massachusetts spurned "heathenish" practices to such a degree that it stopped using names for the days of the week, referring to them only by numbers. 'Williams was really Americas first individualist, the first contradictor of authority, the first rebel,' explains John M. ![]() But it is a MUST read for anyone who wants to better understand the rise of the ultra-conservative, Tea Party movement, where it comes from and what it eventually leads to. ![]() The town of Hartford required its residents to rise from bed at the same hour in the morning. Barry's most recent book, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, plays to all three wheelhouses. In England, laws against adultery were not enforced in New England, adulterers might be executed, or whipped and forced to wear scarlet letters. Barry tells the story with passion and an eye for fine detail. The Calvinist pilgrims who founded the New England colonies had rebelled against England by leaving it, but they were certainly not rebels against a firm social order or against the idea of authority itself. Joe Nocera, The New York Times 'In Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, New York Times bestselling author John M. ![]()
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