In 1988 I wrote a substantial essay laying out my views about abortion, and describing how they had evolved over time. The piece also considered the increasing parallels, both rhetorical and political, between this struggle and the Civil War. Thirty-plus years later, despite some continuing evolution and updates, much of the piece still seems relevant, … Continue reading Abortion & Civil War – 2019 Update; 2021 Postscript
Biographers note that Emily Dickinson, who was born on December 10 in 1830, was most productive in the first half of the 1860s. Secluded within the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts (except when tending the flower garden), she turned out hundreds of poems, mostly short, striking, often astonishing — but unnoticed by the outside world; her fame came after her death, which was likely okay with her.
Biographers speculate about what spurred this massive outburst (she left 1700 poems behind, almost none with titles, given numbers instead). Some extended personal crisis? Missives to a secret love? (She did seem to have some “affairs of the heart,” but most were entirely epistolary, and the few signals are mixed enough to suggest some may have been same sex.)
I haven’t read all the biographies, but want to dip my amateur oar into this rippling reflecting pool, to mention a possibility not dwelt upon in those I’ve seen: could the flood of verse have been her way of coping with the Civil War?
So here I ask myself: what spook outfit would want to harass the godfather? (First guess: all of them, because he’s sidelined & made fools of them from the jump.)
And how could they do that, with decent cover?
Now recall the convenient fact that apparently Junior lied like a rug (as did so many others) when he was at the Intel Committee before. So in some cubbyhole at Langley, or wherever, the light went on:
Burr -Voilà!
Lucretia Mott completely rejected this whole [traditional Easter] scenario, decrying the “harm done” by it.
Yet she seemed devoted to Jesus. She quoted his words incessantly, affirmed his “messianic status,” and thought she was preaching his “gospel” message during her sixty controversial years as a Quaker preacher.
But if Jesus’ “gospel” was not about depravity and vicarious blood atonement, what did Lucretia say it was?
Scholar Priscilla Eppinger has put it in a nutshell: Salvation for humans would come through the faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. By this, Mott meant a faith like that of Jesus. She quoted from Paul’s letter to the Galatians (2:20):
“Faith of Jesus Christ is faith in the truth, faith in God and in man. The life that I now live in the flesh, said the Apostle, I live by the faith of the son of God. . . . Well [Mott added] what is this other than a faith similar to that which Jesus held, the faith of the son of God.” (Greene 124)
The faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. Neither Eppinger nor Lucretia originated this alternate motto. And what was this “faith”?
There are still neo-Orthodox Friends who can’t discuss de Hartog’s novel, The Peaceable Kingdom without turning red in the face and showing signs of apoplexy. And it’s not hard to see why: a hundred or a thousand people have read of de Hartog’s rollicking, bigger than life liberal Fox for every one who searched out their querulous caviling about it in Quaker Religious Thought.
But there’s one other thing to note about de Hartog’s opus. “In his lectures on Quaker history,” Ann Sieber reports, “Jan has waged a sly campaign to shift the credit for much of Quaker faith and practice from Fox to Fell.” And she also notes that in The Peaceable Kingdom, it is Margaret Fell who is by far the more fully-developed character, while Fox remains something of a mystical wraith.
Jan was pointing toward a feminist reinterpretation of this history, one that scholars have been fleshing out since then.
De Hartog’s long life was full, not only of books, but of adventure and romance — especially in the older meaning of the term, conveying excitement, charm, fascination and a touch of mystery.