Add your own quiz and discussion questions, comments, links etc. - you can claim a base for each.
1.What did Anne Hutchinson tell her congregants the Lord had decided?
2. What did Hutchinson say God had told her directly?
4. Why is Hutchinson the Puritan with whom Americans today can most readily connect?
5. Who was Roger Williams?
6. How was freedom of thought in early America different from that of Europe in the 17th century?
7. According to some Puritans, who were "Satan's soldiers" in America?
8. As the Age of Reason was unfolding in Europe, what was Cotton Mather preaching in America?
7. According to some Puritans, who were "Satan's soldiers" in America?
8. As the Age of Reason was unfolding in Europe, what was Cotton Mather preaching in America?
9. What "evidence" was the primary basis for judgments in the Salem witch trials?
10. Did most people in New England believe in witches, during the infamous Salem witch trials?
11. What's Protestantism's enduring influence?
Add your quiz questions in the comments section below (each earns you a base).
Discussion Questions:
- Is predestined salvation fair, just, or believable?
- What would you say to someone who claimed actually to converse with God, i.e., to hear and respond to a voice in their head they're convinced is the supernatural creator and master of the universe?
- Does freedom of religion also mean freedom from religion, for those who are not religious?
- How can Christians in America reconcile the way their ancestors treated the native Americans?
- What do you think of modern-day Wiccans? Do you think they have any magical powers, or do you think they think so? **
- John Dewey philosophized about "natural piety," recognizing our shared inter-dependence on one another and on nature at large. How does a "naturally pious" person express that piety, in terms of lifestyle choices and policy preferences etc.?
- What traits of personal character, if any, do you think mirror the American character? Or is there even such a thing as a national character? Is it safe to generalize about what makes anyone "so American"?
- Should someone apologize on the nation's behalf to native Americans for the shameful way in which European settlers robbed them of their land, infected them with fatal disease, villified them as Satanic, etc. etc.? Should we be talking about reparations for indigenous peoples everywhere?
- Have there been other sorts of "witch trials" in American history than just those in Salem?
- Is it possible, as a Protestant, to renounce all supernaturalism?
- [The following questions are drawn from The Joys of Walking] Have you ever been on a "walking tour" of the sort Leslie Stephen praises?
- What do you think Stephen means when he calls walking "the natural recreation for the [person] who wants to turn [his intellect] out to play"? 20
- If walking saved JS Mill from becoming "a mere smoke-dried pedant," does that imply that all or most sedentary scholars are pedantic? 24
- COMMENT: "I respect the cyclist, but he is enslaved by his machine." 31
- COMMENT: "None of us can always be thinking over the riddle of the universe..." 37
- Add your DQs
And what do you think of this? -
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.
** Wicca is a modern-day, nature-based pagan religion. Though rituals and practices vary among people who identify as Wiccan, most observations include the festival celebrations of solstices and equinoxes, the honoring of a male god and a female goddess, and the incorporation of herbalism and other natural objects into rituals. Wiccans practice their religion according to an ethical code, and many believe in reincarnation... History.com
==
Arthur Miller, "Why I Wrote the Crucible"
...I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867—a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem—that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem’s past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.
I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. “During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam”—the two were “afflicted” teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris’s niece—“both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. . . .”
In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil... NYer
*Th 6 - FL 7-8
LISTEN
1. The American Founders were what kinds of philosophers?
2. Who was known as The Last Puritan, and of what movement was he at the center?
3. What did the Holy Spirit produce in "respectable people," during the Great Awakening?
4. Who said dreams could be messages from God?
5. What "intense supernatural feeling" did George Whitefield implant [not "invent"] in American Christianity?
6. Early American Methodists put great stock in what?
7. What did Thomas Jefferson instruct his teenage nephew to do?
8. Why, according to Alexander Hamilton, did the framers omit God from the Constitution?
9. What, according to Kant, is the motto of enlightenment?
10. Enlightenment thinkers were sure that what would win in the "marketplace of ideas?"
11. What kind of questions "burden" human thought, but cannot finally be answered?
Add your quiz questions, in the comments section below.
Discussion Questions
- The Founders were Enlightenment rationalists and pragmatists devoted to secular government and a "wall of separation" between church and state, but the myth persists among many Americans that they intended to establish "a Christian nation," a theocracy not unlike those in the Islamic world. Why do you think that is?
- Why do you think Americans have been so obsessed with Hell?
- What do you think accounts for "the Affections" of some fundamentalist church services ("moaning, weeping, screaming, jerking, fainting" etc.)?
- Was Jefferson's advice to his nephew good?
- What do you think of Kant's motto?
- Will reason eventually win out in the "marketplace of ideas"?
- Do you have any significant philosophical differences with your parents? Do you discuss them? Do you want to?
- Does "nirvana" (Enlightenment, personal liberation) have to be the same for everyone? What would be your personal definition/experience of nirvana?
- Matthieu Ricard has been called the happiest man in the world. Do you think eastern philosophies focused on the alleviation of suffering are a more promising route to happiness than its "pursuit" in the western/Jeffersonian tradition of individualism and personal liberty?
- Is "Holy Spirit" something real and supernatural, or is it the name of a natural form of experience best studied and explicated by neuroscientists, and analyzed by philosophers?
- Have you been "born again," or encouraged by faith leaders or peers to seek spiritual rebirth? Is that something real, metaphorical, or delusional?
- Why did the founders omit reference to God in the Constitution, do you think?
- Do you think it takes courage to think for yourself and invoke reason against superstition, tradition, etc.?
- Max Beerbohm (in Joys of Walking) notes the "drawbacks" of London's environment that keep him from having to walk. What drawbacks exist in your environment and how do or might you overcome them?
- What usefulness, besides exercise, do you think walking has?
- Add your DQs...
What Is Enlightenment?
by Immanuel Kant
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage [immaturity]. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind--among them the entire fair sex--should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts... (continues)
==
Our culture is obsessed with youth-and why not? What's the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading possibility for experience?
The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect - and demand - very little from it. In Why Grow Up? she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence. Maturity, however, means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without giving in to dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world closer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it is.
Why Grow Up? is a witty and concise argument for the value of maturity as a subversive ideal: a goal rarely achieved entirely, and all the more worth striving for.
“Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.”
“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”
“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.”
“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.”
“When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.”
― Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
― Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
Susan Neiman at the Southern Festival of Books, Nashville - October 2019 - "Learning from the Germans"
==
Jefferson was a self-avowed Epicurean and materialist. "Spiritualism" for him is a term of abuse applied mostly to the Platonic tradition. "Of Jesus he says, 'I am a Materialist; he takes the side of spiritualism.' [But] perhaps Jesus could be interpreted as an Epicurean after all."
In that spirit, perhaps we should all read our (Jefferson) Bible.