Reading Roger Williams

The year is 1635, and Mary Williams and her family live in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her father, Roger, is on trial for preaching new ideas about freedom. When found guilty, he flees into the cold, telling Mary that she must trust in God's providence to see him to safety. Roger's only hope of survival lies with the Narragansett Indians. Will Mary ever see her father again?

A revelatory look at the separation of church and state in America—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Influenza For four hundred years, Americans have fought over the proper relationships between church and state and between a free individual and the state. This is the story of the first battle in that war of ideas, a battle that led to the writing of the First Amendment and that continues to define the issue of the separation of church and state today. It began with religious persecution and ended in revolution, and along the way it defined the nature of America and of individual liberty. Acclaimed historian John M. Barry explores the development of these fundamental ideas through the story of Roger Williams, who was the first to link religious freedom to individual liberty, and who created in America the first government and society on earth informed by those beliefs. This book is essential to understanding the continuing debate over the role of religion and political power in modern life.

Near the end of his life, Roger Williams, Rhode Island founder and father of American religious freedom, scrawled an encrypted essay in the margins of a colonial-era book. For more than 300 years those shorthand notes remained indecipherable... ...until a team of Brown University undergraduates led by Lucas Mason-Brown cracked Williams' code after the marginalia languished for over a century in the archives of the John Carter Brown Library. At the time of Williams' writing, a trans-Atlantic debate on infant versus believer's baptism had taken shape that included London Baptist minister John Norcott and the famous Puritan "Apostle to the Indians," John Eliot. Amazingly, Williams' code contained a previously undiscovered essay, which was a point-by-point refutation of Eliot's book supporting infant baptism. History professors Linford D. Fisher and J. Stanley Lemons immediately recognized the importance of what turned out to be theologian Roger Williams' final treatise. Decoding Roger Williams reveals for the first time Williams' translated and annotated essay, along with a critical essay by Fisher, Lemons, and Mason-Brown and reprints of the original Norcott and Eliot tracts.

In a time not far from our own, Lawrence sets out simply to build an artifical intelligence that can pass as human, and finds himself instead with one that can pass as a god. Taking the Three Laws of Robotics literally, Prime Intellect makes every human immortal and provides instantly for every stated human desire. Caroline finds no meaning in this life of purposeless ease, and forgets her emptiness only in moments of violent and profane exhibitionism. At turns shocking and humorous, "Prime Intellect" looks unflinchingly at extremes of human behavior that might emerge when all limits are removed. An international Internet phenomenon, "Prime Intellect" has been downloaded more than 10,000 times since its free release in January 2003. It has been read and discussed in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Africa, and other countries. This Lulu edition is your chance to own "Prime Intellect" in conventional book form.

A discourse on the languages of Native Americans encountered by the early settlers. This early linguistic treatise gives rare insight into the early contact between Europeans and Native Americans.

Roger Williams is best known as the founder of Rhode Island who was banished from Massachusetts in 1636 for his dangerous thoughts on religious liberty. But the city and colony Williams helped to found was deep in Native country situated between the powerful Narragansett and Wampanoag nations. The Williams that emerges from the documents in this collection is immersed in a dynamic world of Native politics, engaged in regional and trans-Atlantic debates and conversations about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, and situated at the crossroads of colonial outposts and powerful Native nations. Williams lived among and relied on the generosity of his Narragansett neighbors and yet he was a Native enslaver and part of a process that dispossessed regional Indigenous populations. He could establish a colony based on full religious freedom and yet bitterly complain and campaign against residents with whom he disagreed, such as Samuel Gorton or the Quakers. For the first time, Reading Roger Williams offers readers the opportunity to explore the many facets of Williams’s life by including selections from all of his writings, starting with his life in London and ending with one of his final letters, written when he was nearly eighty years old. Each document includes an introduction and annotations to help the reader better understand the text and context.