The Challenges Of Roger Williams

Among those banished was Roger Williams, the advocate of religious liberty who also founded the colony of Rhode Island and established the first Baptist church in America. Williams opposed the Puritans' use of the Bible to persecute radicals who rejected the state's established religion. In retaliation against the use of scripture for violent purposes, Williams argued that religious liberty was a biblical concept that offered the only means of eliminating the religious wars and persecutions that plagued the seventeenth century.

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.

Roger Williams, New England troublemaker and founder of Rhode Island, is seldom included among the great figures in American Reformed theology. Yet Williams's arguments for religious liberty were deeply rooted in Puritan Calvinism. This book explores the "moral theology" that informed Williams's spirited defense of toleration, demonstrating how Reformed theology in Williams's hands allowed him to defend the integrity of religious convictions while also making the case for conversation and cooperation with moral citizens outside his circle of faith. The Columbia Series in Reformed Theology represents a joint commitment by Columbia Theological Seminary and Westminster John Knox Press to provide theological resources from the Reformed tradition for the church today. This series examines theological and ethical issues that confront church and society in our own particular time and place.

Youre banished! Its the twenty-first century. You cant banish me like Roger Williams was. Its our elevator. We can do what we want to! Fred reached into his pocket and took out a gun. When he pointed it upward toward Kate, she jumped away from the top of the shaking elevator and moved over to the ladder. As she gripped one of the rusty metal rungs, she felt a rush of wind behind her. The sounds of screaming voices and scraping metal fell downward with the elevator through the shaft. As the protagonist of Roger Williams in an Elevator, Kate Odyssey is a resident of Rhode Island and a descendant of Roger Williams. After she becomes trapped in a partially destroyed building, she helps people who are trapped inside of eight different elevators: yelling, accounting, liberty, watery, fiery, falling, sharing, and hidden. The different elevator communities create their own rules and freedoms. Events from these communities are connected to Roger Williamss seventeenth-century search for freedom. In her dreams and reality, Kate meets Roger Williams and his legacy. During her journey, she sees statues of Roger Williams and historic items in the Rhode Island State House. Photos of these attractions appear in Roger Williams in an Elevator.

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.

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.

Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.