[Hac-announce] August Book Discussion: John M. Barry's "Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty"

[Kevin Gough or Paula Jones]

Our book for August is Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty  by noted author and historian John M. Barry. The discussion will take place Saturday, August 22, 2015 at 2 pm in the library of the Unitarian Society of New Haven at 700 Hartford Turnpike, Hamden. (Note that the date of the discussion is the fourth, not third, Saturday in August.)     

      
       
        
         
          
           
            
             
              
                                          
                 Per the jacket:                
                 
                 For four hundred years, two fault lines have divided America: one is the proper relationship between the church and state, and the other is the balance between the rights of the individual versus the power of the state. In this extraordinary book, award-winning New York Times best-selling writer John M. Barry examines the origins of these fault lines. What he finds is as relevant today as it was when they first emerged in the seventeenth century. 
   
 From long-time Harper's editor and humanist Lewis Lapham (http://ffrf.org/news/day/8/01/freethought/#lewis-lapham):                
                 
                 
                 
"Democracy assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of its existence, the structure of the idea resembling a suspension bridge dependent upon the balance between countervailing forces. The project collapses unless the stresses oppose one another with more or less equal weight—unless enough people have enough courage to sustain the argument between the government and the governed, capital and labor, men and women, matter and mind. We squander the truth of our inheritance if we don’t know how or why it was accumulated, against what odds, with what force of the human imagination and which powers of expression...John M. Barry’s recent biography,                  Roger Williams and the Creation of the                  American Soul, offers an impressive proof of the hypothesis."                
                 
                 
                 
(Complete article - which also discusses                  The Swerve - here:                  http://room604.wikispaces.com/file/view/Ignorance+of+Things+Pas+-+Lewis+H.+Lapham.pdf)                
                 
                
                
               The book is readily available in numerous libraries around the state.                       
              
             
                           
                           
              Refreshments will be served.             
            
           
          
         
        
       
      
 


     
      
       
        
         
          
           
           
          
         
        
       
      
     
 


    
     
      
       
        
        
       
      
     
    
 


   
    
     
     
    
   
 




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