Commentary: Five myths about Puritans

From Chicago-

On Thanksgiving Day, Americans often look back on the first English settlers in what is now New England. Since these Puritans fill the earliest chapters of the American story, they make plenty of appearances in our shared imagination. But debates over who the Puritans were, what they stood for and how they contributed to our sense of national identity are shrouded in misunderstandings. Here are a few myths:

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-puritans-thanksgiving-history-20161123-story.html

Does Christ belong in Christmas?

From Pittsburgh-

Christmas bells hadn’t begun ringing this fall when the Christmas culture wars came to visit us again. Fighting back against a perceived “war on Christmas,” some Christians loudly insist that Christ be the center of Christmas as “the reason for the season.”

Many devout Christians who built the foundations of the Pittsburgh region we know today would have found the identification of the holiday with their faith baffling, even annoying. Presbyterians in early Western Pennsylvania steadfastly ignored Christmas because, to them, Christ was most certainly not the reason for a season of sinful indulgence.

Numerous Presbyterians arrived in the region during the early days of settlement toward the end of the 18th century. They organized Bethel Presbyterian Church in 1778, giving us Bethel Park. Their church on a hill, organized in 1784, became Churchill. The links between their world and ours are many.

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http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2015/12/06/Does-Christ-belong-in-Christmas/stories/201511290021

Why read the Puritans?

From Evangelical Focus-

This week marks the 400th birthday of one of the Evangelical world’s most beloved pastors, namely, Richard Baxter, who was born on 12th November 1615. Baxter forms part of a movement within Protestantism known as Puritanism. It lasted between 1550 and 1700 with the goal of reforming the Church of England –known as the Anglican Church- in the light of Scripture. The Puritans were convinced that the principles of the Protestant Reformation had to transform both Anglican doctrine and practice. 

I came across the Puritans about ten years ago thanks to a wonderful book penned by the leading Evangelical scholar Dr. J.I. Packer named Among God’s Giants. I read it whilst I studied it at Queen’s University (Belfast) and Packer’s passion for the Puritans birthed a similar zeal within me. I started to read them for myself and I still recall how their books edified my soul throughout the remainder of my time at university.

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http://evangelicalfocus.com/magazine/1127/why_read_the_puritans

When Christmas was banned in 17th-century England

From California-

Shall Christmas be banned this year? Hardly will these words hit print before some readers will begin to roll their eyes and blame such a suggestion on another lawsuit by the ACLU, blame their liberal friends for being afraid to offend another religious group or bemoan the general secularization of our society. But the ban on Christmas first began more than 300 years ago, and it was Christians who wanted to see it thrown off the calendar. Welcome to England in the 17th century!

For a great many centuries Christmas had been a religious festival in England, and it was a national holiday. At the time of the Anglican Reformation, the reformers placed the venerable holy day in the reformed liturgy as one of the holy days in the Book of Common Prayer. But many of the Protestants in England were still suspicious of Christmas, and many of these were none too pleased at what they viewed as an incomplete reformation of the church by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. But under the heavy fist of the House of Tudor, Christmas and a great deal of other medieval traditions remained in the church.

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http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/social-affairs/20131218/when-christmas-was-banned-in-17th-century-england

Psalm Book Could Fetch Record Price

From The Wall Street Journal

In 1640, Puritans settling in the frontier that became Massachusetts found a fresh way to annoy the Church of England they'd left behind: translating and printing their own book of psalms—including this reworded first line of Psalms 23: "The Lord to me a shepherd is, want therefore shall I not." (Take that, King James.)

Now, Boston's Old South Church is planning to sell a rare copy of the psalms—the first book printed in America—for $15 million to $30 million at Sotheby's in New York this fall. If the church gets its asking price, the Bay Psalm Book will be the most expensive book ever sold at auction, surpassing an $11.5 million copy of James Audubon's "Birds of America" that Sotheby's sold three years ago.

In 1947, the last time another version of the psalm book came up for auction, it sold for $151,000—a record price at the time that topped sales of Shakespeare's First Folio and the Gutenberg Bible. Only 11 copies of the psalm book survive today; Yale, Brown and Harvard universities own other versions, as does the Library of Congress.

More here-

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324695104578417013378442712.html