We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
Serious numbers of migrants arrived in Massachusetts from 1630 - 1640. Roughly 21,000. By 1700 they had become 91,000. Their immediate priorities: having families, building farms, forming towns, and building institutions Old England never developed on local levels. But the new Americans didn’t just reproduce the country they left. They built institutions England didn’t yet have.
Year 1 — a seagoing vessel launched at Medford, 4 July 1631. The shipwrights had been sent out in 1629, ahead of the fleet.
Year 4 — representative government. Elected deputies sitting in the General Court.
Year 6 — Harvard. £400 voted for “a schoale or colledge.”
Year 8 — a printing press, the only one in British North America. Glover died on the voyage out; his widow Elizabeth moved the operation to Cambridge and got it running.
Year 10 — the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in America.
Year 11 — the Body of Liberties, read aloud at every General Court.
Year 12 — the 1642 law: every parent and master must teach every child to read.
Year 17 — a blast furnace at Saugus and the Old Deluder Satan Act. Fifty households, a schoolmaster; a hundred, a grammar school; £5 a year if you don’t.
Year 22 — their own silver coinage, struck without telling London.
What was the main thing leading the Christian culture forward and higher? Christian households. Fertility, catechism, and land. Conscientious self-government became optimistic family government which became the first jurisdiction of America's foundations of freedom.
At 6:52 on a school morning, somewhere in your neighborhood, a ten-year-old is standing at the end of a driveway in the dark. His backpack weighs about a fifth of what he does. He ate breakfast in four bites. The bus is late again.
For a long time I thought of that kid as a scheduling problem. Early mornings, long days, a lot of sitting still. Then I sat down and did the math, and it stopped being about scheduling.
Over thirteen years, that boy will hand roughly 16,000 hours to a building. Homeschooling gives most of them back.
Robert Bortins
"In the words of Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, the midterms were ‘an extinction-level event’ for the Republican party."
British academic Matt Goodwin
American foreign policy must consider not only the condition of allied nations today but also the direction or trajectory in which they are moving. European leadership restricting freedom of speech and banning entry to peaceful activists cannot be dismissed as purely domestic when it affects American citizens and raises questions about the values on which the transatlantic alliance rests.
Kristin Ziccarelli
