Up a Tree

Suppose, just suppose, one of the most famous quotes in poetry didn't mean what many readers -- and countless posters, coffee cups and other slogan-adorned merchandise -- think it does. That may well be the case with Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." You know the lines -- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference. We view those lines, most often out of context, as being an inspirational reflection on forging our own paths, eschewing the way of the masses to find something better, probably, overlooked by the crowds who prefer the comfortable, well known routines that dominate daily life. Take a chance, the lines seem to cry out, and you'll find serendipity that will completely change your life. Surely this is the case sometimes. We discover new music, new art, new food, new relationships that we gratefully recognize as being so much more interesting and challenging than the beaten paths we ha...

I mentioned last week that I would check to see if I was related to Robert Frost or Robert Burns. I meant it as a joke, but as the week progressed, I decided I would follow up on the idea, including another couple of famous poets, W.B. Yeats and John Keats while I was at it.  As I've said before, if you broaden your search beyond direct ancestors -- your great and great-to-the-X grandparents, the chances you are related to someone famous multiply greatly, and some of the genealogy sites make the search pretty easy. Give them enough information to pinpoint the person you're looking for, click an icon, and voila, the information pops up.  The program I use won't identify relations beyond 15 generations, but you can still go back pretty far. I ran the four men I cited above and found that our family is related to two of them -- Yeats, who married a 10th cousin, three times removed, and Frost, a 6th cousin, three times removed. I'll skip which side of the family is related ...

The headline jumped out at me as I perused one of the several news feeds I check each day: "Taylor Swift is related to famed poet Emily Dickinson and now it all makes sense," proclaimed a CNN headline. Ordinarily I wouldn't have cared a whit and moved on. I'm not a Swiftie or even a fan (then again I'm not exactly the target audience.) But these days she can hardly sneeze without some news outlet posting a breathless article about it. But with what I consider to be the inordinate amount  of publicity the woman receives and my delving into my family's past to learn more about history, I gave the article a read.  A lot of questions popped up in my head. Who cares, was the first. Well obviously Swift fans, who've apparently made comparisons between the women. And I suspect they'd be excited because they would imagine a genetic link between the two women's perceived greatness, so of course their idol would have been fated to become their favorite songs...

I've read several news analyses and opinion columns over the years discussing why Supreme Court rulings on the religion section of the First Amendment are so varied. Why, they ask, can't the court be consistent with its rulings? The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is that the rulings reflect the two main streams of thought that have existed since the ratifications of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: accommodationism and separationism. The more complex and nuanced answer is that even if you appeal to the Founding Fathers -- a group whose membership fluctuates according to the persons or groups who appeal to them -- you find both sentiments at play, even in the two men we've been looking at: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Just one example for each man: Jefferson started attending worship services held in the House of Representatives after a prominent Virginia preacher was invited to speak at a service, and apparently continued to attend for t...

A letter such as the one sent by the Danbury Baptist Association to a sitting president needed to be answered. When I first read it, I was a little confused because the letter doesn't seem to indicate that the writers knew anything about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, which were ratified a decade before they contacted President Jefferson.  Now I wonder if they were testing the President. How committed was he to religious freedom? After all, his politics trended to a "states' rights" perspective. Now that he held the president, would he commit to defending religious rights for everyone as part of the duties of his office, or might he side with states that had enacted establishment legislation and defer to them in the hopes that they, like his home state, might see the light and disestablish their Christian denominations? I've not read widely enough to settle these questions. But keep them in mind when you consider the contents of the letter. Take a min...

I neglected to mention last time the outcome of the "Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion" -- it failed. Perhaps you already guessed that.  I should also point out Patrick Henry's reasoning on the bill. Simply put people who follow religion -- and yes, I know that whole argument about how "Christianity's not a religion, etc." -- and who regularly attend churches for religious instruction tend to be the kind of citizens we want to foster: prone to follow rules (laws), not given as much to being quarrelsome, more generous than the average unchurced person, regular nice people. And government should want to prop up an institution that creates these law-abiding, somewhat passive citizens. I see this reasoning quoted in an annual ad by a commercial business that used to appear in the papers I read. Ben Franklin -- hardly a Christian icon -- and George Washington -- pretty much your standard Anglican churchgoer -- believed the same ...

Arguments over the meaning of religious liberty have taken place since before the creation of the nation. We've all heard the tales about the Puritans and the Pilgrims coming to America to escape the religious persecutions in England -- and in truth many other European countries.  England, of course, has an established church, the Church of England, more commonly referred to as the Anglican Church, though we may have forgotten that the reigning monarch is also the titular head of this communion. He or she technically can push the church in any direction he/she chooses and can appoint any number of officials. In practice these days, the Crown takes advice on the nomination of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the prime minister, who in turns takes advice from a nominating committee which consists, somewhat paradoxically, of members mostly not from the Anglican communion. What we don't usually hear much about is that once the Puritans, and Pilgrims to a much lesser extent, arrive...