In the year of the pandemic, a printmaker seeks to honor those we have lost
“I was trying to work out how to make real the number of those who had died, how to make it something I could handle, make manifest in some sort of art object,” he said. Unexpectedly, the answer came in a dream. “What came to me was the idea of a book in which each person who had died would be tallied with a mark of some sort, and the whole collection of those marks would be a book of many pages. I decided to have the book represent all the American dead from January to November 1. The book would be completed and added to the remembering on All Saints Day,” he said. |
Desire for church reform led to Mayflower voyage
How could this be, since Eliot lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony? The answer is that Eliot and most other members of the Bay Colony were bent on reforming the Anglican Church, refashioning the established church along the lines of what the New Testament persuaded them was correct. But unlike the Puritans, the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Plantation 10 years before the Bay Colony, in 1620, were separatists. Separatists were not interested in an established church at all. Whether governed by bishops or presbyters, they rejected establishment altogether in favor of local churches governed by the people. It is of the English progenitors of the Pilgrims that Stephen Tompkins writes in “The Journey to the Mayflower.” |
