We Humanists are great admirers of “our founding fathers” especially those who were imbued by the Enlightenment with its rationality and its scientific bent. The Puritans, theocratic, and rigidly biblical, don’t measure up. And when it comes to that generation dealing so blindly and cruelly with witchcraft and summary executions, we have no tolerance whatsoever. Eve Laplante may change some minds.

This program takes place on Sunday afternoon, October 26, also in Phillips Brooks House, Harvard Yard at 1:30. Eve Laplante’s book, published just last year by Harper One, is her second personal historical study; she is the author of American Jezebel, her 12th generation ancestor, Anne Hutchinson. Samuel Sewall is her sixth great-grandfather, a man, says the Philadelphia Inquirer, “ whose second act became one of atonement as well as contrition -- an affectionate and affecting portrait.”

Eve Laplante gives us this amazing summary :

“In 1692 Samuel Sewall, a forty-year-old father of five, sat on the colonial court that tried hundreds of people accused of witchcraft. Believing the girls who claimed their neighbors bewitched them, Sewall convicted and condemned to death more than thirty women and men, including two of his friends. He and the court executed twenty people before public opinion turned and the governor halted the proceedings. Sewall struggled internally for years before publicly assuming "the blame and shame" for the wrongful convictions and deaths. He went on to compose America’s first antislavery tract and a revolutionary essay portraying Native Americans as virtuous inheritors of God’s grace. In a period when women were considered inferior to men, Sewall publicly affirmed the fundamental equality of the sexes. Through his long repentance Sewall became America’s most surprising moral hero.

On October 26 let’s plan to meet this Puritan. Maybe we will want to measure him differently… maybe.