5. Teresa of Ávila and Sectarian “Heretics”
5
Teresa of Ávila and Sectarian “Heretics”
I recently finished reading Cathleen Medwick’s excellent book, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul. At about the same time, my husband, who reads to me every night, began a book we had chosen for our own private book-club selection: Abraham Verghese’s highly rated novel Cutting for Stone. The story is set primarily in an Ethiopian mission hospital. The narrator is a non-Christian Indian surgeon who tells his life story. What a coincidence, then, that Teresa of Ávila, albeit dead, is such an important character in the book. And Verghese even raves about Medwick’s biography in his acknowledgments at the end of the book.
Cutting for Stone was criticized by one reviewer for its mystical artificiality: “The first hundred pages or so make the book look almost like a Rushdie-esque magic realist novel, complete with mystically communicating twins, an apparent virgin birth, divine intervention, and other anti-realist devices.”1 But so too with Medwick’s scholarly biography, which lays out in a systematic way Teresa’s incredible accomplishments while at the same time relating her mysticism and miracles in an objective and almost rational manner.
I found the biography fascinating, though I realized again that Teresa’s spirituality is something I do not easily relate to. God entered her world in strange ways that are foreign to my way of thinking. But if Teresa could experience incredible raptures, who’s to say that her spiritual memoir itself would not inspire great—and small—wonders? Cutting for Stone is exactly what I needed to better understand her and her profound legacy. What a coincidence—or God thing—that one book would follow so seamlessly after the other.
Like Teresa, Anne Hutchinson is a longtime acquaintance of mine, one who has also been favored with a great scholarly biography. Divine Rebel by Selma Williams was first published in 1981, and several more books on her life have appeared since then. She too was persecuted for her religious beliefs, as was Margaret Fell Fox, known as the Mother of the Quakers. American evangelist Clarissa Danforth traveled and preached freely though critics claimed she was infringing on what was rightfully a man’s turf. But like the others she was convinced she had a profound calling from God.
Besides being intrepid evangelists, Teresa, Margaret, Anne, and Clarissa were all involved in what are typically considered sectarian movements. Teresa fought the Roman Catholic establishment as much as Margaret fought the seventeenth-century religious establishment in the British Isles. Anne, like Teresa and Margaret, was regarded as a heretic, in her case and in the case of Mary Dyer, by Puritan divines. Only Danforth had ministerial credentials, albeit from the sect known as Free Will Baptists.
Strong-Willed Catholic Reformer
Keeping track of Catholic religious orders, as I have discovered, is a mind-boggling project even for seasoned Catholic monastics themselves. Many of these movements were repeatedly reformed and in the process were renamed or had a qualifier added to their original name. Such is the case with the Carmelites, both calced and discalced.
In the thirteenth century St. Albert of Jerusalem organized hermits who had already taken up their abode in caves and huts on Mount Carmel for the purpose of poverty, prayer, and penance. Albert wrote a rule for them and set the stage for a monastic order. The significance of their location on Mount Carmel was that here the great prophet Elijah prevailed over the prophets of Baal. This blazing miracle would conclude with the slaughter of all the false prophets—an unusual setting perhaps for peaceful hermits to congregate. Mount Horeb, where God came to Elijah in a still small voice, might appear to be a more appropriate locale. But when we consider the Carmelites of Teresa’s day, the site of the killing fields is fitting.
To imagine St. Teresa as a beloved reformer or a placid nun receiving revelations from God is to miss the upheaval surrounding her ministry. She was anything but a contemplative in a hermit’s cave. Her reforms were hated by a majority of the Carmelites, and she was considered a heretic by many outside her discalced order. Violence often accompanied reform in the sixteenth century, as was true in the autumn of 1571. Having departed La Encarnación (her convent just outside the city walls of Ávila) to establish more convents, she returned to defend her turf after learning of fierce opposition. With armed bodyguards and supporters, her procession was announced before her arrival. Onlookers gathered for a good view of the impending melee.
Angry nuns had locked themselves behind bolted doors while the two sides scuffled outside. Then Teresa’s armed band forced its way in, jostling and kicking the screaming, irate enemy nuns. They fought back, punching, scratching, and hurling obscenities. Indeed, the commotion was so loud it could be heard some distance away inside the city walls. At the end of the day Teresa’s reform-minded henchmen claimed victory. The nuns in the convent were defeated, even as were the false prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, though in this situation they were forced to live under the rule of Teresa, whom they hated—perhaps a punishment worse than death.
This altercation occurred barely a decade before Teresa’s death at sixty-seven. She is known primarily for her founding, with John of the Cross, the Discalced (or barefoot) Carmelites. The reform was largely an effort to bring the movement back to its very strict initial practices. That Teresa would one day become a beloved saint would not have appeared to be an obvious eventuality to most contemporary observers. But the unshakable loyalty of her followers, combined with her published spiritual memoir and a boatload of alleged miracles, led to her canonization forty years after her death—and a miraculous death at that. Her corpse, smelling as fragrant as roses a month later, did not naturally decompose.
For those who might be skeptical about a sweet-smelling corpse and, prior to death, a miraculous capability of levitating, there ought to be no doubt about Teresa’s punishing lifestyle of privation and almost nonstop arduous travel and work. And entirely by choice. She grew up in affluence, a daughter of wealth and privilege. She would easily fit in with today’s upwardly mobile American family—a typical teenager with trashy novels, a love for dancing, chess, and horseback riding, her iPhone only a ringtone away. She later reflected on her dreamy fascination with the romance of chivalry: “So excessively was I absorbed in it that I believe, unless I had a new book, I was never happy. . . . I began to deck myself out and to try to attract others by my appearance, taking great trouble with my hands and hair, using perfumes and all the vanities I could get.”2
But then came the hard times, the death of her mother and her own extended illness. She had previously taken religion for granted. Sixteenth-century Spain was saturated with spirituality. With her reading of St. Jerome’s Letters, however, her life changed. She learned that Marcella and Paula had worked alongside him. And what was barring her from becoming a woman of God even as they were? So at age twenty she stole away from home to join a Carmelite monastery. There she saw laxity all around her, and she was no better than the rest, that is until she determined to devote herself entirely to God. She would forfeit all but the barest necessities with self-imposed solitary confinement and strenuous asceticism, lashing herself “until the walls of her cell dripped with gore.”3
For most of the next two decades, Teresa’s life in the convent was relatively routine—if near-fatal physical ailments and severe doubt and terrifying temptations could be considered in any way routine. But then in 1554, as she was approaching forty, her life made a radical turn. In a flood of tears, she was converted. Something suddenly happened in a momentary flash that endless hours of prayer and meditation and self-flagellation could not accomplish. But with the conversion came horrendous battles with the powers of darkness, as well as heart-pounding raptures.
These intense times of spiritual warfare, revelations, and raptures served to fuel the engines of Teresa’s reform. A visionary tour of hell revealed to her how Satan was snatching souls—souls who had been deceived by the “Lutherans” (actually French Calvinists). They were souls worth any sacrifice to redeem and bring back to the true church. The Protestant Reformers were to her as dangerous as were the false prophets of Baal. God stood with Elijah on Mount Carmel, and he was standing with her and her Carmelite reformers in the face of heresy.
Teresa’s most memorable mystical experience was an erotic ecstasy that she recorded in her Life. Here she revealed graphic details of “an angel . . . in human form . . . [who had in his hands] a large golden spear. . . . I felt as if he plunged this into my heart several times, so that it penetrated all the way to my entrails. When he drew it out, he . . . left me totally inflamed with a great love for God. The pain was so severe it made me moan several times. The sweetness of this intense pain is so extreme, there is no wanting it to end.”4 Such love would impel her to carry out a ministry in the face of intense opposition. In the next two decades she established more than a dozen new houses, and she would be named among the great leaders of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Yet Teresa’s actual success as a founder of convents was questionable. Many of these so-called Carmelite houses were small and regularly in a state of turmoil. Powerful opposition from secular Carmelites and high-ranking clerics was marshaled against her. She was repeatedly accused of heresy and charged with leaving “her cloisters against the orders of her superiors contrary to the decrees of the Council of Trent.” Proud and disobedient, she was out of control: “She is ambitious and teaches theology as if she were a doctor of the church in spite of St. Paul’s prohibition.”5
Despite the attacks, Teresa managed to curry the favor of certain high-placed individuals. Though questioned by papal inquisitors, she repeatedly managed to avoid prison. The pope ruled in her favor largely because of her effort to rid Spain of the “mischief and ravages those Lutherans had wrought in France.” Were she to have “a thousand lives,” she vowed she “would give them all to save a single one of the many [such] souls which were going to perdition.”6
Teresa’s writing has stood the test of time, especially her Life. So also her volume on spiritual discipline, The Interior Castle, which guides the seeker through seven stages toward complete union with God. She has long been a revered Catholic saint, and more than that. In 1970 Pope Paul VI gave her (as well as Catherine of Siena) the title doctor of the church.
ANNE HUTCHINSON
New England “Heretic”
The town of Boston was barely ten years old when Anne Hutchinson arrived with her large family. She quickly became a popular teacher, was then banished from town, and died in 1643, less than a decade after she had arrived. In 1660, Mary Dyer, a Quaker preacher, was hanged in that same town. Then in the early 1690s, the Bay Colony presented a full-length feature show in Salem, now remembered as the infamous witch trials of 1692. Dozens of individuals, primarily women, were accused, imprisoned, and condemned, no less than twenty of whom were executed. Hangings were the hottest shows in town.
Imagine such awful spectacles. Here were Puritans who had been severely persecuted in England now turning these same vicious tactics against those whom they deemed heretics. In recent decades New England Puritans have been heralded for their noble legacy, but we dare not forget their damnable religious bigotry. Fortunately, Anne’s contemporary Roger Williams, also banished from Boston, articulated a position of religious liberty that would serve to turn the tide toward religious toleration and significantly influence later constitutional rights.
Growing up in England, Anne was a deeply religious girl whose favorite haunt was the well-stocked library of her father, an Anglican vicar who died when she was nineteen. Two years later, she married William Hutchinson and soon thereafter became acquainted with the preaching of the young John Cotton, already an influential English Puritan. In his message she found the theology that would frame the remainder of her life: God’s overpowering grace and the Holy Spirit’s mystical union with a believer—an “elect saint,” in Puritan terminology. So profoundly inspired by his teaching was she that a dozen years later, in the 1630s when Cotton emigrated from England to the Bay Colony, Anne was bound and determined to follow. Only pregnancy with her fourteenth child delayed the voyage.
When the large family arrived in Boston, they were warmly welcomed. Anne quickly became a much-sought-after midwife, working closely with other women to keep the mothers and their infants alive during the most perilous days just before and after the birth. She also started what would today be called a ladies’ Bible study. Her minister described her work during those early years:
Shee did much good in our Town, in womans meeting at Childbirth-Travells, wherein shee was not onley skillful and helpfull, but readily fell into good discourse with the women about their spiritual estates . . . By which means many of the women (and their husbands) were . . . brought to enquire more seriously after the Lord Jesus Christ.7
Indeed, Anne was an engaging teacher—too engaging for her own good. The women enjoyed lively interaction, and they shared their thoughts with their husbands, who started attending her weekly meetings as well. In fact, she became a sensation. So many people attended that she had to schedule extra meetings. But the criticism quickly piled on. She was just like Eve, some said. Indeed, the neighborhood women were proving that. They were “as by an Eve catch[ing] their husbands also.”8 In fact, so many women and men did she catch that they were collectively called Hutchinsonians.
Essentially what she had done was to draw from John Cotton’s theology of grace, while adding her own emphasis on personal guidance from the Holy Spirit, testifying of her own revelations coming directly from God. Such divine messages were regarded as dangerous. “If they be allowed in one thing [they] must be admitted a rule in all things,” Governor Winthrop warned, “for they being above reason and Scripture, they are not subject to control.”9 That she denied the doctrine of original sin only added fuel to the fire. The storm surrounding her quickly spread as the accused and the accusers multiplied, and the controversy took on a life of its own.
Yet her unique story stands out. She was rebuked not only as an Eve but also as a Jezebel who, like that wicked Old Testament queen, had spread “abominable” doctrine and carried out her agenda as a “thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God, nor fitting for [her] sex.”10 Brought before the Bay Colony’s General Court and charged with insubordination, she insisted that her only authority was the Great Jehovah. The verdict was banishment, but she was permitted to stay in her home until spring. When she again appeared in court, this time begging that her sentence be reversed, there was no backing down. Even her mentor and onetime friend John Cotton spoke of her detestable “errors and pride of spirit” that had brought great harm “to many a poore soule.”
But John Cotton desired to give her another chance. For a week he and another minister counseled her until she recanted her errors. But when brought back into court, her enemies brought new evidence and quickly ended the trial with an unambiguous sentence read by Rev. John Wilson: “I doe cast you out and . . . deliver you up to Sathan . . . and account you from this time forth to be a Hethen and a Publican. . . . I command you in the name of Ch[rist] Je[sus] and of this Church as a Leper to withdraw your selfe out of the Congregation.”11
Although her husband had gone on ahead to Rhode Island to prepare a home, Anne’s life quickly went from bad to worse. She was pregnant again, and the trauma resulted in a miscarriage. Word got back to Boston, and her misfortune quickly became a story of God’s righteous judgment. This, the rumor mill hissed, was no mere miscarriage. Rather, “20 monstrous births,” none of them “of human shape.” Even John Cotton joined in these cruel accusations: She had delivered “twenty-seven . . . lumps of man’s seed, without any alteration or mixture of anything from the woman, and thereupon gathered that it might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness.”12
What a travesty! Where was his sense of decency? What about his calling to pastoral care? He should have been ashamed of himself.
Sometime later when word reached Boston that Anne and some of the children had been slain by Native Americans on Long Island, the Puritan divines haughtily insisted that they now had solid evidence God was on their side. “I never heard that the Indians in those parts did ever before this, commit the like outrage,” wrote the Reverend Thomas Weld, “and therefore God’s hand is the more apparently seene herein, to pick out this wofull woman, to make her . . . an unheard of heavie example of their cruelty above al others.”13
MARGARET FELL FOX
Mother of the Quakers
She was a rich, highborn lady who married George Fox, a smelly itinerant preacher trudging about from town to town in the English countryside with a message that drew mockery and derision. Not only that, imprisonment. His attempts to shout down ministers who were waxing eloquent in their Sunday morning sermons did not sit well with local law enforcement. He was a tormented man, many people claimed, but outwardly he was brash and self-possessed. An early Quaker song, “The Ballad of George Fox,” depicts him boldly “walking in the glory of the light . . . in [his] old leather breeches and [his] shaggy, shaggy locks.”14 By his own account he slept under haystacks and hedges and foraged for food.
What did Margaret Fell see in this man? Even if she recognized him as a true prophet of God, what possessed her to marry him? I pondered that question a decade ago wandering the grounds of her lovely Swarthmore mansion, and I still mull over it today. On that cloudless September morning, the grass still wet and sparkling from an overnight rain, I tried to put myself in her shoes. I’ve certainly made my share of rash decisions, but to marry a frenzied fanatic so devoid of social graces is something I cannot comprehend. If her biological clock had been running down and there were no other eligible bachelors, I might give her some slack. But she was in her midfifties, a widowed mother of nine children.
George Fox, more than ten years younger than she, however, had received a message from God: “I had seen from the Lord, a considerable time before, that I should take Margaret Fell to be my wife; and when I first mentioned it to her, she felt the answer of life from God thereunto.”15 What happened next is left to our imaginations, but we cannot assume that their relationship revolved around romance. To his credit, he did not rush matters, and he consulted with her children and with other Quakers.
Margaret had married her first husband, Thomas Fell, when she was seventeen, he some sixteen years her senior. A barrister and country gentleman and later a member of Parliament, he trusted his young wife with the management of the Swarthmore estate during his frequent travels. It was while he was away in 1652 that George Fox paid a visit. Soon she, her children, and most of the household servants were “convinced and converted unto God.” When Thomas returned home, nosy neighbors met him and warned him of the fate of his household. He no doubt entered his house with some serious trepidation. But his confidence in Margaret was so great that later the same evening he agreed to listen to the message of George Fox himself.
Although Thomas Fell did not become a Quaker himself, he never presumed to restrain Margaret in her active involvement with George Fox and his ragtag following. In fact, she freely donated large sums of money and opened Swarthmore Hall not only as a meetinghouse but also as the nerve center of the new movement. So significant was her support and leadership in these early years and throughout her life that it is difficult to imagine the movement ever getting off the ground without her involvement.
When Thomas Fell died in 1658, six years after her conversion to Quakerism, Margaret was devastated. She had lost not only her beloved husband but also the movement’s most reliable defender. The matter of religious toleration in seventeenth-century England was dicey at best, and Quakers were a natural target for harassment. Now with Fell’s death and the restoration of King Charles II to the throne, the threat of street violence and state-sponsored persecution spiked. It is hardly a surprise, then, when the arm of the law reached into the very inner sanctum of Swarthmore. George Fox was hauled off to languish for months in a foul dungeon in Lancaster Castle.
Margaret managed to secure his release, but then she was locked up. Her crime? Failing to honor the king with an oath of allegiance—though hardly rubbing it in his face:
I love, own, and honor the King and desire his peace and welfare [and desire to] live a peaceable, a quiet and a godly life under his government, according to the Scriptures. . . . And as for the oath itself, Christ Jesus, the King of Kings, hath commanded me not to swear at all, neither by heaven, nor by earth, nor by any other Oath.16
Although the judge handed down a life sentence, she ended up serving less than five years, during which time she wrote her now most widely quoted booklet, Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures. . . . The Bible, she argued, raised no roadblocks to women serving God in the pulpit or on the evangelistic circuit. Rather the roadblocks came from “the bottomless pit, and the spirit of darkness that hath spoken for these many hundred years together in this night of apostasy.” The Scriptures, she argued, presented perfect equality—in marriage as well. The word of God to Abraham: “In all that Sarah hath said to thee, hearken to her voice.”17
It was two years after the pamphlet was published that Margaret, more than a decade a widow, had married George Fox, a union that afforded her an opportunity to put her egalitarian proposal into practice. But if equality was a mark of the marriage, togetherness was not. Again she was hauled away to prison, this time for holding unauthorized religious meetings. She was released in less than a year, barely in time to see her new husband off on his sea voyage to America. After he returned, he was imprisoned again. And so went their marriage until his death at age sixty-seven.
It is no surprise that the company of Quakers remained scattered, disorganized, and ravaged with infighting. When Fox was not imprisoned, he was traveling, as was the case with many of his followers. Margaret, more than he, kept the movement from falling apart entirely. As early as 1660, she published her declaration on pacifism, which clearly stated what her husband a decade earlier had put forward. In the years that followed she continued to write and to clarify the beliefs of the growing movement.
Throughout her twenty-one-year marriage with George Fox, there were questions about their lengthy separations. Marriage had not put a damper on his itinerant ministry. Was this a real union or a marriage in name only? Prior to his death, with his health declining, he was living in London and had not seen Margaret for some six months. She was sensitive about any such censure:
My concern for God and His holy and eternal truth was then in the north, where God had placed and set me; and likewise for the ordering and governing of my children and family; so that we were willing both of us to live apart some years upon God’s account and His truth’s service, and to deny ourselves of that comfort which we might have had in being together. . . . If any took occasion, or judged hard of us, because of that, the Lord will judge them; for we were innocent.18
Margaret carried on in the ministry until her death at eighty-eight. Three years earlier she had made the arduous journey to London for the purpose of delivering a letter to the new king, William of Orange, refusing to return home “until [she had] cleared [herself] unto this government.” The letter includes a brief summary of more than four decades of persecution and imprisonment for no other crime than following their “consciences towards God.” Truly, for no crime they had “suffered very much, as it is well-known to the nation of England, even to the death of several hundreds by imprisonment and other hardships.” All of that, “and yet,” she stated, “we were never found in transgression of any just or righteous law, but only upon account of our consciences towards God.”19
She ended her letter with praise for this king who had promoted religious toleration: “Now God has placed you over us, in this government, which has been very moderate and merciful to us, and we live very comfortably. . . . I pray God for your preservation, who am His servant, and your faithful subject.”20
It is interesting to note that the year after Margaret Fell’s death in 1702, John Wesley, often considered the child of his parents’ reconciliation, was born. Samuel Wesley (his father) had allegedly walked out on his wife, Susanna, because of a bitter political clash over King William’s legitimacy as an English monarch. That story is told in a later chapter, but it is cited here only to point out that Susanna strongly opposed this same king to whom Margaret Fell expressed such gratitude.
Although Susanna was a strong woman involved in ministry herself, it would be left to her son John to commission women preachers. In doing so he was accused of being—God forbid—a Quaker. Indeed, it was often assumed, thanks to Margaret Fell, that any woman preacher must be a Quaker. Perhaps she would have smiled at that thought. John Wesley did not. But if the seventeenth century belonged to her, the eighteenth belonged to him. Both continued in their respective ministries until they died in their eighty-eighth year.
CLARISSA DANFORTH
New England Evangelist
Can a woman preach and teach and conduct revival meetings? This was an issue in the early nineteenth century when Clarissa Danforth began her ministry in New England. Well why not? Why should anyone deny women the pulpit? “If an Ass could reprove the prophet Balaam, and a barn-yard fowl could reprove Peter, may not a woman rebuke sin?”21 So went the reasoning of Dr. Clark, one of Clarissa’s supporters.
Whether the same rationale was used to support people of color in the pulpit was not immediately apparent, but the records show that she had on more than one occasion shared the pulpit with a black man. Like Clarissa, Charles Bowles was an ordained Free Will Baptist minister, and in January 1817, they were both billed at the same venue. For some the appearance of “a colored man and a woman” was “a novel spectacle” that they might never witness again in a lifetime.
It is tempting to include Clarissa in a book on American religious history simply because of gender. But it is important to note that her ministry as an early American revivalist is significant apart from her sex. In another series of meetings the following year in New Hampshire, she is credited with the conversion of more than two hundred individuals. It was reported that scarcely a person in this sparsely populated region was left unconverted. And we should not imagine that collecting converts was an easy job in early nineteenth-century New England—certainly no easier than it had been for Jonathan Edwards some two generations earlier. In fact, she might be favorably compared with him as a revivalist and thus might be well known to us today, except that unlike him she left behind no writings or a reputation as a theologian and philosopher.
Though Clarissa’s ministry reached people from a wide variety of denominations, her own loyalties did not waver. Wherever she went, she organized Free Will Baptist churches, several, in fact, in Rhode Island alone during her preaching tour of 1819–20. Here she was credited with some three thousand converts. Such success was considered a “glorious work” of God, not a result of her remarkable speaking ability and engaging personality. Among her converts was Nancy Towle, a young woman who would herself become an iterant evangelist in the 1820s, preaching in New England and beyond, traveling to a dozen states as well as Canada and the British Isles.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
So that woeful woman Anne is banished from New England, and some two centuries later in the 1820s Clarissa, a Free Will Baptist, is winning souls by the thousands among the great-great-grandchildren of those who banished Anne. Now some two centuries after Clarissa’s heyday of pulpit pounding, most Baptist women who wish to preach are again prohibited. The argument calling forth Balaam’s ass and the barnyard fowl did not settle the matter.
For a woman to carry the torch as a preacher or an evangelist required a clear call from God and more than a little chutzpah. Such was the case with Teresa, whose influence is still powerfully felt. I wonder, though, how I would assess her today if she were a sister nun or a neighbor? Would I report her to social workers and insist that she be treated with appropriate meds? I remind myself that this much beloved and honored St. Teresa would be fighting against me as surely as she fought demons. The Protestant Reformation was to her a terrible blight, the worst calamity to ever befall her beloved Catholic Church.
And what about Anne Hutchinson? Would I have stood in solidarity with her against her accusers, those hypocritical Puritan leaders who deemed her a heretic? I surely admire her confidence and skills as a midwife and her willingness to pass her expertise along. And like me, she questions tradition and authoritarian church control. She naturally assumes women’s intelligence is equal to that of any man. But does she carry her freedom too far? After all, her teaching of the inner light essentially claimed that her own direct access to God trumped the rules laid down by the church.
Margaret Fell, “mother” of the Quakers, made a decision to marry a movement—and George Fox to a lesser extent. I cannot comprehend what might have been going through her mind, other than her confidence in his having actually heard the voice of God. The decision in the end afforded her a platform—as well as harsh persecution—that transformed her into a church mother far beyond the borders of the Society of Friends.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Do you understand the popularity of St. Teresa and her writing today? Do mystical and miraculous experiences in everyday life resonate with you? Do you think that Christians today easily gravitate to spiritual experiences while ignoring the sacrifice and asceticism of such holy women as Teresa?
Does it seem strange that historically (and even today) women such as Anne Hutchinson were referred to as an Eve or a Jezebel, while similar slurs were not made against wayward men, calling them an Adam or an Ahab?
Had you been living in Boston in the early 1640s, how would you have reacted to the treatment of Anne? Would you have stood by her right to express her own opinion even if you did not agree with her? Would you have strongly spoken against her banishment and the smearing of her reputation after she had been so brutally killed?
What do you most admire about Judge Thomas Fell and his relationship with his wife Margaret? How do you view her decision to become the wife of George Fox and their seemingly distant marriage?
Why do you think Clarissa was permitted to be a preacher and evangelist in the sectarian Free Will Baptists at the same time the more liberal established churches were almost universally banning women in the pulpit? Is there any justification today in allowing women to preach in small mission churches, while banning them from the pulpit in large churches?
Have you ever considered abandoning the good life, as Teresa and Margaret did, to live on the edge, barely knowing where your next meal is coming from? Which of these four women would you be most inclined to join with in a ministry partnership?