Anna Pinkert and the Commonwealth Museum recently released a fantastic podcast on Anne Hutchinson: Puritan, Rebel, Founding Mother.

​Portions of the podcast were recorded in front of the Chipotle on Washington Street in downtown Boston that is the site of the house in which Hutchinson lived from 1634 until 1638 and taught her followers. 

To listen, click on the link:

​https://annapinkert.com/2015/11/02/anne-hutchinson-puritan-rebel-founding-mother/

​I'm excited to give the keynote address at this summer's celebration of Anne Hutchinson's 425th birthday, on the morning of July 21 at the Congregational Library & Archives in Boston. This event is part of an important initiative to acknowledge and recognize America's founding mothers: 

425 Years: The Anne Marbury Hutchinson Celebration
                            July 20-24, 2016                       

This summer the Anne Marbury Hutchinson Foundation celebrates 
its namesake's 425th birthday in three states over four days. The event-series will begin in Boston, MA (July 20-21), continue to Portsmouth, RI (July 22) and Bronx-Eastchester, NY (July 23), and return to Boston for closing events (July 24). The foundation's  mission is to raise awareness of "Mother Anne's" nation-shaping contributions and serve as a springboard to celebrate the lives of other extraordinary women in our nation's past. The 2016 Our Founding Mothers Celebration, a collaborative series of events organized by the Anne Marbury Hutchinson Foundation and other nonprofits, will focus in its inaugural year on Anne Hutchinson's life (1591-1643).

For more information:  www.OurFoundingMothers.org

Inside the Heinz Memorial Chapel of the University of Pittsburgh, where my daughter Clara just graduated, I was astonished to look up at a stained-glass window and find Anne Hutchinson. She is dressed in blue, with white coif and collar, standing before a man and three women, teaching. Her right hand is raised, one finger pointing toward the heavens. To the left of her hand is the Holy Spirit.

​The transept windows of the nondenominational chapel portray figures both sacred and secular that represent tolerance, courage, temperance, and truth. The figures include Florence Nightingale, Pocahontas, Lewis and Clark, Abigail Adams, Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Mary Magdalene, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Saint Francis, Benjamin Franklin, and Leif Ericsson.


​

Back in 2008 Alex Ashlock and I met at the Sewall family grave in the Granary Burying Ground to talk about Judge Samuel Sewall. 

​Here's the link to our talk, from "Here & Now" on WBUR:

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/section/radio/2008/10/27

Here are the links to Clara's work over the weekend for Vatican Radio. First she interviewed the Pope's friend Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Buenos Aires...

   ​    http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/1174970

...and then she waited for the Pope to arrive:​

       http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/1175051

As a follow-up to her Catholic News Service story about Bologna's patron saint, Petronius, Clara has written about the Via Francigena, a pilgrimage from France to Rome, for Catholic News Service. Check it out at this link:

https://cnsblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/following-a-millenniums-worth-of-footsteps-on-italys-via-francigena/

This is the cover of the new collection from Facing History and Ourselves, Washington's Rebuke to Bigotry: Reflections on our First President's Famous 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, available for sale in July 2015. Contributors include Gordon Wood, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,  Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Martha Minow. The title of my essay, "America's White Slaves," is a quote from Louisa May Alcott. 

Here's the link to another story from our recent family trip to Italy, in The Jewish Daily Forward: 

http://forward.com/culture/308648/in-the-vatican-a-jewish-paradise/