New York Times<\/em>, October 18, 1923.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If one crosses New England\u2019s valleys and hills one will inevitably encounter ubiquitous clapboard Congregational meetinghouses. These places of worship crown the town greens of villages throughout the region. Their faith, the faith of the Puritan pilgrims, is a foundational element of the American ethos. Theirs is the faith of the first Thanksgiving, of Jonathan Edwards\u2019 \u201cSinners in the Hands of an Angry God,\u201d of the Salem witch trials, and of the heart and soul of the First Amendment: the freedom of religion (though most of the early Puritans came to the shores British North America seeking religious freedom for themselves, not for others). Puritan Congregationalism has shaped the contours of American civic and religious life for hundreds of years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34965,"featured_media":6097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6096"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34965"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}