By William H. Benson
The Parallel Lives
Of The NOBLE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS THINKERS AND BELIEVERS:
Roger Williams VS. Cotton Mathers
NEW ARTICLES
Time, Space, and Work
In “A Brief History of Time,” first published in 1988, the British physicist Stephen Hawking explained how space and time are connected, interwoven, interdependent with each other. Since the universe displays massive amounts of space, it also displays massive amounts of time.
When a massive object, like a planet, enters into spacetime, a warping, called gravity, results.
Certain wise human beings on planet Earth noticed that nature gives us just three sets of time: a day based upon the sun rising and setting, a month based upon the moon’s transformation from full moon to full moon every 29.5 days, and a year based upon the completion of four seasons.
In an attempt to control and rein in time, certain other wise human beings chopped up time into segments: seconds, minutes, hours, and weeks.
It was the ancient Egyptians who decided to split daylight into twelve segments. How?
They looked at a sundial that threw a shadow onto a plate, and then set a series of twelve stakes onto that plate that marked the shadow’s progress throughout the day. Why 12 and not ten? The reason is that those Egyptians used base 12, the duodecimal number system.
The ancient Greeks made the hours uniform, the same length throughout the year. It was an ancient Greek named Hipparchus, who suggested that officials divide a day into 24 hours, based upon 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness that appear on the two equinoxes each year.
The ancient Babylonians in Mesopotamia came up with the idea of splitting the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. Why 60? Those ancient Babylonians used base 60, a sexagesimal system.
They noticed that 60 is highly divisible, more so than 100. A total of 12 numbers can divide evenly into 60: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. However, only 9 numbers can divide evenly into 100: 1, 2, 4 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, and 100.
The seven days for one week originated with the Babylonians and Sumerians, who gave seven celestial names to a sequence of seven days, including the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Three of those names, you and I still use: Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.
Tyr, or Tiu, or Tiw was the Norse god of war and justice. Woden was an Anglo-Saxon god, similar to the Norse God, Odin. Thor was the Norse god of thunder, and Freyja was the Norse goddess of marriage. From the Norse gods, we have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Because the year is 365 1/4 days long, every four years, the calendar-makers add one more day onto February, and call it leap year. Last year was leap year, and the next is 2028.
If you divide 365 days by 7, you get 52.14 weeks. That fractional part of a week equals one day. Hence, in 2025, January 1 was on a Wednesday, and December 31 will fall on a Wednesday, 52 weeks and one day more. In 2026, the year begins on a Thursday, and will end on a Thursday.
Each week contains 168 hours: 56 hours for sleep (8 hours x 7 days), 40 hours of work at the office or school or shop (8 hours x 5 days), 32 hours for the weekend (16 hours awake x 2 days), and 40 free-time hours, mornings and evenings when we eat, relax, and reconnect with family.
Monday is Labor Day, a day when our country recognizes our work force with a day off from work. Throughout the year, an employee exchanges her or his time for a paycheck, a bargain.
Time moves forward, forcing more space between us today and our day of conception and birth. Time never stops sprinting. Indeed, it speeds up as we age. Ken Lange said, “Time is relentless, marching forever onward, stripping away everything it its path.”
A quote on time. “Children and spouses spell the word ‘love’ with four letters t-i-m-e.” Our affection for children and spouses equals the time and space we give to them.
Enjoy your day off on Monday.
Servants of the people
Edward Muir is president of the American Historical Association. In the May issue of that non-profit’s magazine, “Perspectives on History,” he wrote a column he entitled, “The United States Needs Historians.”
Muir states in his thesis, “Our culture needs historians who can look behind today’s headlines and the latest ‘fake news’ to think about longer patterns in the past, even as they engage in current struggles.”
Explo ’72
This last week I watched the new Lionsgate film, “Jesus Revolution.” The film did better than expected, grossing $50 million in the first months after its release in February.
The screenplay is based upon a memoir that Greg Laurie, and co-writer Ellen Vaughn, published in 2018, “Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today.”
Native Americans and education
In “National Geographic’s” May edition, the writer Suzette Brewer, member of the Cherokee Nation, wrote an article about “the some 500 federally funded boarding schools for Native children opened in the U.S and Canada in the 1800s.”
Stories
This past week I listened to Craig Wortmann’s book, “What’s Your Story: Using Stories to Ignite Performance and Be More Successful.” Craig encourages readers to place their stories into a matrix of sixteen cells, four columns by four rows.
He identifies four columns, top to bottom: success, failure, fun, and legends. A success story is how a project succeeded. A failure story is how a project failed. A fun story is a joke. A legend story is a once-upon-a-time story, that of a hero.
The idea of a matrix appears too complicated, a spreadsheet to arrange jokes. Ronald Reagan kept it simpler. He wrote his stories on 3 x 5 cards and kept them in boxes. To write a speech, for example, to inspire, he withdrew cards from his stack.
Roger Williams and William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born close to April 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-the-Avon, in England, 100 miles northwest of London. Roger Williams was born either as early as December of 1603, or as late as April 5, 1604, in Smithfield, a section of London.
Shakespeare’s father, John, was a glover in Stratford-on-the-Avon, in that he stitched gloves out of animal skins. Williams’s father, James, bought, sold, and traded textiles.
Shakespeare became a famous playwright in London at the Globe Theater, but Williams sailed to Massachusetts in 1631, and later founded Providence, Rhode Island.
Shakespeare died close to his 52nd birthday, on April 23, 1616, in Stratford-on-the Avon. Roger Williams died in early March of 1683, near his 79th birthday, in Providence.
Roger Williams vs. the Puritans
Last time in these pages, I mentioned Jonathan Winthrop’s “city on a hill” sermon, “that all the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop considered himself a type of Moses who was leading his people, like Israel, to a new land, to build a new Jerusalem.
This is spelled out in John Barry’s 2012 book, “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.”
Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed the city on a hill should have a church and a state, and that the two should work together, like left and right hands. In essence, Winthrop wanted to build a theocracy, in New England, in 1630.
The Puritans expected the magistrates to support the church by compelling people to attend worship, to recite oaths, to pray prescribed prayers, and to tithe.
Older Posts
Jonathan Winthrop’s ‘A Model of Christian Charity’
In recent days, I have begun reading John Barry’s book, “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.”
Although published in 2012, Barry tells the story of how the Puritans chose to leave old England to build a plantation on the rocky New England coast of Massachusetts.
In England, the Puritans wanted to purify and simplify their church. Hence, the title of Puritans. They wanted a rustic sanctuary, without stained glass windows and gaudy artwork. Also, they wanted the Anglican clerics to dress without cassock, cap, or gown.
King James I, his son Charles I, and Charles’s archbishop William Laud disagreed. Laud and his henchmen hunted the Puritans down, jailed them, and even tortured them. For these Puritans, exile to North American represented a better choice.
biweekly column
Readers, please look for my column that I completed today, some ideas on Jonathan Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity." It should post in a few days.
War and peace in Ukraine
On February 17, 2023, David Remnick of the New Yorker podcast interviewed Steven Kotkin, history professor at Stanford, and biographer of Joseph Stalin.
Kotkin said, “Let’s think of a house with ten rooms, and let’s say I barge in and take two of those rooms. I wreck those two rooms, and I also wreck your other eight rooms. You try to evict me, but I’m still there wrecking your entire house. An excerpt about war and peace in the Ukraine.
St. Valentine’s Day / Presidents Day
We celebrated St. Valentine’s Day yesterday, February 14, a day when we reflect upon our good fortune that we have that special person in our life, our Valentine.
Next Monday, February 20, government officials grant us a holiday to consider the forty-five Presidents, all men. Because Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, officials count him twice, as #24 and #26. Thus, we give honor to forty-four men.
Groundhog Day
On February 4, 1977, the band Fleetwood Mac released their record-selling “Rumours” album. Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie sang one of its songs, “Don’t Stop.” “If you wake up and don’t want to smile. If it takes just a little while. Open your eyes and look at...
Profiles in Courage
Kennedy showed that quote from Herbert Agar’s book to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen, and asked him to find other examples of Senators, who had displayed unusual political courage at crucial times in their careers. Sorensen came back with eight examples.
In addition to John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Sorensen included Daniel Webster also of Massachusetts, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Sam Houston of Texas, Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, Lucius Lamar of Mississippi, George Norris of Nebraska, and Robert Taft of Ohio.
One of University of Northern Colorado’s 2020 Honored Alumni
William H. Benson
Local has provided scholarships for history students for 15 years
A Sterling resident is among five alumni selected to be recognized this year by the University of Northern Colorado. Bill Benson is one of college’s 2020 Honored Alumni.
Each year UNC honors alumni in recognition for their outstanding contributions to the college, their profession and their community. This year’s honorees were to be recognized at an awards ceremony on March 27, but due to the COVID-19 outbreak that event has been cancelled. Instead UNC will recognize the honorees in the fall during homecoming Oct. 10 and 11……
Newspaper Columns
The Duodecimal System
For centuries, the ancient Romans calculated sums with their clunky numerals: I, V, X, L, C, D, and M; or one, five, ten, 50, 100, 500, and 1,000. They knew nothing better.
The Thirteenth Amendment
On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and by it, he declared that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are and henceforward shall be free.” Lincoln’s Proclamation freed some 3.1 million slaves within the Confederacy.
The Fourteenth Amendment
After Congress and enough states ratified the thirteenth amendment that terminated slavery, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This law declared that “all people born in the United States are entitled to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.” The Act equated birth to citizenship.
The New-York Packet and the Constitution
Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, published her newest book a month ago, These Truths: A History of the United States. In a short introduction, she describes in detail the Oct. 30, 1787 edition of a semi-weekly newspaper, The New-York Packet.
Mr. Benson’s writings on the U.S. Constitution are a great addition to the South Platte Sentinel. Its inspiring to see the history of the highest laws of this country passed on to others.
– Richard Hogan
Mr. Benson, I cannot thank you enough for this scholarship. As a first-generation college student, the prospect of finding a way to afford college is a very daunting one. Thanks to your generous donation, my dream of attending UNC and continuing my success here is far more achievable
– Cedric Sage Nixon
Donec bibendum tortor non vestibulum dapibus. Cras id tempor risus. Curabitur eu dui pellentesque, pharetra purus viverra.
– Extra Times
FUTURE BOOKS
- Thomas Paine vs. George Whitefield
- Ralph Waldo Emerson vs. Joseph Smith
- William James vs. Mary Baker Eddy
- Mark Twain vs. Billy Graham
- Henry Louis Mencken vs. Jim Bakker
