Thursday, December 18, 2008

Who Was Dorothy Ripley?

I just looked Dorothy Ripley up on Wikipedia and it says that she was an Enlishwoman who "spent thirty years in the United States trying to secure better conditions for slaves." It also says that she may have been the first woman to ever address the Congress of the United States. But the Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about Ripley's acitivity in the course of Algonkian church history.

Like Samson Occom, Dorothy Ripley is a hero because she managed to have a career as a preacher at a time when mission societies rarely gave any kind of support to anybody that wasn't a white male. In an upcoming post, I'll describe how Ripley preached to the New York Indians, including the Stockbridges and Brothertowns, in 1805. (I'm also going to keep the title of her book under wraps for now - so it can be the title of the upcoming post.)

I chose five verses of a poem Ripley wrote that appear to illustrate her life:




















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