Professor to Deliver ‘Shadows & Sunshine’ Lecture on Needham’s Early Days

David D. Hall, PhD, will deliver a lecture entitled "Shadows and Sunshine: Textures of Everyday Life in Early Needham" on Sunday, November 14, at 4 p.m. in the Meetinghouse of First Parish in Needham, Unitarian Universalist. The lecture is being cosponsored by First Parish and the Needham Historical Society.

Hall is the Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History at Harvard Divinity School. His lecture will provide a fitting preamble for the year leading up to the 300th anniversary of the parish and the town on November 6, 2011.

Hall writes extensively on religion and society in seventeenth-century New England and England; his books include The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century; Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England; and Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology.

Hall has also edited two key collections of documents: The Antinomian Controversy of 1636-1638: A Documentary History and Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638-1693. Another interest is the history of literacy and reading in early America. He edited, with Hugh Amory, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, the first of a five-volume series of which he is the general editor.

Professor Hall continues to study and write about religion and culture in early America, with particular attention to "lived religion" and, in a book nearing completion, to the political culture of the early colonists in the context of English movements and disruptions of the seventeenth century.

First Parish is located just off the town square at 23 Dedham Ave (route 135).  Please enter through the Lincoln Street doors.  There is ample parking in the town lot off of Lincoln Street. The building is fully accessible. For more information, go to http://www.uuneedham.org/or call the Parish office at 781-444-0823.