Running from Religion: Five Centuries of Mystics and Misfits

RUNNING FROM RELIGION is the story of a journalist's search into the lives and the lies of his forefathers. Don Lattin traces the two sides of his immigrant family back to the sixteenth century European wars of religion and the nineteenth century diaspora of Russian Jews.His paternal ancestor, Richard Lettin, arrived in New England just eighteen years after the Mayflower. Don's maternal clan, the Kubeys, descended from a family that included the notorious "Gangster Joe" Kubey. Their...
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RUNNING FROM RELIGION is the story of a journalist's search into the lives and the lies of his forefathers. Don Lattin traces the two sides of his immigrant family back to the sixteenth century European wars of religion and the nineteenth century diaspora of Russian Jews.His paternal ancestor, Richard Lettin, arrived in New England just eighteen years after the Mayflower. Don's maternal clan, the Kubeys, descended from a family that included the notorious "Gangster Joe" Kubey. Their stories go beyond the comforting myths of the ancestral search to reveal what the actual lives of our ancestors tell us about faith and family in America. This is not just the Lattin/Kubey story. It's an American story.To deepen the historical context of his family's saga, Lattin pens profiles of Julian of Norwich, the first woman author of a surviving book written in English; Erasmus of Rotterdam, the great Christian humanist; Hendrik Niclaes, whose Family of Love was one of the most despised sects of the Protestant Reformation; Giordano Bruno, the Dominican mystic burned at the stake; Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan prophetess and convicted heretic; Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher and renegade Jew; and John Humphrey Noyes, an exiled prophet of free love. Lattin places these mystics and misfits within his newly imagined Sangha of Skeptical Universalists - a kind of "tradition of no tradition."This edition is Illustrated with fifteen black and white photographs inside and a full-color colonial New England map on the back cover.It's available exclusively through the author at don@donlattin.com. Read the first six chapters online at lattinancestors.com .