The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking: A Message from the Philadelphian Society

Seventeenth-century England was a rotten time and place to live. Civil wars, various iterations of religious persecution, enclosure of the commons, plague. Stuff like that. Stuff like that of our own times. Yet it was also a time of great optimism and inspiring religious intuition and communitas. Anglican priest and poet Robert Herrick celebrated communitas in his boisterous, jovial, and often messy collection Hesperides, holding a magic mirror up to society to show what human flourishing could ...