David Powers is a native of Springfield, Massachusetts, and has long been interested in its earliest days, particularly the part that William Pynchon played in shaping its life. He traces his fascination with the area’s history to finding a map of the early days of Pynchon’s settlement in a book by Springfield historian Harry Andrew Wright. In time his interest led to a paper for C. Conrad Wright’s American Church History class at Harvard Divinity School. Through extensive research since retirement in both New England and Old, Powers has explored as much of the story as he could for Damnable Heresy. In the course of this study Powers deciphered coded notes that John Pynchon, William’s young son, wrote down while the settlement’s minister, the Rev. George Moxon, preached on Sundays in the 1640s. The teenager’s jottings comprise a small booklet, which is one of the very earliest artifacts from Springfield. These notes, transcribed in Good and Comfortable Words, reveal the concerns the minister addressed. They also reveal him to be an able, engaging speaker who offered encouragement–and challenge–to the growing settlement he faithfully served through its earliest years on the edge of the ‘wilderness.’Videos Rev. George Moxon’s Preaching Damnable Heresy Review