I am, to be blunt, a church-history fan and that affected both
my undergraduate and graduate educations as I prepared to seek
work on the Godbeat. To get personal about it, this is also the
sort of interest that can inspire a Baptist to swim the
Bosporus. Thus, I was pretty excited about that recent New York
Times story about a historic find in the ruins of Jamestown.
Here’s the lede: JAMESTOWN – For more than a decade, the marshy
island in Virginia where British colonists landed in 1607 has
yielded uncounted surprises. And yet William M. Kelso’s voice
still brims with excitement as he plants his feet atop a long-
buried discovery at the settlement’s heart: what he believes are
the nation’s oldest remains of a Protestant church. The
discovery has excited scholars and preservationists, and
unearthed a long-hidden dimension of religious life in the first
permanent colony. It may prove to be an attraction for another
reason: the church would have been the site of America’s first
celebrity wedding, so to speak, wh