Emily Dickinson famously wrote that while “some keep the Sabbath going to church,” for most of her life she kept it “staying at Home.” But that didn’t prevent her from wrestling with the biblical texts that were the subjects of sermons across the street from the Homestead at First Congregational Church. For Emily Dickinson, the Bible was more than “an antique Volume / Written by faded Men,” and more than a treatise on sin and redemption. Its stories were exemplars not of virtue or vice but of the human condition, with all of its agonies and exultations.

Lay leader: Mary Latham