The events and characters surrounding King Henry VIII's Tudor Court and the English Reformation have received many treatments in novels, plays, and cinema. Yet the most important figure of the age, William Tyndale, is hardly mentioned much less celebrated. The man who gave us the first English Bible, invented modern English, set the drive towards democracy and personal judgment in the English speaking world, provoked literacy in England to go from 6% to 50%, essentially founded the Church of England, and defined the civil philosophy that launched the English Empire, lived a life even more dramatic than the better known figures of Henry, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Cromwell. They largely reacted to change, while Tyndale was the greatest change agent in history. Part spy thriller, part history, and part Arden forest romance, God's Spy imaginatively presents on stage in a modern dramatic verse not just the events but the spiritual issues that moved the men and women of the times.

On May 14, 1818, the Rev. Harry Croswell of Trinity Episcopal Church, New Haven, broke a 180 year old tradition and became the first non-Congregational minister to give the Annual Election Sermon in Connecticut. Better known as the free press hero of The People v. Croswell" case in 1804 where Alexander Hamilton argued for the precept that "truth is a defense against libel," Croswell here 16 years later provides an argument for the separation of church and state. Taking his text from the scriptural precept Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's, he creates a hard "distinguishing line" between church and state. Shortly after he gave the sermon to the Assembly, they voted 81 to 80 to accept a majority vote on passing a constitution - a constitution that would disestablish the Congregational Church in the state. One of the shortest of all the elections sermons, it was also the most powerful. His sermon was at the time considered so important that the Assembly authorized four editions at printers around the state, an unprecedented number. Rather than read private letters and snatch at metaphors for a justification of a supposed "wall of separation" between church and state, Harry Croswell's sermon provided the intellectual and emotional motivation that ended the last theocratic-democracy in America by voting on it - even if it won by a single vote. Understanding Harry Croswell is vital to understanding the First Amendment's protection of both religious and press freedom. The book includes the essay, "The End of Theocracy in American: The Distinguishing Line of Harry Croswell's Election Sermon," along with a transcription with introduction and notes of Croswell's "A Sermon Preached at the Anniversary Election, Hartford, May 14, 1818."

This book arose out of an investigative attempt to use methods adapted from the field of Organizational Culture to answer the related questions, "Where did the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence come from?," "What kind of men could create a document so powerful it became a revered work of what some call republican scripture?," "How did the supposedly flawed organization of the Continental Congress accomplish so much, and create so many ideas of so lasting importance?" And most important, "What lessons can we learn from them?" It suggests that 106 contributors to the Declaration - 100 delegates and 6 men of moral influence in Philadelphia connected to the congress - debated not only the politics of separation, but the moral philosophy that justified the revolution. The Declaration was as Jefferson called it a "harmonizing sentiment" among competing moral values systems of Calvinist-Puritans, Quaker-Spiritualists, Social-Anglicans and a new domestic school of moral philosophy American Practical Idealism that arose in 1740s at Yale, and the 1750s at King's College (now Columbia) and the College of Philadelphia (now Penn). This last school of philosophy was not based on ideas from Locke, or English Republican Radicals, Scottish "innate sense" moral philosophy, as often suggested, but on the moral philosophy of the American Dr. Samuel Johnson of Yale and King's College, which was then promoted by Dr. Benjamin Franklin and Provost Dr. William Smith at the College of Philadelphia. It also suggests that the Continental Congress in its fifteen years of existence was not just a rather long ad hoc meeting of individuals in wigs. Rather, it was a tremendously effective organizational culture in itself that deserves to be analyzed for its extraordinary accomplishments -- and to see if we can imitate its successes.