John Woolman Brush papers

The John Woolman Brush papers consist of materials documented and compiled by John Brush himself throughout his career. The collection spans from Brush’s early life after high school in 1914 through his retirement, with the latest materials being comments from the late 1970’s in some of his earlier journals, and letters from the 1980’s.

The collection is split into five series: Correspondence, Educational Materials, Pastoral Materials, Writings, and Journals and Diaries.

John Brush’s correspondence spans over 60 years, from 1914 through the 1970’s, and includes letters from mentors, publishers, professors, his wife Hilda, his children, and many of his friends and colleagues. In these letters, Brush discusses his own work and others’, including the work of his Ph.D. students over the years. He consistently kept in touch with his mentors, and his collection of letters follows their lives and includes letters he himself sent. His letters discuss his personal life, politics, war, and other current events and topics relevant to his personal and professional theology. There is a surge of letters from late 1960 during his illness and hospitalization, and they continue into early 1961. The letters in the early years of his life and after this hospitalization are fewer, but there is at least one letter from almost every year between 1914 and 1989.

Brush’s Educational Materials include his student notebooks, course materials, and lectures and papers. His student notebooks include courses about the book of Jeremiah, the psychology of religion, the life of Paul, church history (in several volumes), and homiletics. It seems Brush did not keep his notebooks from his graduate coursework, although he did keep many of his reading notes in journals from throughout the years (which are in the final series of this collection). He did keep intricate notes for the courses he taught and copies of the lectures he gave as a lecturer and professor, and he also kept many syllabi from his courses on church history.

The third series in this collection, Pastoral Materials, consists of liturgy and worship materials, church records, and sermons. “Liturgy and Worship” includes church bulletins from a church in California from Brush’s close friend Shozo Hashimoto, a copy of a Reformation Sunday issue of the Andover Newton Bulletin, a prayer journal, one of Brush’s personal bibles, and more. The pastoral records he kept include lists of baptisms, deaths, marriages he ordained, and other reports of committees Brush participated in during his career. The last subseries in this collection, Brush’s sermons, include numerous sermons of varying topics. There are hundreds of sermons, each with a unique title and based on specific Bible passages. Many of these sermons were written in lettered series and kept organized, an order not disturbed in the archival process. One particular sermon of interest is a sermon Brush wrote against the KKK in 1924 when the local klan donated books about the problems of Roman Catholicism to his church, Glenwood Chapel, and Brush refused them. Brush’s sermon outlines the innate problem of otherness and discredits the KKK’s polemic against Catholics. The sermon was met with a negative response by the KKK published in a local newspaper, and this article is also included in this archive.

John Brush’s Writings are split into three subseries: Publications, Church Pamphlets, and Addresses. His publications, although short, are several. He also wrote a work entitled Stroudwater Days, which was intended to be published as a collection of journals written by Brush describing his time working in his church. Brush’s church pamphlets are about prayer, living a Protestant life, church history, and more. The final section of the Writings are Brush’s Addresses, which consist of graduation speeches, faculty forum talks, and various others.

Brush’s Journals and Diaries are plentiful, thorough, thought-provoking, informational, and detailed. He includes drawings and paintings, poetry both in dedicated volumes and sporadically, and quotes lined up on the inside covers of most of the journals. He has journals throughout his life, and diaries that can be paired up nearly every year with lists of daily events, to-dos, and daily jottings. His journals include reflections on Ghandi, the first televised presidential debate, the birth of Israel as a state, the atom bombs in World War II, the invasion of Poland by Hitler, addresses given by Winston Churchill, and so much more. Brush kept himself up to date on all current events, and his journal entries give a detailed account of living through each event. He also glued in newspaper articles, had entire journals dedicated to notetaking the philosophy and theology books he read, and reflected on many of his domestic and international travels. As the most personally and professionally telling of the materials in this collection, John Brush’s collection of journals and diaries draw an intimate portrait of his own mind and the transformation of thought and politics throughout the decades.