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New book takes fresh look at ‘St. Thomas’ Paine
Carr in the driver’s seat for Scotties bowling
BY DAN AUBREY
BY RICH FISHER
As of Jan. 21, the Bordentown High boys’ bowling team was 14-2-2 and coach Ron Jones was asked how much the addition of freshman Lucien Carr had impacted the Scotties. His citing of the statistics said it all. “It helped tremendously,” Jones said. “Last year, with pretty much the same team minus him, we only had seven wins out of 17 games. This year we have 14 wins in 18 games.” That’s quite a difference. Then again, Carr is quite a bowler. Through Bordentown’s first 18 contests he led the team with a 166 average that included six 200 games. He was the lone Scottie with a 600 series as he rolled a 632 against Delran. That’s not to say there haven’t been a few bumps in the road. Jones noted that in tryouts Lucien averaged 199, which he has not maintained during the season. But the youngster shows maturity in understanding that. “I came in with a really high average, but with bowling the ups and downs come,” he said. “You gotta get used to it and get ingrained in it. This is my first year of doing it, I’ve see BOWLING, Page 14
Leyonna Robinson holds “Family Game Night,” the design that won the Bordentown City Creative Team Gingerbread House contest. Robinson designed and built the house with her grandmother, Tuesday Robinson. (Photo courtesy of Adriana Loughnane.)
Grand duo wins Creative Team’s Gingerbread House contest BY JOE EMANSKI
When Leyonna Robinson and her grandmother, Tuesday, spend time together, they like to turn off the devices and the TV and play some games. So when they heard last November that the Bordentown City Creative Team was holding a Gingerbread House design contest, they had an
idea for their design that nobody else would have come up with. They called their submission “Family Game Night,” and it was one of 12 designs on display at various locations in Bordentown City throughout the month of December. The Robinsons’ design was in the window at Mimosa Goods on Farnsworth Avenue. Voting was open to the
public, and hen the winners were announced on Dec. 18, Leyonna and Tuesday were thrilled to learn that their gingerbread house had taken first prize in the contest. The house is shaped like a typical gingerbread house and has plenty of candy features, like pretzel beams, popcorn snow and gables made of see WINNER, Page 8
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Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer whose “Common Sense” and “The American Crisis” fanned the fiery spirit of the American Revolution, celebrates his 285th birthday on Jan. 29 with a new Princeton University Press book, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism. It obviously puts the once Bordentown resident into a fresh perspective. Its author is Leigh Eric Schmidt, a professor of humanities at Washington University in St. Louis and past professor and department chair of religion for Princeton University. His expertise is American religion and culture, including research in evangelical revivalism, religious liberalism, atheism, and secularism. As Schmidt shows in the following excerpt, Paine’s call to end of the European monarchy structure also called for dismantling religious institutions made him an enemy to the church and a savior to unbelievers: “No founding figure occupied a more canonized role in the 19th century secularist imagination than Paine, whose bold deistic critique of the Bible in “The Age of Reason” had made him the ogre of evangelicals and the hero see PAINE, Page 6
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