On Monday, Oct. 29, at 7 p.m. in 202 Brooks Hall at West Virginia University, Jeff Bach, Ph.D., will give a presentation about the earliest known white settlers in Preston County. His lecture, “The Hermits of the High-Lying, Wide-Stretching Alleghenies: Pennsylvania Dunkers in Preston County, West Virginia in the 1750s,” provides a background on the religious views and conflicts that propelled three brothers, Samuel, Israel and Gabriel Eckerlin, to settle along the Cheat River. They had been expelled from a Protestant monastic community of people who were pacifists and baptized by immersion.

Bach discusses details of the unique religious views of the Eckerlin brothers and their original community in Ephrata, Pa., which is now a museum. Illustrations accompany the lecture. Evidence from recently discovered manuscript letters and treatises expand the story that has been known about the Eckerlins, their attempts to form a monastic community and the demise of their outpost in the Alleghenies in 1757.

The event is free and open to the public.

Bach, native of Middletown, Ohio, is the director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies and teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., in Lancaster County. He began at the Young Center in 2007 after teaching at Bethany Theological Seminary in Richmond, Ind., for 13 years.

He earned his doctorate in religion from Duke University in 1997, concentrating on the history of Christianity. He has studied and written about topics related to Radical Pietist groups in Europe and America, including the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania.

Bach is the author of “Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata,” (Penn State Press, 2003) and collaborator with Michael Birkel, professor of religion at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., on “Genius of the Transcendent: Mystical Writings of Jakob Boehme,” (Shambhala, 2010). He recently published “The Unchristian Negro Slave Trade: Brethren and Slavery,” in Brethren Life and Thought.

For more information, contact Jane Donovan, at 304-293-7739 or Jane.Donovan@mail.wvu.edu

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gd/10/10/12

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