Here's one of my favorite "digital Wesley" letters as I go....

Even legends have sisters! In this letter, John Wesley's older sister Emilia, in addition to filling him in on all the family gossip, criticizes his habit of walking everywhere as undignified. :-)

Are there really body parts in the Methodist Library?

This is a post I have always wanted to make, so thought I'd share it with you during my last week.

Archives and rare book collections are supposedly famous for having "dusty" and rarely consulted books and manuscripts. First of all, the "dusty and unconsulted" part is not true (we have about 500 on-site visitors a year and 500 questions from off-site users). Secondly, sometimes we have some pretty weird stuff as well.

To wit: it is true that the Methodist Center contains what purports to be the dessicated thumb of famous Methodist evangelist George Whitefield. If you want to read more about the story, historian Clifton Guthrie has written about it here:
http://www.bts.edu/Guthrie/GuthrieCV&Pubs/Touching%20Whitefields%20Bones.htm

The thumb has also been featured in Christian History and Biography (Winter 2004) and The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 28, 2005), although both articles are now on copyright-protected pages, so I can't send you there electronically.

That's the only actual body part, although we do have (as Guthrie mentions) Wesley's death mask (making death masks was actually a fairly common 18th-century way of memorializing the dead). Also, the archives of the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference, which are in our building, have the shoes of a woman who was struck by lightning and survived.

Cheers! :-)