As the Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana, from 1905 to 1938, Frank (Smith Calthrop) Wicks (February 15, 1868-December 21, 1952) was a leading Unitarian minister of the Progressive Era. During his long pastorate, he grew what was at first the sole Unitarian church in Indiana –a state that fell under the dominance of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1920s — from fewer than 50 members to over 500.…
Horatio Stebbins (August 8, 1821 – April 8, 1902) served as minister of the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco for thirty-five years, 1864 to 1899. Having struggled economically to gain a higher education, he finished Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School in his late twenties, and served Unitarian parishes in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, before being selected as the successor to Thomas Starr King.…
For forty years, Charles Fletcher Dole (May 17, 1845- November 27, 1927) served what is now First Church (Unitarian) in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. A prolific author, Dole was both childhood pastor and mentor to Emily Balch Greene (1867-1961), founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1946.…
Margaret Barr (19 March 1899 – 11 August 1973), known as Annie Margaret Barr, was a British Unitarian minister who devoted her life to serving the indigenous Unitarian churches of Northeast India.
Born in the village of Menston, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Annie Margaret Barr was the fourth of six children raised in a Wesleyan Methodist family.…
Richard Morrow Steiner (1901-1975) was senior minister of the First Unitarian Church in Portland from 1934 to 1965. An inspirational preacher, he helped rebuild the congregation after a decline during the Great Depression. As an advocate of the social gospel, he was personally involved in the community and inspired others to a life of social action.
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Krzysztof Sieniuta, his nephew Piotr Sieniuta, and Piotr’s son, Aleksander Krzysztof Sieniuta, were Polish noblemen and patrons of the Polish Brethren (Arians) in Wołyń. The Polish Brethren flourished in 17th Century Poland, a period of relative religious toleration between the Reformation and the reassertion of Roman Catholic control.…
Olive Higgins Prouty (January 10, 1882-March 24, 1974) was an American novelist, most active in the period between the First and Second World Wars. In this interval between women’s suffrage and women’s liberation, when few openly questioned the notion that a woman’s fulfillment is to be found in a subordinate role, Prouty insisted on the importance, for women as well as for men, of independent judgment, freedom from illusion, and full personal responsibility for one’s actions.…
S
ylvia Plath (October 27, 1932-February 11, 1963) was a poet, literary critic, novelist, diarist, correspondent and sometime social activist. On the evidence of her intensely confessional poetry, Plath’s personal theology was humanist, with a leaning toward nature mysticism. Throughout her short life she associated closely with the Unitarian church.…
Leslie Talbot Pennington (October 30, 1899-December 6, 1974), a Unitarian and Universalist minister who chaired the Unitarian Commission on Church Union, was throughout his career an active civic leader and organizer of pioneering church social action programs. He was especially prominent in advocating international peace and promoting neighborhood racial integration.…
Susan Charlotte Barber Lloyd Jones (May 15, 1832-October 26, 1911) was the first wife of the Unitarian minister Jenkin Lloyd Jones and his “yoke-fellow in the cause of religious freedom.” Together they promoted the growth of the Western Unitarian Conference, wrote widely-adopted Sunday School curricula, created the first, much-imitated Unity Club, helped found organizations for Unitarian women and for Unitarian Sunday Schools, and encouraged women to serve as ministers in midwestern Unitarian churches.…
William Roscoe (March 8, 1753-June 27, 1831) was a poet, historian, botanist, and politician who laid the foundation for the cultural flowering of Liverpool while opposing the slave trade, the main source of its prosperity. A prominent member of the Presbyterian (Unitarian) dissenting community, his political and social reform activities were strongly informed by his rational views of religion.…
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (May 16, 1804-January 3, 1894), Mary Tyler Peabody Mann (November 16, 1807-February 11, 1887), and Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne (September 21, 1809-February 26, 1871)—were champions of reform movements, pioneers in modern educational theory, founders of the kindergarten movement in America and supporters of the arts.…