Earl Clement Davis (June 3, 1876 – May 19, 1953) was Unitarian minister of the first half of the twentieth century who understood modern life as requiring freedom, discovery , and consent. He ran for public office as a Socialist. He vigorously supported congregational polity and opposed any religious creed or over-sight of an individual’s religious thinking.…
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John Weiss (June 28, 1818 – March 9, 1879) was a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, advocate for women’s rights, writer, lecturer, and the earliest biographer of Theodore Parker. Weiss may have been one of the first people of Jewish heritage to affiliate with Unitarianism. …
Founded in response to the 1866 meeting of the National Conference of Unitarian Churches in Syracuse, New York, where the congregational delegates reaffirmed allegiance to Jesus Christ, the FRA was initiated by radical Unitarian ministers who had failed to convince the group to declare itself nonsectarian or organize to include independent congregations as well as Unitarian.…
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English-born Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble (Nov. 27, 1809 – Jan. 15, 1893) lived a dramatic life on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress, abolitionist, and writer. She is best known for her controversial Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839, published only in 1863.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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.…