This page is for Contributors (A-K). For bios of our other authors, see Contributors (L-Z).
Andreu, Jaume de Marcos
Jaume de Marcos Andreu was born June 25, 1961, in Barcelona, Spain. He graduated in Anglo-Germanic Philology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in 1987. Since then he has worked as a free-lance translator, specializing mainly in software and fiction. Since 1990 he has also been a software localization tester for the Spanish versions of computer programs and travels frequently to the USA and Canada.
Raised a Catholic, in his twenties he started a spiritual journey looking for a new religious home. In 1989 he discovered Unitarian Universalism quite by chance while looking for information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He quickly joined the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) and became quite active in the European Unitarian Universalists (EUU), attending several religious retreats in Central Europe. In 1992 he was one of the founding members in Spain of the New Age Universalist Movement (Movimiento Universalista Nueva Era – MUNE), a liberal non-denominational group that fostered interfaith dialogue and religious freedom. In 1996 and 1998 he participated in UU Leadership Seminars sponsored by the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU) in Klingberg and Frankfurt, Germany. In 2000 he started the Unitarian Universalist Society of Spain (Sociedad Unitaria Universalista de España – SUUE), which was admitted as a member of the ICUU in May, 2001. SUUE has applied for formal recognition from the Spanish government as a religious organization, and is an active supporter of the interfaith movement in Spain. He is also coordinating the creation and development of Spanish-speaking Unitarian Universalist groups in Spain and Latin America and two mailing lists in Spanish devoted to Unitarian Universalism.
Articles: José María Blanco White
Andrews, Barry
Barry Andrews is Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, Long Island, New York. He received his Doctorate in Ministry from Meadville/Lombard Theological School and for thirty years served UU congregations in Washington State, California, and New York as a Minister of Religious Education prior to his retirement in 2011. He and his wife Linda are currently living on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Barry was scholar in residence at the Thoreau Institute, Merrill Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, and received an honorary doctorate from Meadville. He was recipient of the Angus MacLean Award for Excellence in Religious Education, awarded by the UUA. He chaired the UUA Emerson Bicentennial Committee and served on the UUA Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee. He has also served on the board of the UU Historical Society and is currently on the board of the Thoreau Society. (He is shown sitting in Emerson’s favorite chair.)
His ministry has always included a strong emphasis on adult spiritual growth. He has been especially interested in the spirituality of the Transcendentalists and has written and edited books on Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. In addition, he has written numerous articles, essays and reviews.
Articles: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau
Baros-Johnson, Irene
Irene Baros-Johnson received a B.A. from Hunter College of the City University of New York, an M.Div. from Drew Theological School, and is a member of Collegium. She co-authored the sesquicentennial history of May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society, “May No One Be a Stranger.” That church’s website includes her 1989 article on Samuel J. May and social action, “The Just Demands of the Other.” In 1994 she received a Feminist Theology Award for her costumed “Urged Onward by a Longtime Friend: Lucretia Mott and Unitarianism,” presented in thirteen east coast churces from New Bedford, Massachusetts to Atlanta, Georgia. Her biographical summaries of British Unitarian women are included in Dorothy May Emerson’s book Standing Before Us. Her late husband John served as Minister of the Universalist Unitarian Church of Halifax from 1997 to 2006. In 2004 she co-edited, with Mary-Lu MacDonald, Concise Portraits of Canadian UU Women. In 2004, she co-authored “Concise Portraits of Canadian UU Women,” set to have a second edition. She has a son Nicholas and her husband John has been minister of the Universalist Unitarian Church of Halifax since 1997.
Articles: Emily Stowe
Belote, Thom
As a life-long Unitarian Universalist, raised in the First Parish in Wayland MA, Belote wrote his senior thesis at Reed College on Thomas Jefferson and religion. He received his M.Div. from Harvard in 2003 and was called, at age 25, as Minister of the Shawnee Mission UU Church in Lenexa, KS. During his 11 years there, Thom helped that church to nearly double in size and complete an ambitious building project. His book, The Growing Church: Keys to Congregational Vitality, was published by Skinner House in 2010. Since 2014 he has been Minister of the Community Church of Chapel Hill, NC.
Articles: Thomas Jefferson
Bem, Kazimierz
Kazimierz Bem, Ph.D. (2007), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is pastor of First Church in Marlborough (Congregational) UCC in Massachusetts, USA and a lecturer at the Evangelical School of Theology (EWST) in Wrocław. He received his M.Div. and S.T.M. degrees from Yale Divinity School in 2010 and 2012. He is the author of many articles on Calvinism in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and of the book Biographical Dictionary of Reformed Clergy, Pastors, and Deaconess of the Lesser Poland and Warsaw Consistory 1815-1939 (Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper, 2015). His latest book Calvinism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1548-1648: The Churches and the Faithful came out in St. Andrew’s Studies in Reformation History by Brill Publishers in 2020.
Articles: The Czaplic Family, Gabriel Hojski, Jan Kiszka, Jerzy Niemirycz, The Niemirycz Family, The Radziwill Family, Mikolaj Siennicki, The Sieniuta Family
Blouin, Lenora
Lenora Blouin was born in Seattle, Washington but lived most of her life in San Jose, California. She studied at San Jose State University at which she earned an MA in English Literature (1972) and an MLS in Library Science in (1974). She worked as a librarian at the San Jose Public Library for twenty years until she retired in 1996. From 1986 on she was Head of the Reference Department at the Main Library. Her publications include May Sarton: A Bibliography (1978, rev. ed. 2000), several articles on May Sarton, and “Library Access and the Independent Scholar: 25 Years of Growth and Change,” The Independent Scholar (Winter 1999-2000).
She was a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. After a long battle with cancer, she died in 2015, a devoted member of Campbell United Methodist Church of San Jose.
Articles: May Sarton
Bohanan, Adam
Originally from Gatlinburg, TN, Adam S. Bohanon earned a B.A. in classics from Vanderbilt and an M.A. from Chicago Theological Seminary and was Assistant Librarian at Meadville Lombard Theological School. He then earned a Master of Library and Information Science degree from Dominican University and oversaw special collections and archives for the Kennebunk Free Library in Kennebunk, ME, while earning a law degree and certificate in information privacy law from the University of Maine. He now serves as Data Privacy Counsel in the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration, advising over state agencies on legal issues related to data privacy.
Articles: Henry Noble Couden
Buescher, John
John Benedict Buescher earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, doing comparative studies of Buddhism and Christianity. He then served as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and as a Program Officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 1991 to 2007 he head the Voice of America’s Tibetan Broadcast Service. He has been a contributor The Catholic World Report. His publications include The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth Century Religious Experience (2004); The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land (2006); Empress of Swindle: The Life of Ann Odelia Diss Debar (2014); News Bites Dog: Papers Cut by Their Own Wit (2014); and Radio Psychics: Mind Reading and Fortune Telling in American Broadcasting, 1920-1940 (2021).
Articles: Theodore Clapp, Jesse Babcock Ferguson, Charles Spear, John Murray Spear, Spiritualism
Bumbaugh, Beverly
Beverly A. (Keplinger) Bumbaugh was born in Hagerstown, Maryland in 1936. She graduated in 1958 from Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio. She studied for the Unitarian Universalist parish ministry under an Independent Studies program in the 1970s, then served her first 7 years in the ministry as co-minister with her husband, David Bumbaugh, in Alexandria, Virginia (1977-84). Subsequently she served congregations in Mentor, Ohio (1986-87); Pamona, New York(1987-91); Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1992-93); and Freeport, New York (1993-95). She earned Interim Ministry accreditation but her last three years in active ministry were spent again as co-minister with David, in Summit, New Jersey.
Her bout with breast cancer caused them both to retire as Minister Emeritus and Emerita in 1998. David then joined the faculty of Meadville Lombard Theological School and wrote Unitarian Universalism: A Narrative History (2001). Beverly taught occasionally as adjunct faculty. She died on February 14, 1982, survived by David and their four children.
Articles: Augusta Jane Chapin
Carpenter, Frank
Frank Carpenter is a graduate of MIT (biology and history of science, 1964) and Meadville/Lombard Theological School (1972). He inherited a passion for history and genealogy from his mother. When she died-while he was still in high school-she passed to him the mantle of family historian. His genealogical studies now extend beyond his own kin to embrace the family of William Ellery Channing.
At his first church, in Wilton, New Hampshire, Carpenter used the stories of Unitarian luminaries from the local Abbot clan as material for a history column in the district newsletter. In 1981 he was an extension minister in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex. In 1985 he settled in Newport, Rhode Island, birthplace of William Ellery Channing. With a fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society, he investigated Channing’s family wealth and wrote “Paradise Held: William Ellery Channing and the Legacy of Oakland,” Newport History (1994). With what he learned about Channing participation in the slave trade he contributed to Richard C. Youngken’s African Americans in Newport (1995). Carpenter was selected Treasurer of the UUHS when then President, Conrad E. Wright, supposed that if he could sort out the Channing family finances, he might be able to figure out the Historical Society’s as well.
Upon leaving Newport, Carpenter served two years as interim minister of First Unitarian Church, Cleveland, Ohio and two years as interim minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn, Massachusetts. He went from Lynn, Massachusetts, to the First Parish in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. From 2002 to 2014 he served as Minister of St. John’s Unitarian Universalist Church in Cincinnati, a congregation founded in 1814 by German immigrants that affiliated with the Unitarians in 1924. He then became Minister Emeritus.
Articles: Samuel Barrett, Henry Trevett Channing, William Ellery Channing, Ephraim Peabody, Unitarian Controversy
Cassara, Ernest
A respected historian and scholar of the American Enlightenment, as well as a Unitarian Universalist minister, Cassara served on the faculties of Tufts University, George Mason University and in the administration of Goddard College and Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland. Hwas admired for his dedication to making history accessible through his writing and his passion for teaching. His books include The Enlightenment in America and A History of the United States of America: A Guide to Information Resources. In retirement, he turned to writing historical fiction in Murder on Boston Common and Murder on Beacon Hill. He died in 2015 at the age of 89. A more extensive biography is included in this dictionary.
Articles: Hosea Ballou, Lucius Paige, Thomas Whittemore
Cleary, Maryell
Maryell Cleary grew up a Roman Catholic in western New York state. She became a Unitarian in college, attended Meadville Theological School, graduating in 1950. She was ordained by the Free Religious Fellowship, a mostly African-American Unitarian church in Chicago. After marriage, two children, work in religious education and elementary education, she became a parish minister in 1971, and retired in 1990. Since then she has been active in pro-choice work and has published an anthology of the late Kenneth Patton’s work, The Wonder of Life (1997) and edited A Bold Experiment: The Charles Street Universalist Meeting House (2000). She died July 1, 2003.
Articles: Elizabeth Gaskell, A. Eustace Haydon, Harriet Martineau, Kenneth Patton
Clement, Jacqueline “Jackie”
A native of northern New Jersey, Jackie earned her B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and worked in high tech in Massachusetts for twenty years. She became a lay leader in the First Parish in Littleton and earned her M.Div. at Andover Newton Theological School. After interim ministers to the First Universalist Church of Rockland, ME; the UU Church of Saco-Biddeford, ME; and the First Parish in Saugus, MA, as it merged with the First Parish in Malden, she became Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois from 2010 to 2018. Celebrating her Latina heritage, she contributed to Voices from the Margins: An Anthology of Meditations, ed. Jacqui James and Mark Morrison-Reed (2012) and Faith Like a River in the UUA Tapestry of Faith curricula. Now retired, she has served as Co-Chair of the UUA Committee on Ministerial Fellowship.
Articles: Harriot Stanton Blatch
Coeyman, Barbara
Ordained to the Unitarian Universalist ministry in 2005, at First UU in Austin, TX, Barbara has not only an M.Div, but also a Ph.D. in musicology, a Master’s degree in Public Administration, and has become an Accredited Interim Minister. She pursues research on 19th century women in the Universalist ministry. She is a current Co-Chair of the Unitarian Universalist Studies Network.
Articles: Mary Billings
Curtiss, Elizabeth
Elz, as she is known to friends, studied Unitarian Universalist history at Harvard Divinity School with C. Conrad Wright, George Hunston Williams, William Hutchinson, and David D. Hall. She also holds a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia. She has been a parish minister, religious educator, and an Asian Affairs analyst for the Library of Congress. She served as Vice President of the UU Historical Society from 1988 to 1995.
Articles: Hannah Adams, Samuel Atkins Eilot II
Dahill, Thomas
Thomas H. Dahill, Jr. was born in Cambridge and raised in Arlington, Massachusetts. After serving as an aerial navigator in World War II, he graduated from Tufts College, now University, with a degree in Chemistry and then proceeded to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Upon graduation he received a painting fellowship for two years at the American Academy in Rome. From that time to the present his professional activities have been painting, teaching studio arts and art history at the Museum School, Tufts University, and Emerson College. His experience in Italy stimulated a lifelong love of travel. Many of his trips were shared with the then Dean of Emerson College, Richard Pierce, sometimes accompanied by students. Although his emphasis has been painting, he has produced many watercolor and pen drawings inspired by his travels. In addition he has illustrated numerous books authored by friends and colleagues. There is an ebook on his art, 1955-58: Alan Seaburg, Botega a Roma: Tom Dahill at the American Academy (2007).
Articles: Richard Pierce, Rhys Williams
Dahlberg-Chu, Amy
Amy Dahlberg-Chu is a writer, editor, and mental health worker living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was raised Catholic but found herself drawn to the principles of Unitarian-Universalism as an adult. Between 2003 and 2005, Amy and her husband Julian participated in the Netherlands Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship (NUUF) in Amsterdam, where Amy served as Editor of the NUUF’s newsletter, The Pilgrim. Amy’s family now attends the First Parish Unitarian-Universalist in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Amy earned her B.A. in History & Science from Harvard in 1995 and went on to work in scientific publishing. In 2007, she received an M.A. in American History from Brandeis University. In her graduate work, Amy focused on the history of medical social work and the role of Unitarian-Universalist thought in that movement.
In 2009, Amy decided that her true passion lay in helping others recover from mental illness. She did training in human services and became a Certified Peer Specialist (C.P.S.) in Mental Health Recovery in the State of Massachusetts. She has worked in several settings as a mental health outreach worker, peer counselor, and support group facilitator, using her own lived experience with mental illness to inform her service to others. Amy has also served as an editor and writer for Voices for Change, a mental health advocacy newsletter, since 2010, and she has also developed expertise as a genealogical researcher.
Articles: Richard Cabot, Ida Maud Cannon
Duthie, Peg
Peg Duthie is a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville, where she has served on the board of directors, chaired the Committee on Church Administration, and sings in the choir.
A writer and calligrapher, Peg graduated with honors from the University of Chicago in 1991 and earned an M.A. in English literature from the University of Michigan in 1992. Her poetry has appeared in The Amherst Review, The Fiddlehead and other journals. She is also a contributor to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (forthcoming 2005). Her poetry collection Measured Extravagance appeared in 2012. She has been an editor at the Frist Art Museum and a program manager in biostatistics at Vanderbilt Medical School.
Articles: Hendrik Willem van Loon
Dau, Karen
As a member of the First Universalist Church of Rochester, NY, and its historian, and as Archivist for the New York State Convention of Universalists, Karen Dau has been involved for many years in the research and preservation of New York Universalist history.
Articles: John Mather Austin
Davidson, Dennis Michael
Dennis Michael Davidson was born May 30, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. Reared as an American Baptist, he became a Unitarian Universalist in 1964. His degrees include: B.S. in engineering (U.S. Naval Academy 1960), M.D. (University of Michigan 1971), M.A. in Social Ecology (University of California, Irvine 1987), M.Div. (Starr King School 1992), and Ph.D. in Health and Social Psychology (UC Irvine 1995).
He was a line officer in the U.S. Navy from 1960-1966, serving the year 1966 in Qui Nhon, Vietnam. He was a naval medical officer on active duty from 1971-1977 and on reserve status until his declaration as a conscientious objector in 1991. He was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal for directing the
Indochinese Refugee Camp in 1975. He completed a cardiology fellowship and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar program at Stanford University from 1977-1981. He subsequently served on the medical faculties of Stanford University and the University of California. He received the Preventive Cardiology Academic Award from the National Institutes of Health and authored the book Preventive Cardiology.
In 1992, he was ordained by the UU Church of the Larger Fellowship. He has served as President of the UU Peace Fellowship and editor of its newsletter, UNIPAX. He has been a member of the National Council and Executive Committee of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organization. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School from 1995 to 1997, researching the early history of Unitarian and Universalist peace activism. He died in 2014 in Palm Desert, CA.
Articles: Noah Worcester
DeRoche, Celeste
With an emphasis on the history of immigrant women, Celeste DeRoche earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Maine. She is married to the Rev. Gail R. Geisenhainer, Minister Emerita of the First UU Congregation of Ann Arbor, MI. During their earlier residence in Canoga Park, CA, Celeste developed an interest in how UUism came to the West Coast. She is also a contributor to the UU Rainbow History Project. They are now retired in Cumberland, ME.
Articles: Thomas Starr King, Mary Augusta Safford, Caroline Severance
Doerr, Edd
Having discovered religious humanism at All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis in 1951, during the ministry there of E. Burdette Backus, Doerr became a life-long advocate for humanism, religious liberty, reproductive choice, and civil liberties. He was the founder of Americans for Religious Liberty in 1982 and president of the American Humanist Association, 1995-2003. A one-time teacher of history and Spanish, he became the author, co-author, editor or translator of 20 books, including Timely and Timeless: The Wisdom of E. Burdette Backus, plus five books of poetry and fiction. As a member of the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, MD, he was frequent delegate to UUA General Assemblies, and a guest speaker at over 100 congregations in 30 states. Over 3,000 of his articles, columns, reviews, and letters appeared in The Humanist, Free Inquiry, and other publications. He died in 2020 at the age of 89.
Articles: E. Burdette Backus
Dundzila, Rudra Vilius
Rev. Rudra Vilius Dundzila is Professor of Humanities and Comparative Religion at Harry S Truman College (City Colleges of Chicago). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and German with an emphasis on religious-mythological literature, and a D.Min. in spirituality. He has authored various articles on Baltic mythology and religion. He has served as the Minister of the Kaunas, Lithuania and Chicago congregations of Romuva for a total of 11 years. He is now a Unitarian Universalist Minister, serving as Community Minister at Second Unitarian Church of Chicago. He has ministerial standing with both the UUA and the United Church of Christ.
Articles: Peter Gonesius
Eddis, Charles
Born and raised in Toronto, Charles Eddis became involved with American Unitarian Youth in the late 1940s, attending several youth gatherings in Eastern Europe. He earned his ministerial degree at Harvard Divinity School in 1952 and served churches in Edmonton, Alberta; Pointe Claire, Quebec. He led the founding of the Canadian Unitarian Council. In 1966 he accepted a call to the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois, where he served eleven years. He received an honorary D.D. from Meadville Lombard Theological School in 1979. He served the Unitarian Church of Montreal from 1977 to 1993, retiring as the Minister Emeritus of that congregation. His published writings include a chronicle of the 1987 tragic burning of its historic sanctuary, and several chapters in Montreal’s Unitarians, 1832-2000. His book, Stephen Fritchman: The American Unitarians and Communism (2011) was carefully researched to provide a balanced account of Fritchman’s dismissal from the staff of the A.U.A. Eddis died in May, 2021, at the age of 94.
Articles: Angus Cameron, Stephen Hole Fritchman, William Phillip Jenkins, Leonard Mason
Edwards, Judy Rosella
An experienced freelance writer and new media specialist, Judy Rosella Edwards focuses primarily on genealogy and history. She holds a master’s degree in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University. History has been her favorite subject, dating back to high school when her grandmother introduced her to family history. Her ancestors were among the first European settlers of Shelby County, Illinois. She was a regular columnist for Genealogy Today for a number of years and authored several titles in Holly Lisle’s “The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make…” series. Judy is a past presenter at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency’s annual Conference on Illinois History. Since 2004, she has maintained the Jasper Douthit Project, building on the story of an early apostle of Unitarianism in Illinois. In 2021 she published The Scream on Tenth Street: The Murder of Doris Louise Edwards, her sister, who was mysteriously shot and killed at the age of 14. She lives in Peoria, Illinois, and is a member of the UU congregation in that city.
Articles: Ada Kepley
Edwards, June
June Edwards was a founding member of the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Heritage Society and an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Oneonta, New York. She was the editor of the Education section of Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776-1936, for which she wrote the introduction and the biographical sketches of Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Peabody, Mary Livermore, and Fannie Barrier Williams.
Professor emerita, Division of Education, SUNY-College at Oneonta, she is also the author of Women in American Education, 1820-1955: The Female Force and Educational Reform (2002); Opposing Censorship in the Public Schools (1998); and numerous articles and book chapters on church-state conflicts and other issues.
Articles: The Cary Sisters, Edwin Chapin, Fannie Barrier Williams
Elferdink, Claudia
Starting college, Elferdink planned to train for the Presbyterian ministry but she soon became disillusioned with mainline religion. After attending the University of California Santa Barbara she went on to the College of Wooster in Ohio, graduating with a BA in history and art in 1970. While living in Philadelphia she earned an MEd from the Antioch Graduate School of Education. Elferdink worked as a school teacher and a Public Television producer in western Massaachusetts. She encountered Unitarian Universalism when she stumbled across the Unitarian Universalist Society of Greater Springfield and knew she had found a spiritual home. While still an independent TV producer, she became the Director of Religious Education.
While attending Harvard, theology professor, Paul Rasor mentioned a little-known WWI era British woman Unitarian he had heard about from Dorothy Emerson. That person was Margaret Brackenbury Crook, a minister, Biblical scholar, and theologian who had taught for over thirty years at Smith College in Northamapton, Massachusetts. When Elferdink started her internship in Northampton she found herself walking past Crook’s former house and meeting people who had known her. She was stunned by Crook’s brilliance and tenacity.
Elferdink’s senior thesis at Harvard was on Ms. Crook, as was her presentation at the 1998 Collegium. She received her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School in 1998. Ordained in 1999, Elferdink served parishes in Amherst, Massachusetts and Madison, Connecticut. Cynthia Grant Tucker suggested that Crook and Elferdink’s Crook paper deserved a wider audience and should be published in the Journal of UU History (JUUH). Thanks to Kathleen Parker, JUUH Editor, the Crook paper was condensed and published in 2012.
Elferdink took a sabatical leave the next year to work in the Transylvania Unitarian Archives. Archivist Lehel Molnar, translated the JUUH article into Hungarian and published it in The Christian Sower, the Transylvanian Unitarian Journal. In 2014, Amy Dahlberg, an editor for the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography extracted the biographical highlights from
Elferdink’s senior thesis and the JUUH article to produce the DUUB article linked at the bottom of this page. Claudia Elferdink retired from full-time ministry in 2013. In 2020, she initiated the International Reckonings Project, a series of online line intercultural conferences on issues of UU responses to injustice and human rights abuses.
Articles: Margaret Brackenbury Crook
Evens, Mark
Born in Kansas, raised a nominal Roman Catholic in the Detroit suburbs, Mark Evens received his B.A. in biology from Brown University. Working as a technical writer in No. California, he joined the First Unitarian Church of Oakland in 1989. He completed his M.Div. at Starr King School for the Ministry in 2005 after an internship at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas. From 2008 to 2015 he served as Associate Minister of the First UU Congregation of Ann Arbor. He then returned to his previous career in information technology.
Articles: Henry Whitney Bellows
Facer, Wayne
Wayne joined the Auckland Unitarian Church while studying at the University of Auckland, where he graduated in economic history. Following a number of years working in university administration he became a consultant in health economics. Later Wayne returned to university to complete a postgraduate degree in religious history. His current interests are researching and writing about New Zealand Unitarian history.
Articles: Franklin Bradley, John Gammell, Owen Glenbrook Hansen, Lincoln Ashton Gribble, William Joseph McEldowney, Cyprus Richard Mitchell, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Sir Robert Stout, Hone Tuwhare
Ferguson, Mark
From an early age, Mark had a deep sense of purpose, devotion and service. He grew up in North Baltimore, Ohio, in a home with so many well-loved animals that he called it “a veritable zoo.” Although his parents were from the Anabaptist/Brethren tradition, Mark completed high school at Divine Word Seminary, a Roman Catholic school in Perrysburg, Ohio. After studying to become a Trappist monk at The Abbey of the Genesee in New York, he moved to Chicago in the early 80s. There he earned a B.A. in religion from De Paul University and an M.S.W. from Loyola University. During his work in the research department at the Howard Brown Health Center, he also cared for people in the early years of the AIDS crisis at Bonaventure House. While in Chicago, Mark met his life-partner, Fred Beal, and joined Second Unitarian Church. In 2001, they moved to Portland and Mark worked with Protocol Crisis Hotline and Compassion & Choices, where he was an end-of-life counselor. As a member of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Mark volunteered in its prison ministry and joined UUs for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (now the UU Ministry for Animals). He also became a pet loss and bereavement counselor. As a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, Mark joined the Portland Buddhist Priory, where he received lay ordination and became president of the Sangha. His lifelong passions were classical music, gardening, animal welfare and the environment. He died in 2015.
Article: Henry Bergh
Fox, Van Eric
Van Eric Fox lives in Tallahassee, FL, where he is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in religious studies from the University of Florida. His area of study is religion in the United States, with a focus on the history of Unitarianism. A life-long Unitarian Universalist, Fox also studies the critical issues which arise from doing scholarly research within the faith tradition to which one personally belongs.
Articles: James Luther Adams
Frank, Will
Willard C. Frank was professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and a member of the Unitarian Church of Norfolk. Although his professional research focused on the naval history of Spanish-American War, he also wrote A Year with Our Liberal Heritage (1984), with 52 vignettes from UU history. He wrote several articles on UU history and organized two denomination-wide conferences and other programs on African American Universalist history. He died in 2011 (obituary). There is a memorial fund in his name at Meadville Theological Seminary.
Articles: Joseph Jordan, Thomas E. Wise
Frazee, Jerry
Jerry D. Frazee was born in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1929 and attended public school in that city. His degrees are from the University of Texas (Austin) in Physical Chemistry with a minor in Physics. He is member of the Sigma Xi honorary chemical society and the Sigma Epsilon honorary athletic society. He belongs to the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and the AAAS. His work experience includes several years as a research chemist in the space industry and quality control chemist in the area of polymers, cement, color, and solid propellants. He has done post-doctoral work at several universities and has taught general and analytical chemistry at several colleges. He first attended the Unitarian Church while in college and has been a member of First Church in Austin, Texas for many years. He has written a life of Texas Unitarian pioneer Edwin Wheelock, The Magnificent Carpetbagger (1976) and an ebook, The Fabulous Heywood Brothers: Searching the Earth for Riches: Oil, Gold and Land (2011).
Articles: Linus Pauling, e. e. cummings, Robert Millikan, Edwin Wheelock
Fredette, Marc
A native New Englander, Marc Fredette graduated in 1987 from Humboldt State University in California with a B.A. in Social Science and French. Between 1988 and 2001, he worked as a programmer and training consultant for a startup software company in New Hampshire, travelling extensively. He joined South Church (UU) in Portsmouth, NH, and prepared for ministry at Harvard Divinity School. After two years with the UUs of Fayetteville, AR, he served the historic First Parish in Waltham, MA, for fifteen years, before retiring in 2021. He wrote his bio of W. L. Sullivan as an M.Div. student of UU history. He is still in the Boston area, performing ministerial functions as requested.
Articles: William Laurence Sullivan
Giannino, Joanne
Before becoming a religious professional, Joanne Giannino had a career as an expressive arts therapist at a community mental health center, served as adjust faculty at Lesley University, and was managing editor for a chain of weekly newspapers. She wrote her biography of Viola Liuzzo while preparing for the ministry at Andover-Newton Theological School, earning her M.Div. in 2007. She served as Assistant Minister at King’s Chapel for three years, then as interim minister for congregations in MA, AZ, and IL. She is now retired from professional ministry.
Articles: Viola Liuzzo
Goodwin, Joan
Joan W. Goodwin was born Dec. 2, 1926, in Dallas, Texas. She graduated from Barnard College in 1947. She is the author of The Remarkable Mrs. Ripley: The Life of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, published in 1998 by Northeastern University Press, and Giving Birth to Ourselves, A History of the Liberal Religious Educators Association, published by LREDA in 1999, as well as UUA curriculum publications. After working in religious education at First Unitarian Church of Milwaukee and First Unitarian Church of Cleveland, she took a position at the UUA with the Sharing in Growth program in 1973 and continued there in extension-related positions until her retirement in 1987. Subsequently she served as Director of Religious Education for Church of the Larger Fellowship until 1992. From 1973-75, she was President of the Liberal Religious Educators Association. In 1984, she received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Starr King School for the Ministry. She served on the UU Historical Society board and that of the UU Women’s Heritage Society. She was an active member of the Arlington Street Church, Boston, from 1974. She died in 2006.
Articles: Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, Maria Weston Chapman, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, Sarah and Samuel Ripley
Grady, Charles
Charles Wesley Grady is a native of Lima, Ohio, born in 1925. He and his wife Claudine were founding members of the Unitarian Fellowship in their home town. He left a career in broadcasting to prepare for the liberal ministry at Meadville/Lombard and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1966. His first pulpit was in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, a suburb of Saint Paul (1966-1969). He was called to the First Parish UU Church of Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1969 and served there for 21 years, retiring as Minister Emeritus in 1990. In retirement he accepted a part-time settlement with the UU Fellowship of Hendersonville, North Carolina, and retired fully in 1996. The Gradys continue to make their home in Hendersonville.
During his Arlington years, Grady was active on the UUA Ministerial Fellowship Committee, the original UUA Committee on Church Staff Finance, the Mass. Bay District board, the Universalist Historical Society, the James Luther Adams Foundation, and Collegium. He took a particular interest in the life and work of Frederic Henry Hedge, who was a distant predecessor in the Arlington pulpit, 1829-1835. He published several articles on Hedge, including a UUHS-sponsored lecture at the Atlanta General Assembly. In 2000 the First Parish in Arlington published his history of the two Arlington liberal churches, Unitarian and Universalist, under the title “Arlington’s First Parish: A History, 1733-1990.” He died in January, 2017, at the age of 91.
Articles: Frederic Henry Hedge
Grebe, Jim
Jim Grebe was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, attended Northwestern University (B.S., 1966) and the University of Michigan (M.B.A., 1967), and served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam war. Since 1974 he has been an active member of All Souls UU Church in Kansas City, Missouri and has enjoyed spending more time working on its Archives Committee since he retired in 2001 from a career in business. He has edited a selection of excerpts of Rev. Raymond Bragg’s letters, and in 2014 he published Democracy’s Defender: The Life of L.M. Birkhead (a Unitarian minister who served Wichita and Kansas City and in 1937 founded the Friends of Democracy). Grebe and his wife, Janice, a retired anatomy professor, live in the Kansas City area with their prize-winning French bulldogs.
Articles: Leon Milton Birkhead, Raymond Bragg
Green, Melinda
Melinda W. Green specializes in story-driven, participatory, and interactive curriculum and worship for all ages featuring relatable histories and biographies. She has created poetry, dramatic readings, Spirit Play lessons, Wonder Box stories, story books, card games, and storytelling scripts about Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists living out their faith in the world. She presented one of her dramatic readings and one of her poems at the 2010 History & Heritage Convocation put on by the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society in cooperation with Collegium, the Association for Liberal Religious Studies. She contributed to Remember Me: A Guide to Little Compton’s 46 Historic Cemeteries, discovering the burial ground for enslaved persons. Melinda contributed historical and genealogical research and writing to Remember Me: A Guide to Little Compton’s 46 Historic Cemeteries, Little Compton Historical Society, Little Compton, RI 2018. She is currently researching and writing a novel inspired by women in the Unitarian and Universalist congregations of a small factory town in Massachusetts.
A 6th generation Unitarian and 2nd generation Unitarian Universalist, Melinda continues to search for Universalists in her family tree.
Articles: Joshua Young
Grodzins, Dean
Dean Grodzins, historian, writer, and editor, is the leading contemporary scholar of the life and work of Theodore Parker. His book, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (UNC Press, 2002) won the Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Journal of American History, The Journal of Religion, and The Root, among many others. He is a contributor to The Atlas of Boston History (Chicago, 2019) ed. Nancy Seasholes. He co-wrote case studies in the history of U.S. democracy, now being used by high school students across the U.S. in Democracy: A Case Study, ed. David A Moss (Harvard, 2017). He has been a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard College, Assoc. Professor of History at Meadville Lombard Theological School, and a Senior Researcher at Harvard Business School in its Cast Method Institute for Education and Democracy. He has also been a NEH Research Fellow at the Mass Historical Society and a Pew Faculty Fellow at Yale. He is a former editor of the Journal of Unitarian Universalist History and the creator of the prize-winning comic strip, TANGENTS (1979-2000).
Articles: Theodore Parker
Grohsmeyer, Janeen Kelley
She joined the UU Fellowship of Southern Maryland in 1996, serving in many capacities, but often telling stories for all ages in worship. Janeen had a B.S. in physics and math from Bucknell, and another degree in electrical engineering for Naval Postgraduate School, and had worked in computer design and in a radar/microwave teaching lab. But as the mother of two children, she began to pursue a career as a writer and storyteller. She published two books of Southern Maryland folktales about Moll Dyer. Her book, A Lamp in Every Corner: A Unitarian Universalist Storybook, appeared in 2004. She made many contributions to the UUA Tapestry of Faith curricula.
Articles: Frances Harper
Groth, Bobbie
A descendant of Ephraim Nute, Rev. Dr. Bobbie Groth was born in New York, raised in New Jersey, and came to the Midwest for college. She has lived in the Milwaukee area since 1991, and has taught sociology at Alverno College. She earned her D.Min from Meadville with a dissertation on the role of the church in maintaining a culture of rape and violence. As a community minister, she serves the needs of victims of domestic violence and their families in clinical settings, shelters, hospitals and correctional institutions, providing pastoral counseling, risk reduction education, substance abuse and violence recovery counseling, and both writing and preaching on related issues. She is the author of two books about her forebear: The Incredible Story of Ephraim Nute (Skinner House, 2011) and Liberty’s Curse: [Ephraim Nute] . . . In His Own Words (2020), as well as works of fiction.
Articles: Ephraim Nute
Guest, Avery “Pete”
Avery “Pete” Guest is a retired professor of sociology, University of Washington, with primary expertise in demographic/population studies, especially with a community focus. For many years, he has been interested in the 19th-century history of the Universalists. Before retirement, he published a few research papers on the sociology of religion. Recently he has presented several papers on Universalist demographics at Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Convocations and at Association for Liberal Religious Studies (UU Collegium) conferences.
Articles: Lon Ray Call, Arthur W. Foote II, Stephen Rensselaer Smith
Haberly, David
David T. Haberly is Professor Emeritus of Portuguese at the University of Virginia. He holds an AB, MA, and PhD from Harvard University. He is a specialist on Brazilian literature and culture, but also has wide-ranging comparative interests in the nineteenth-century literatures of Latin America, the United States, and Spain. His publications on Brazilian literature include Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1983); editorial work, introduction, and two chapters for the third volume of the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and editing Quincas Borba, a novel by Machado de Assis (Oxford University Press, 1999). He has also written articles on a number of North American writers, including Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Caroline Howard Gilman.
Articles: Caroline Howard Gilman, Samuel Gilman
Harris, Mark
Mark W. Harris is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister living in Owls Head, ME. He is minister emeritus at the First Parish of Watertown, MA, where he served for more than twenty years, part of that time as co-pastor with his wife Andrea Greenwood. He also served churches in Palmer and Milton, MA, and was Director of Information for the UUA. He has written a number of books on UU History including the Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism (2nd edition 2018) , Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History (2011), and co-authored An Introduction to the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions with Andrea Greenwood (2011). Harris has taught at a number of seminaries as an adjunct including: Starr King School for the Ministry, Andover Newton Theological School, Harvard Divinity School, and most recently, Boston University.
Articles: Nathaniel Stacy
Henry, Richard
A native New Englander, Richard Henry received degrees from Harvard University, Union Theological Seminary, and Meadville/Lombard Theological School. He served churches in Brooklyn, New York (where he was assistant to John Howland Lathrop); Knoxville, Tennessee; Denver, Colorado (a pastorate lasting twenty years); and Salt Lake City, Utah, retiring from there as minister emeritus in 1986. He was a member of the first Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (1961-64); served on the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) Executive Committee; and served several terms on the Board of Directors of the Unitarian Service Committee. He also was a board member of the Colorado and Utah Planned Parenthood affiliates and of the Colorado A.C.L.U.
Richard Henry is married to a former math professor, Patricia. He had two sons, Evan (in Bangor, Maine) and Seth (in Denver, Colorado), with his first wife, Helen.
Henry’s interest in Czechoslovakia began with his first visit there in 1948. Between 1989 and 1996 he returned to Prague six times to work in the Capek archive at the Unitarian church headquarters. His biography of Norbert Fabian Capek, published in 1999 by Skinner House Press, is the first full-length biography of that modern martyr. Henry died in August 2018 at the age of 97
Articles: Norbert Capek, Adlai Stevenson
Herring, Joseph
Joseph Herring is an historian and a senior program officer with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). A native Washingtonian and a United States Navy veteran, he has two degrees in history (BA 1977, MA 1981) from the University of Maryland. In 1986, he earned a Ph.D. in American History from Texas Christian University. Prior to joining the NEH staff in 1991, he taught history at Kansas Newman College in Wichita for three years and worked for two years as an archivist at the National Archives in Washington. Dr. Herring has written numerous historical articles about the American West and American Indians. His books are Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet and The Enduring Indians of Kansas. He has been a member of First Unitarian Universalist Church, Wichita, Kansas, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Goodloe Memorial Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Bowie, Maryland. He now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Articles: Arthur Buckminster Fuller
Herz, Walter
Walter P. Herz, a native of New Rochelle, N.Y., received his A.B. from Harvard following U. S. Navy service in World War II. He devoted his business career to marketing communications, working for leading medical product manufacturers and publishers. He specialized in professional relations and educational programming. Herz and his spouse, Betty, joined the First Unitarian Church of Plainfield, N.J. in 1958. First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, where they were members since 1989, is their fourth Unitarian Universalist congregation. Herz was active at district and continental levels of the Unitarian Universalist Association as well as having filled virtually every congregational responsibility at one time or another. He wrote on local Unitarian history for the Cincinnati Historical Society’s professional journal; he wrote and published a biography of his maternal grandfather; and he was the editor of Redeeming Time: Endowing Your Church With the Power of Covenant published by Skinner House in 1999, to which he also contributed two essays.
Update: Walter Philip Herz, of Cincinnati, Ohio, passed away on May 19, 2012. He was born on August 31, 1924.
Articles: Peter H. Clark, Sallie Ellis, Sarah Otis Ernst, Millard Fillmore, G. Peter Fleck, Alphonso Taft, William Howard Taft
Hewett, Phillip
Phillip Hewett was minister emeritus of the Unitarian Church of Vancouver. Born and raised in Dorchester, England, he served in the R.A.F. during World War II. He studied at Exeter College and Manchester College, Oxford University (B.A., 1949, M.A., 1951) and the Harvard Divinity School (S.T.M., 1953). He received the S.T.D. from the Starr King School for Ministry in 1969. In 1951 he married Margaret Smith of London, England. He served churches in Montreal, Quebec (1953-54); Ipswitch, England (1954-56); Vancouver, British Columbia (1956-91); and Victoria, British Columbia (1991-92). He also served for short terms congregations in St. Catharines, Ontario, Adelaide, South Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand.
Hewett wrote a number of books introducing Unitarianism, including An Unfettered Faith: the Religion of a Unitarian (1956), On Being a Unitarian (1968), and The Unitarian Way (1985). His principal historical work is Unitarians in Canada (1978, 2nd edition 1995). He was a contributor to the Canadian Encyclopedia and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He served as president of both the British and Canadian Unitarian Historical Societies and vice president of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. He also served three terms on the board of the Canadian Unitarian Council. He was a strong advocate for the environment, family planning, disarmament, and peace. Since 1952 Hewett was active in the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF). In 1983 the American chapter of IARF presented Phillip and Margaret Hewett a joint award for Outstanding Service to International Liberal Religion. In 1992 he was given the Unitarian Universalist Association annual award for distinguished service. He died in 2018 at the age of 93.
Articles: William Sullivan Barnes, Frances Power Cobbe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Cordner, Dorothy Livesay
Hill, Andrew
Andrew Hill was Minister of St. Mark’s Unitarian Church in Edinburgh, Scotland from 1974 to his retirement in 2006. For even longer, he was a leader in the (British) Unitarian Historical Society, with particular interests in British Universalism, the General Baptists, and international Unitarian and Universalist Connections. He edited Celebrating Life (1993), a manual for special services, and worked on a new British Unitarian hymnal. He now lives in York, England, where he is affiliated with the Unitarian Chapel at St. Saviorsgate, and edits their church newsletter.
Articles: William Adam, Thomas Aikenhead, Robert Burns, James Relly, William Vidler
Hoogenboom, Olive
Olive Hoogenboom, whose parents were Seventh-day Adventist missionaries, was born in Calcutta, India, in 1927, and raised in South Dakota and Texas. She went to school in the East, graduating from Atlantic Union College, where she met and married her husband, Ari, with whom she has written on historical subjects. Earning her master’s degree in English in 1955 from Columbia University, she lived, worked, and raised three children in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Brooklyn, New York, where she and her family moved in 1968. After publishing The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn: One Hundred Fifty Years in 1987, she was named church historian. She was both a writing fellow and an associate editor of American National Biography and was writing a biography of the four Woodbury sisters, who were politically connected in Washington from the 1840s to the early 1900s. She died in 2020 at 92.
Article: Augustus Graham, John Howland Lathrop, Charlotte Masaryk, Alfred White
Howard, Carol
Carol Howard is Professor of English and Associate Provost at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. She has been a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Asheville since 2006. She and her husband, Michael Matin, live in nearby Black Mountain, with their two daughters.
Carol writes on early British women’s literary biography, which was also the topic of her Ph. D. thesis in English at Columbia. She has co-edited two volumes in Scribners’ British Writers series, and she wrote the introduction and notes for the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. She has partnered with the Black Mountain Community Garden, which donates thousands of pounds of fresh produce annually to local food pantries. Her community engagement course, Gardens and the Literary Imagination, has led to her writing a monthly column, “The Literary Gardener,” in The Laurel of Asheville, a regional magazine on arts and culture.
Articles: Elizabeth Blackwell
Howe, Charles A.
Charles A. Howe, a native of Utica, New York, retired from the Unitarian Universalist parish ministry in 1989. He served congregations in Austin, Texas, 1966-70; Syracuse, New York (First Universalist), 1970-83; Charlottesville, Virginia (interim), 1983-84; New York City (Fourth Universalist, interim), 1984-85; Gainesville, Florida (interim), 1985-86; and Wilmington and Kinston, North Carolina, 1986-89. He has served the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) in a variety of capacities, including membership on the UUA Commission of Appraisal, 1989-95 (chair, 1992-94), and has taught courses in UU history and polity under the auspices of Meadville/Lombard Theological School, Wesley Theological Seminary, Duke Divinity School, and UU leadership schools. He is the author of The Larger Faith, 1993; For Faith and Freedom, 1997, and numerous journal articles, and is co-author and editor of Clarence R. Skinner: Prophet of a New Universalism, 1999 and editor of The Essential Clarence Skinner, 2004. In addition, he has edited two volumes of UUMA Selected Essays, 1987, 1988; and three volumes of the John Murray Distinguished Lectures, 1991, 1995, and 2004.
In 1947 Howe married Ann Elizabeth Clark, a science educator and author; they have three children: Judith, 1951; Marjorie, 1952; and David, 1956. A chemistry professor at Clarkson University before entering the ministry, Howe held three chemistry degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (AB, 1943; MA, 1949; PhD, 1951) in addition to two divinity degrees from Meadville/Lombard Theological School (BD, 1966; DD, 1995). He was active in anti-death penalty, family service, health planning, abortion rights, and civil liberties organizations. Howe was an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, NC, and an associate member of the Community Church of Chapel Hill, Unitarian Universalist.
Update: Charles Alfred Howe, theologian, advocate, scholar, and chemist, died peacefully on August 10, 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina. A memorial service celebrating the life of Charles Howe was held on Sunday, August 15th at at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Articles: John Quincy Adams, Bronson and Abigail Alcott, Isaac Morgan Atwood, John Murray Atwood, Hosea Ballou 2d, George Biandrata, Herman Bisbee, Orello Cone, Moncure Conway, George Willis Cooke, David Eaton, Ebenezer Fisher, John Godbey, Horace Greeley, The Humiliati, Lydia Ann Jenkins, Max A. Kapp, Mary and Daniel Livermore, Angus MacLean, Zoltan Nagy, Rudolph Nemser, Ellsworth C. Reamon, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson Sawyer, Clinton Lee Scott, Quillen Hamilton Shinn, Clarence Russell Skinner, John Van Schaick, Carl Seaburg, Dorothy Spoerl, St. Lawrence University, John Wood, Albert Ziegler
Hromatko, Wesley
Wesley V. Hromatko is an ordained and fellowshipped Unitarian Universalist minister and has served Unitarian and Universalist congregations in Illinois, Indiana, and Massachusetts. He also taught classes dealing with Alfred North Whitehead at the Seminary of the Community (affiliated with McCormick Seminary, Chicago) in Northwest Indiana.
He received a B.A. cum laude in history from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has a M.A. and Doctor of Ministry from Meadville/Lombard Theological School affiliated with the University of Chicago. His articles, book reviews and sermons have appeared in Unitarian Universalist Association publications. He is a member of Collegium.
Articles: Brooks Adams, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams, Sr., Henry Brooks Adams, John Adams, Marian Hooper “Clover” Adams, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, Edith Holden, Sylvia Plath, The Russell Family, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., N. C. Wyeth
Hughes, Lynn Gordon
Lynn Gordon Hughes has been a Unitarian Universalist since 1977. She has been a member of congregations in Montreal, Quebec; Stamford, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; Woonsocket, Rhode Island Milford, Massachusetts; and Toronto, Ontario. She has been married since 1973 to Unitarian Universalist minister and scholar Peter Hughes. They have two grown children. Lynn studied engineering at MIT and McGill University, and has held a variety of engineering and information technology positions. She is currently a business analyst for the University Health Network Research Institute in Toronto.
Side by side with her “day job,” Lynn has pursued a second career focusing on Unitarian Universalist history. She received her MA in history from Brown University in 2007. A focus of Lynn’s historical study has been the career of Adin Ballou and the utopian community he founded at Hopedale, Massachusetts. She has edited and published new editions of two of Ballou’s books, Practical Christian Socialism and Christian Non-Resistance, and written a children’s book, To Live a Truer Life, about the Hopedale community. In 2002, Lynn and Peter founded Blackstone Editions, a small press specializing in Unitarian, Universalist, Unitarian Universalist, and liberal Christian history. In addition to her work for Blackstone, she has worked on publication projects for LREDA, UUWHS, and UUHS. Since 2004 she has been part of a long-term project to translate and publish the works of Michael Servetus and other antitrinitarians of the Reformation era. In 2016 she published Becoming Brownson: The Early Life of Orestes A. Brownson. She serves as Assistant Editor of the Journal of Unitarian Universalist Studies.
Articles: Nathan Appleton, Thomas Appleton, Orestes Brownson, Richard Hildreth, Samuel Loveland, Olive Higgins Prouty, Dolphus Skinner, Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Hughes, Peter
A Canadian citizen, Peter Hughes lived for three decades in the United States. He is a graduate of M.I.T. (1973), the University of Chicago (1984), and Meadville/Lombard Theological School (1986). Before entering seminary Peter worked as a computer programmer at McGill University and elsewhere. Between 1986 and 1999 he was minister to the First Universalist Church of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He is retired from ministry because of post-polio syndrome. He now lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Hughes has written a number of articles on early Universalist history. He contributed “A Different Treatise on Atonement: The Theology of Paul Dean” and “Some Problems in the Chronology of Early American Universalism” to the Unitarian Universalist Christian (1994 and 2005). For the Proceedings of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society / Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, he has written Quackery in the Clergy, Medicine and Ministry in Conflict in 1848 (1995), two articles on the origin of Universalism in New England (1997 and 1999), two on the Restorationist controversy (2000 and 2001), and one on Michael Servetus (2005). He edited the revised edition of Roland Bainton, Hunted Heretic (2005). Hughes was the founding editor of the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist biography.
Articles: Abigail and Bronson Alcott, William Balch, Adin Ballou, Hosea Ballou 2d, The Ballou Family, George Biandrata, Bela Bartok, José María Blanco White, Adrian Cedric Boult, John Boyden, George Bradburn, Robert Burns, Maria Cook, Celio Secondo Curione, Caroline Dall, Charles Dall, The Davis Family, Paul Dean, Sallie Ellis, William Farwell, Arthur Foote, Jacob Frieze, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Gaskell, Eleanor Elizabeth Gordon, Matteo Gribaldi, Edvard and Nina Grieg, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Richard Lloyd Jones, Susan Charlotte Barber Lloyd Jones, Thomas Starr King, Abner Kneeland, Harriet Martineau, John Murray, David Pickering, Restorationist Controversy, Caleb Rich, Rammohun Roy, Edmund Hamilton Sears, Michael Servetus, Lelio Sozzini (Laelius Socinus), Adams Streeter, Edward Turner, Bernard Whitman, Albert Rhys Williams, Elhanan Winchester
Hunt, Rebecca
In 2020, Dr. Rebecca A. Hunt retired from UC Denver where she taught Colorado, Denver and immigration history as well as public history and museum studies. A native of Wyoming, she has been a Unitarian Universalist since 1980. Her current project is a biography of Wyoming painter and homesteader Neal Forsling. She discovered Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes when living in South Dakota and rediscovered her while working on Colorado suffrage history.
Articles: Elizra Tupper Wilkes
Johnston, Christine
Born in Malawi and educated in Scotland, Christine Johnson emigrated to Canada as a young adult, working as a teacher and later as a social worker and an adjunct professor in that field. She became a Unitarian in 1966, and filled a variety of roles at the First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, serving as President, full-time Religious Education Director, and Historian/Archivist, delivering several annual Workman Lectures. In 2000, she published Joseph Workman: The Father of Canadian Psychiatry (Ogden Press). She now lives in Victoria, BC, where she has been active in the First Unitarian Church.
Articles: Joseph Workman
Johnston, Karen
Now the Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, VT, Karen G. Johnston grew up in Oregon, where generations of her family farmed in the Hood River Valley. A graduate of Hamilton College (1989) and the Smith College School for Social Work (1995), she credits the seeds of her interest in the intersection between history, the dismantling of white supremacy, and Unitarian Universalist faith to the influence of her older brother, an academic historian, and Steve Strimer, a grassroots historian of the Underground Railroad and of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. She became a Unitarian Universalist in 1995 when she joined the Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence, MA. She graduated from the cooperative M.Div. program of Hartford Seminary and Andover Newton Theological School and was ordained in 2016. She previously served the Village Church in Cummington, MA, First Parish in Groton, MA, and the Unitarian Society of East Brunswick, NJ.
Articles: Joshua Young
Jones, Louis Worth
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1908, Worth attended Washington University in that city and served in the Farm Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture until 1946, then in the War Assets Commission, 1946-48, then as a management analyst with the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, NM, 1948-50, and finally with the U.S. Navy Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco, 1950-68. A founding member of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in San Mateo, he was also founder and executive director of the Intergroup Relations Association of Northern California, 1964-73, and published the Lou Jones Newsletter, 1959-70. He published dialogues concerning Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexender Meiklejohn, Servetus, free speech, and democracy. As a co-founder and trustee and trustee emeritus of The World University, he was listed in several editions of Who’s Who. He died in 2007.
Articles: Mary Wollstonecraft
Kass, Amalie M.
Amalie Moses Kass (1928-2019) was an American historian at Harvard Medical School who wrote about obstetrics and midwifery. Born in Baltimore, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1949 with high honors in history and received an M.Ed. from Boston University in 1963. After the death of her first husband, Malcolm (Mac) Hecht, Jr., with whom she had five children, and for whom the animal carousel for children on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston is named, she married Dr. Edward Kass, with whom she published a biography of English physician and pathologist Thomas Hodgkin, for whom a form of lymphoma known as Hodgkin’s Disease is named. Her book, Midwifery and Medicine in Boston: Walter Channing, M.D., 1786 – 1876, (Northeastern, 2002) appeared the same year she became President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Articles: Walter Channing
Kelley, Jim
Born and raised a Methodist, Jim Kelley graduated from Western Carolina University in 1969 with a degree in business. He served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. He spent the next four decades in marketing, primarily in the home furnishings industry. He wrote an online history of the congregation where he was a member, the UU Congregation of Atlanta.
Articles: Harold Hitz Burton, George Leonard Chaney
Kellaway, Richard
Born in 1934 in Newton, MA, Kellaway earned a B.A. in philosophy at Antioch College, an M.A. in the same field at Southern Illinois University with Henry Nelson Wieman, and his ministerial degree at Harvard Divinity. He served the First Unitarian Church of New Bedford (1960 – 1968), then the Fourth Universalist Society in New York City (1969-76), before directing U.S. programs for the UU Service Committee (1976-80), and serving the UU Church of Sarasota, FL (1981-96). He then returned to the New Bedford church (1986-99), where he became Minister Emeritus and was the founding president of the New Bedford Art Museum. After serving several UU congregations as interim minister, Kellaway completed a two-volume biography of William James Potter: From Convinced Quaker to Prophet of Free Religion (2014, 2015). He became an active member of First Parish in Dorchester, MA. He died in March, 2021.
Articles: Thomas Dawes Eliot, William James Potter, Samuel West
Keohane, John
John Keohane (pron. CO hayne) has been active in three UU churches: First Unitarian in Denver, where he was ministerial intern, First Unitarian church in Chicago, where he attended Sunday school in 5th and 6th grades, later leading an adult discussion group on politics, government, education and race; more recently, at the First Unitarian Universalist of Austin. The three biographies he has written are of people who were personal friends of his family.
Articles: Emily Taft Douglas, Paul H. Douglas, Maurice B. Visscher
Keyes, Clara
Clara Keyes, a Special Collections Librarian in Morehead, Kentucky, was the author of the biographical entry on Allie Young in the Kentucky Encyclopedia (1992). She contributed to the development of the Kentuckiana Digital Library, and was the bibliographer for Larkspur Press, a fine press in Kentucky. She was a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Harry Toulmin. She died in 2011.
Articles: Harry Toulmin
Klenin, Emily
Emily Klenin is a native of rural Pennsylvania, where she now lives. She attended Swarthmore College and Princeton University before starting to teach at Harvard University. Professor emerita at UCLA, her professional interests have focused on cultural and linguistic contact situations in the nineteenth century, including the use of George Sand’s French novels in Russian socialist literature, Russian translations of Goethe and Catullus, and the life experience of the Russian poet Afanasy Fet, whose family background was German and whose formal education was entirely in German up to university level.
She has more recently been studying the life and work of British writer Dylan Thomas, who had some command of Welsh and spent nearly his whole life in Wales, but whose work was written entirely in some of the most splendid English of the twentieth century. On a less scholarly note, she is enjoying learning about some of the varied cultural and religious experiences that have shaped American lives, in Pennsylvania and New England. She has been discovering Thoreau and, after a lifetime of determined non-belief and non-affiliation, has belatedly found the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster.
Articles: James Henry Ecob, William Thomas (Gwilym Marles), Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg)