Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Unitarian Fellowship of Saskatoon“

Abstract This article examines the evolution of Bellow’s proposal for a newly reformed Unitarian “catholic” church during the 1850s and 1860s. For Bellows in particular, political, cultural, and ecclesiastical matters collided in his efforts to transform a diffuse set of liberal Christian churches in fellowship into a denomination of national, even global, caliber. The creation of this “new catholic church” would, in turn, help to heal an ailing nation. There are two questions driving this narrative. First, how did Bellows arrive at the conclusion that Unitarianism was the future of Christendom, the more “Protestant-Protestantism,” or even more boldly, the “more Catholic-Catholicism?” Secondly, how did Bellows arrive at the conclusion that uniting Christendom under a “catholic” Unitarian banner could unite a fractured country? During the early 1860s, the language of nationalism and catholicity merged in Bellows’ organization of the National Convention.

This chapter explores Isaac Mayer Wise’s connections with the Free Religious Association. This was an organization founded in 1867. The leaders were a distinguished intellectual group from the National Conference of Unitarian Churches who could no longer accept the more traditional position of the national body. The Free Religious Association was avowedly of a non-Christian character — a standpoint that had become a matter of contention within the official Unitarian camp. The objects of the association were ‘to promote the interests of pure religion, to encourage the scientific study of theology, and to increase fellowship in the spirit’. In practice the association reflected the humanistic theism espoused by Octavius Brooks Frothingham.