Books on the topic 'All Souls Unitarian Church'

This chapter examines how the congregation of All Souls Unitarian Church in Chicago fulfilled Fannie Barrier Williams' progressive vision of an intellectually stimulating, racially broad-minded, and integrated community. It begins with a background on All Souls Unitarian Church, led by minister Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and proceeds by discussing Barrier Williams' attraction to Unitarianism due in part to the movement's inclusion of women. It then considers Barrier Williams' friendship with Unitarian minister, reformer, and activist Celia Parker Woolley as well as Prudence Crandall's influence on her religious ideology. It also describes Barrier Williams' participation in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and concludes with an assessment of the controversy surrounding her attempt to join the Chicago Woman's Club, a white women's group that did not want to accept black women as members. The chapter shows that Barrier Williams' ordeal with the Chicago Woman's Club is proof that living north of Jim Crow and virulent racism did not necessarily bring about equality or acceptance.

Generations of Reason recounts the story of three Cambridge-educated Englishmen and the women with whom they chose to share their commitment to reason in all parts of their lives. In the first generation, Theophilus and Hannah Lindsey founded the Unitarian Church in 1774. In the second, William Frend, with the support of his wife Sarah, lived a complicated life as a radical political thinker and writer through the Napoleonic era. In the third, Augustus De Morgan pursued mathematics and logic while his wife Sophia explored the world of spiritualism in early Victorian England. These couples were members of a non-traditional family formed when a man married the daughter or niece of the mentor, who had taught him the ways of reason. This dynamic supported a commitment to reason that profoundly shaped the lives of three generations of men, women and children. The reason this family embraced was an essentially human power with the potential to generate true insight into all aspects of the world. Recognizing the role reason played in their lives casts new light on key developments in English cultural and political history, from the religious conformism of the eighteenth century through the upheavals of the Napoleonic era into the industrial prosperity of the Victorian age. At the same time, it restores the rich world of the essentially meditative, rational sciences of theology, astronomy, mathematics, and logic to their proper place in the English intellectual landscape.

This chapter discusses the centrality of the invisible church for Bunyan and his readers. Called to lead the Bedford congregation in 1671, Bunyan was committed to defending and building the visible church, but its purpose was to nurture souls on the pilgrimage to heaven, the invisible church of glory whose members were known only by God. Doctrinal works on the theology of justification, polemical works on ‘things indifferent’ (such as baptism) or on essentials of faith, and pastoral works on the spiritual conditions of his readers, all attest to Bunyan’s single-minded focus on the invisible church in the 1670s. Religious toleration, like the visible church, was not a good in itself but a means to an end: the ‘desired countrey’ of union with God, the imagined community outside of time that made the present an interval of remembrance and anticipation.

During the period 1922–1967 the Catholic Church in Ireland opposed any notion of joint responsibility between laity and clergy for secondary school education. The State also permitted the Church to pursue its major interest in education in secondary schools. Unhindered, the Church thus was able to promote within the schools sets of practices aimed at ‘the salvation of souls’ and at the reproduction of a loyal middle class along with priests, brothers, and nuns to maintain and expand the institution. The State for its part supported that arrangement as the Church also acted on its behalf in aiming to produce a literate and numerate citizenry, in pursuing nation building and in ensuring the preparation of an adequate number of secondary school graduates to address the needs of the public service and the professions. All of that took place at a financial cost much lower than the provision of a totally State-funded system of schooling would have entailed.

Unitarianism and Presbyterian Dissent had a complex relationship in the nineteenth century. Neither English Unitarians nor their Presbyterian cousins grew much if at all in the nineteenth century, but elsewhere in the United Kingdom the picture was different. While Unitarians failed to prosper, Presbyterian Dissenting numbers held up in Wales and Ireland and increased in Scotland thanks to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. Unitarians were never sure whether they would benefit from demarcating themselves from Presbyterians as a denomination. Though they formed the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, its critics preferred to style themselves ‘English Presbyterians’ and Presbyterian identities could be just as confused. In later nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland, splinter Presbyterian churches eventually came together; in England, it took time before Presbyterians disentangled themselves from Scots to call themselves the Presbyterian Church of England. While Unitarians were tepid about foreign missions, preferring to seek allies in other confessions and religions rather than converts, Presbyterians eagerly spread their church structures in India and China and also felt called to convert Jews. Missions offered Presbyterian women a route to ministry which might otherwise have been denied them. Unitarians liked to think that what was distinctive in their theology was championship of a purified Bible, even though other Christians attacked them as a heterodox bunch of sceptics. Yet their openness to the German higher criticism of the New Testament caused them problems. Some Unitarians exposed to it, such as James Martineau, drifted into reverent scepticism about the historical Jesus, but they were checkmated by inveterate conservatives such as Robert Spears. Presbyterians saw their adherence to the Westminster Confession as a preservative against such disputes, yet the Confession was increasingly interpreted in ways that left latitude for higher criticism. Unitarians started the nineteenth century as radical subversives of a Trinitarian and Tory establishment and were also political leaders of Dissent. They forfeited that leadership over time, but also developed a sophisticated, interventionist attitude to the state, with leaders such as H.W. Crosskey and Joseph Chamberlain championing municipal socialism, while William Shaen and others were staunch defenders of women’s rights and advocates of female emancipation. Their covenanting roots meant that many Presbyterians were at best ‘quasi-Dissenters’, who were slower to embrace religious voluntaryism than many other evangelical Dissenters. Both Unitarians and Presbyterians anguished about how to reconcile industrial, urban capital with the gospel. Wealthy Unitarians from William Roscoe to Henry Tate invested heavily in art galleries and mechanics institutes for the people but were disappointed by the results. By the later nineteenth century they turned to more direct forms of social reform, such as domestic missions and temperance. Scottish Presbyterians also realized the importance of remoulding the urban fabric, with James Begg urging the need to tackle poor housing. Yet neither these initiatives nor the countervailing embrace of revivalism banished fears that Presbyterians were losing their grip on urban Britain. Only in Ireland, where Home Rule partially united the Protestant community in fears for its survival, did divisions of space and class seem a less pressing concern.