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. Most recently, he has been on the faculty of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California.
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. 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 senior at Reed College, Thom Belote devoted an entire year to the study of Thomas Jefferson and religion, writing a thesis entitled “(Dis)establishing Religion: Thomas Jefferson and the (Dis)course of Religious Freedom.”
Thom was raised a Unitarian Universalist in the suburban Boston town of Wayland. He then switched coasts and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon where he majored in the study of religion. Thom rejoiced in Reed’s distinctive culture and in the natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest. Portland’s ceaseless rain gave Thom the incentive he needed to spend long hours in the library and for his efforts he was elected Phi Beta Kappa upon graduation. During his college tenure, Thom continued and strengthened his connection to Unitarian Universalism, attending Portland’s Wy’East congregation and becoming active in campus ministry and young adult programming.
Following college, Thom accepted a full-tuition scholarship to Harvard Divinity School, where he is currently working towards his Masters of Divinity degree and pursuing his calling to the professional ministry. Thom is an avid ultimate frisbee player, a juggler, and his favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut. When in Cambridge, look for Thom at Christine’s IceCream in Inman Square or at the Harvard Law School library because, as he advises, “It is a lot more comfortable than the Divinity School library.”
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 has 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 is a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She is a Methodist.
Articles: May Sarton
Bohanan, Adam
Adam S. Bohanan is a librarian and amateur bookbinder. Formerly Assistant Librarian at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, he now specializes in archives and special collections at the Kennebunk Free Library in Kennebunk, Maine. He has studied at Vanderbilt University (B.A.), Chicago Theological Seminary (M.A.), and Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science (M.L.I.S.). Originally from Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he now lives in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
Articles: Henry Noble Couden
Buescher, John
John Buescher obtained his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, doing comparative study of Buddhism and Christianity. He has served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and as Program Officer for the Division of Education Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently he is Chief of the Tibetan Broadcast Service of the Voice of America in Washington, D.C. He is preparing a book which is a joint biography of nineteenth-century Universalist ministers and reformers Charles and John Murray Spear, a subject in which he became interested while researching the roots of the modern New Age religious movement. His other research publications are in the field of Tibetan Studies.
The website of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP) provides an extensive library of searachable and downloadable Spiritualist and occult periodicals published between the Congress of Vienna and the start of the Second World War.
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. A bout with breast cancer made early retirement necessary in 1998. In recent years Beverly has preached occasionally, in tandem with David, and has served as occasional adjunct professor at Meadville/Lombard Theological School.
The Bumbaughs were married in 1956. They have 4 children: Mark, 1961; Geoffrey, 1965; Stephen, 1966; and Julia, 1967.
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. Since August 2002 he has served as the Minister of St. John’s Unitarian Universalist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, a congregation founded in 1814 by German immigrants, which affiliated with the Unitarians in 1924.
Articles: Samuel Barrett, Henry Trevett Channing, William Ellery Channing, Ephraim Peabody, Unitarian Controversy
Cassara, Ernest
Ernest Cassara is Professor Emeritus of History at George Mason University, the state university in Northern Virginia, and former chair of the Department of History. He studied at Tufts University, Boston University, and the University of Cambridge. While teaching at Tufts, he was Curator of the Library and Archives of the Universalist Historical Society. He has also been a dean at Goddard College, interim director at Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, and Fulbright Professor at the University of Munich.
Cassara’s works include The Enlightenment in America (1975), History of the United States of America: A Guide to Information Sources (1977), Universalism in America: A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith (1971, revised 1997), Hosea Ballou: The Challenge to Orthodoxy (1961, reprinted 1982, 3rd edition 2003), and an introduction to the latest edition of Hosea Ballou’s A Treatise on Atonement (1986). He has written articles for a number of encyclopedias and journals. His latest work is a new edition of Carl Schurz’s Abraham Lincoln (1999), including a biographical study of the author. He has also written two mystery novels featuring Hosea Ballou as a detective: Murder on Beacon Hill (1995) and Murder on Boston Common (1998).
Update: Ernest died on April 10, 2015 according to an obituary in the April 17, 2015 edition The Boston Globe. A memorial service is scheduled on May 30th, at 3 pm at the First Parish, 3 Church St., Cambridge, MA 02138.
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”
Jacqueline “Jackie” Clement was born northern New Jersey where she spent the first 18 years of her life. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Jackie moved to Massachusetts where she worked in the high tech industry for 20 years. She held positions as design engineer, customer support specialist and marketing manager before moving out on her own as an independent marketing consultant. Jackie is currently a candidate for the Unitarian Universalist ministry studying at Andover Newton Theological School. Jackie, husband John Ford, and two unruly cats live in a Harvard, Massachusetts apple orchard.
Articles: Harriot Stanton Blatch
Coeyman, Barbara
Barbara Coeyman was ordained to Unitarian Universalist ministry in 2005 in Austin, Texas. She has served a variety of parish and community ministries in central Texas, and most recently has been an interim minister in New England and Long Island, New York. Prior to ministry, she was a faculty member in music history at West Virginia University, where her research included French Baroque opera, women’s studies in music, and early music performance. Currently she sits on the boards of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society and the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Heritage Society. In the Doctor of Ministry program at Meadville Lombard school, she is pursuing research on nineteenth-century women Universalist ministers.
Articles: Mary Billings
Curtiss, Elizabeth
The Reverend Elizabeth Curtiss has been Director of Religious Education for the First Congregational Society (First Church, Unitarian Universalist) in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts since August 1999. Her previous positions include parish minister and Asian Affairs analyst for the Library of Congress. She studied Unitarian Universalist history at Harvard Divinity School with C. Conrad Wright, George Huntston Williams, William Hutchison and David D. Hall. She also holds the Master of International Affairs Degree from Columbia University. Rev. Curtiss served as Vice President of the Unitarian Universalist 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.
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).
Articles: Hendrik Willem van Loon
Dau, Karen
Karen Dau has been involved for some 35 years in the research and preservation of Universalist history related to New York State. For many years she has been historian of her congregation, First Universalist Church of Rochester, NY and Archivist of the New York State Convention of Universalists.
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.
Articles: Noah Worcester
DeRoche, Celeste
Celeste DeRoche first encountered Unitarian Universalism at the Ellsworth Unitarian Universalist Church in Ellsworth, Maine. She now lives in Los Angeles, California where she is a member of Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church in Canoga Park. She has been the Youth Group advisor since becoming a member at Emerson in 1996. This year she taught for the first time in the Coming of Age program.
Celeste recently finished her Ph.D. in United States History. Her degree, from the University of Maine, specialized in the history of immigrant woman. She now plans to turn her research focus to a history of how Unitarian Universalism came to the Pacific Coast.
Celeste lives in West Hills, California with her life partner of sixteen years, Gail Geisenhainer, the minister of Emerson UU Church.
Articles: Thomas Starr King, Mary Augusta Safford, Caroline Severance
Doerr, Edd
Edd Doerr was president of the American Humanist Association from 1995 to 2003, serving previously as vice-president and board chair under Isaac Asimov from 1985 to 1991. He has been executive director and then president of Americans for Religious Liberty since 1982.
A former teacher of history and Spanish, he is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of twenty books, mostly on religious liberty and reproductive rights but also including five books of poetry and fiction and Timely and Timeless: The Wisdom of E. Burdette Backus. He joined Burdette Backus’s All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis in 1951, is currently a member of River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, and has been a frequent delegate to Unitarian Universalist Association General Assemblies. An accomplished speaker, he has preached in over a hundred Unitarian Universalist churches in thirty states. He has served on the governing body of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice since 1973 and on the boards of NARAL, the ACLU of Maryland, and the National Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty. More than 3,000 of his articles, columns, reviews, and letters have been published in The Humanist and many other publications.
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.
Articles: Peter Gonesius
Eddis, Charles
Charles Eddis, the leading founder of the Canadian Unitarian Council, was its first chairman, executive secretary, and president. He was educated at the University of Toronto (B.Comm., 1948) and at Harvard Divinity School (S.T.B., 1952). He received a D.D. from Meadville/Lombard Theological School in 1979. He served churches in Edmonton, Alberta (1953-58); Pointe Claire, Quebec (1958-66); Evanston, Illinois (1966-77); and Montreal, Quebec (1977-93). He is now minister emeritus of the Montreal congregation. His historical writing includes Stephen Fritchman: The American Unitarians and Communism (2011), The Story of a Sacred Space: from Creation to Ruins: an Account of the Creation and Destruction of the Sanctuary of the Unitarian Church of Montreal (1992) and several chapters contributed to Edgar Andrew’s Montreal’s Unitarians, 1832-2000 (2001).
Articles: Angus Cameron, Stephen Hole Fritchman, William Phillip Jenkins, Leonard Mason
Edwards, Judy Rosella
Judy Rosella Edwards is a central Illinois photojournalist with a graduate degree from Indiana University. She is the owner of EcoLitGy Communications, a new media company. She has written for the Bloomington Pantagraph, the Pekin Times, and other newspapers. She is the editor of The Shelby County Independent Index – Mar. 23, 1876, through Oct. 6, 1876, Lake Shelbyville: A River DOES Run Through It, and Dora Etta Wade Diaries: 1931 to 1937. She volunteers as host to the Shelby County section of the Illinois Trails project. Her ancestors were among the first European settlers in Shelby County. Most recently, she founded the Jasper Douthit Project.
She and her husband, Jeff Imig, live in Mackinaw, Illinois, with their four cats. They are members of the Universalist Unitarian Church of Peoria, in Peoria, Illinois.
Articles: Ada Kepley
Edwards, June
June Edwards is 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. She is currently at work on a book on Supreme Court decisions regarding religion and public schools and another on biographies of eight sets of sisters who became well known for their contributions to society in a variety of fields.
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.
All this attention is a testament to the significance of Margaret Brackenbury Crook. Little could Rev. Elferdink ever have imagined that Crook would still be coming back into her life two decades later! Hopes that Margaret Crook’s groundbreaking efforts would gain the recognition they deserves seem to be coming true. Crook’s visionary theology has “given her legs.”
Claudia Elferdink and her husband, John Egnal, live in both New Haven, Connecticut and Silver City, New Mexico close to their two children, Martha and Stuart and three granddaughters. Rev. Elferdink continues to volunteer for the Transylvanian Unitarian Archives in Kolozsvar, thanks to digitized documents. She is also actively connected with UU clergy on both coasts, maintains a lively ministerial identity, and still imagines what she will do in retirement!
Articles: Margaret Brackenbury Crook
Evens, Mark
Mark Evens will receive his Masters of Divinity degree from Starr King School for the Ministry in May 2005 after completing an eleven month internship at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas. He plans to pursue a vocation in parish ministry. Mark includes among his current interests tithing and generosity, policy governance, embodiment and metaphor in theology, and the revitalization of the liberal religious voice in the public square. His abiding commitments are to racial and economic justice, humane living, and the continued survival of higher life forms on planet Earth.
Born in Kansas, Mark grew up marginally Catholic on the margins of Detroit. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Biology with honors from Brown University, then lived 18 years in Northern California working as a technical writer. Since 1989 he has been an active member of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland. For recreation and spirit renewal, he enjoys a variety of self-propelled locomotory behaviors including running, swimming, and biking. He most frequently encounters the Divine in wild nature, conversations that matter, music, playing with children of all ages, and well-crafted worship. He aspires to settle down with an as yet to be identified partner and raise children.
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
Mark Ferguson is a psychotherapist currently living in Portland, Oregon. He grew up in Ohio and was raised within the Brethren/Anabaptist tradition. His family home was shared by a veritable zoo, with dogs a constant favorite. Mark received a B.A. (1998)-with an emphasis on Theology and Religious Studies-from De Paul University in Chicago, Illinois. He received the M.S.W. (2001) at Loyola University in Chicago. He has worked as both a crisis counselor and in grief and bereavement. Combining his profession with his love for animals, Mark has also been recorded as a pet loss and bereavement counselor. Mark is currently employed as a counselor for a non-profit organization serving persons facing end of life decision-making. Mark was a member of the Second Unitarian Church of Chicago. He is now a member of the Church of the Larger Fellowship and is part of the Church’s prison ministry. He is also a member of Unitarian Universalists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Mark lives with his life companion and four dogs. His interests include writing, gardening, music, and environmental/ecological issues.
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 , Jr., teaches history at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. He has been a member of the Unitarian Church of Norfolk (Unitarian Universalist) since 1958. He has published A Year With Our Liberal Heritage (1984) and several articles on Unitarian Universalist history. He has organized two denomination-wide conferences and several programs on African American Universalist history.
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 twenty years. He has written several Unitarian Universalist histories including a life of the Texas Unitarian pioneer Edwin M. Wheelock, The Magnificent Carpetbagger.
Articles: Linus Pauling, e. e. cummings, Robert Millikan, Edwin Wheelock
Fredette, Marc
A native New Englander, Marc Fredette is currently preparing for ministry at Harvard Divinity School. His is a graduate of Humboldt State University in northern California (1987) and holds a BA in Social Science and French Literature. Between 1988 and 2001, Marc worked as a computer programmer and training consultant for a startup software company in southern New Hampshire, traveling extensively in that capacity. Marc is a member of the South Church Unitarian Universalist community in Portsmouth, NH. Marc hopes to continue to research and write Unitarian Universalist biographies as time and resources permit.
Articles: William Laurence Sullivan
Giannino, Joanne
Joanne Giannino is a Unitarian Universalist minister. She has served congregations in Illinois, Arizona and Massachusetts. Joanne wrote the biography of Viola Liuzzo while she was studying for the ministry at Andover-Newton Theological School.
Before becoming a religious professional, Joanne had a career as an expressive arts therapist at a community mental health center, served as adjunct faculty at Lesley College Graduate School, and served as managing editor for a chain of weekly newspapers.
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 has served on the UU Historical Society Board and the UU Women’s Heritage Society. She has been an active member of the Arlington Street Church, Boston, since 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. Most recently 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.”
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 is currently researching 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.
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 is Assistant Professor of History at Meadville Lombard Theological School. He received his A.B. from Williams College (1983) and his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University (1993). His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Alan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians, the DeLancey K. Jay Prize from Harvard, and the Samuel K. Gross Prize from the Harvard History Department. He has been editor since 1995 of the Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, and is the author of American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (2002).
Articles: Theodore Parker
Grohsmeyer, Janeen Kelley
Janeen Kelley Grohsmeyer joined the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Southern Maryland in 1996. She has served on the Board of Trustees and on the Worship and the RE committees, taught Preschool and Elementary Religious Education classes, been the Coordinator of the Religious Education Program, created services (Winter Solstice, Women’s History, Sacredness of the Body, and Spring Sunrise), told stories during the Children’s Moment, and sung in the choir.
Grohsmeyer earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the United States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, then worked in computer design and a radar/microwave teaching laboratory. She is the mother of two children and was a breastfeeding counselor with La Leche League for five years. Currently, she manages the website for her local League of Women Voters, plays and composes for the lever harp, and is pursuing a career as a writer and storyteller.
Her book, A Lamp in Every Corner: a Unitarian Universalist Storybook, will be published by Lifespan Faith Development of the Unitarian Universalist Association in 2004.
Articles: Frances Harper
Groth, Bobbie
Rev. Dr. Bobbie Groth was born in New York State, raised in New Jersey, migrated to the Midwest for college, and never left. She is a Unitarian Universalist community minister, serving the needs of victims of domestic violence and their families in the clinical setting, shelters, hospitals and correctional institutions. She provides pastoral counseling, risk reduction education, substance abuse and violence recovery counseling, and writes curricula and articles addressing those issues. She holds a BA in Fine Arts/Psychology from Shimer College, an MS in Early Childhood Education/Administration from National Lewis University, and a D.Min. from Meadville/Lombard Theological School. Her dissertation discusses the role of the Church in maintaining a culture of domestic rape and violence. She has lived in the Milwaukee area since 1991, and is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Alverno College. She serves as Treasurer on the Executive Committee of the Cabinet of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, and is on the board of Cathedral Center, a shelter for homeless women and their children. She provides ritual officiation and pulpit supply to many Unitarian Universalist congregations in Wisconsin and consults in domestic violence and sexual assault related issues. She spends her free time playing the fiddle in a traditional Celtic music band, which, as a non-profit organization, donates its profits to worthy social causes.
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 Religius Studies (UU Collegium) conferences.
Articles: Lon Ray Call, Arthur W. Foote II, Stephen Rensselaer Smith
Haberly, David
David T. Haberly is Professor 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, a native of New Salem, Massachusetts was born on September 26, 1951. He graduated from Bates College in 1973, the University of New Hampshire (M.A., 1975) and the Starr King School for the Ministry (M.Div., 1978). Harris served Underbank Chapel and Unity Church in Sheffield England in 1978, and then was called to St. Paul’s Universalist Church in Palmer, MA in 1979, where he was ordained in April of that year. From 1985-89 he was the Director of Information for the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), and then was called to the First Parish in Milton, MA, where he remained until 1996. That fall he began a co-ministry with his wife Andrea Greenwood at the First Parish of Watertown, MA, but after two years Harris was called to be the sole pastor. He is the father of four sons: Joel, Levi, Dana and Asher. He has written numerous UUA pamphlets, including Unitarian Universalist Origins. He has written a history of New Salem, MA: Among the Dry Bones, coedited Celebrating Easter and Spring (2000), is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism (2004), and has most recently written “Hosea Ballou’s Treatise at 200,” for the Unitarian Universalist Christian (2005).
Articles: Nathaniel Stacy
Henry, Richard
A native New Englander, Richard Henry has 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 has 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.
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.
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 have been members since 1989, is their fourth Unitarian Universalist congregation. Herz has been 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 has written on local Unitarian history for the Cincinnati Historical Society’s professional journal; he has written 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 is 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 has also served for short terms congregations in St. Catharines, Ontario, Adelaide, South Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand.
Hewett has written 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 is a contributor to the Canadian Encyclopedia and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He has been president of both the British and Canadian Unitarian Historical Societies and vice president of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. He has also served three terms on the board of the Canadian Unitarian Council. He is a strong advocate for the environment, family planning, disarmament, and peace. Since 1952 Hewett has been 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.
Articles: William Sullivan Barnes, Frances Power Cobbe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Cordner, Dorothy Livesay
Hill, Andrew
Andrew Hill has been Unitarian minister in Edinburgh, Scotland since 1974. For even longer he had been secretary of the (British) Unitarian Historical Society and is currently (2000) its President. His specific interests in Unitarian history are British Universalism, the Unitarian General Baptists and international Unitarian and Universalist connections. He edited Celebrating Life (1993), the current British Unitarian manual of special services, and is a member of the working group considering the next British Unitarian ‘hymn book’. He is married with three adult children.
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 is currently writing a biography of the four Woodbury sisters, who were politically connected in Washington from the 1840s to the early 1900s.
Article: Augustus Graham, John Howland Lathrop, Charlotte Masaryk, Alfred White
Howard, Carol
Carol Howard is Dean of the Faculty 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 recently 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 holds 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 has been active in anti-death penalty, family service, health planning, abortion rights, and civil liberties organizations. Presently residing with his wife in Raleigh, North Carolina, Howe is an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh 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. His late wife Marilyn had a B.A. in English from Northern Illinois University and an M.A. from Kent State University. During the student disturbances at Kent in 1970 she was a resident dormitory assistant. She did what she could to calm the situation.
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.
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 is editor emeritus 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
Rebecca Hunt teaches history at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center where she specializes in United States, western America, immigration and ethnicity, and gender history. 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 she lived in South Dakota and rediscovered her when working on Colorado suffrage history.
Articles: Elizra Tupper Wilkes
Johnston, Christine
Christine Johnston was born in the African country of Malawi, Christine Johnston received most of her formal education in Scotland. After emigrating to Canada she worked first as a teacher, then as a social worker, earning in 1989 the title of Adjunct Practice Professor from the University of Toronto Faculty of Social Work.
Johnston became a Unitarian in 1966. She filled a variety of roles at First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, including President, full-time Religious Education Director, and Historian/Archivist. As church historian she gave numerous presentations at the Annual Workman Lectures, the basis for her recent biography of Joseph Workman. Presently she lives in Victoria, B.C., where she is the Vice-President of the First Victoria Unitarian Church. She is married with two children.
Articles: Joseph Workman
Johnston, Karen
Reverend Karen G. Johnston is a Unitarian Universalist minister who has served First Parish Church of Groton and The Unitarian Society, a Unitarian Universalist Congregation in East Brunswick, NJ, as well as Village Church in Cummington, MA. Ordained in 2016, she is a graduate of the Cooperative Master of Divinity program between Hartford Seminary and Andover Newton Theological School. A Unitarian Universalist since 1995 when she joined the Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence in Northampton, Massachusetts, Karen grew up in Oregon, where generations of her family farmed in the Hood River Valley.
She holds a Master of Social Work degree from Smith College School for Social Work (1995) and a Bachelor of Arts from Hamilton College (1989). A published poet, she is also the adoptive mother of two now young adult children. Karen 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 to Steve Strimer, a grassroots historian of the Underground Railroad, the utopian Northampton Association of Education and Industry, and the Free Congregational Society of Florence.
Articles: Joshua Young
Jones, Louis Worth
Louis Worth Jones, a retired management analyst and journalist, was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1908. After attending Washington University at St. Louis, he was an administrative officer for the Farm Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture until 1946. Jones served as a management analyst for the War Assets Administration, 1946-48; the Atomic Energy Commission, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1948-50; and U.S. Navy Radiological Defense Laboratory, San Francisco, California, 1950-68. He edited and published the Lou Jones Newsletter, 1959-70, which dealt with the subject of intergroup relations. He was founder and executive director of the Intergroup Relations Association of Northern California, 1964-73.
Jones was co-founder of the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Mateo, California. He is the author of the question-and-answer scripts “Meet Mary Wollstonecraft” (1977), “Meet Alexander Meiklejohn” (1978), and “Servetus: Why Did He Die?” (1977). His lectures on free speech include “The Great Deception” (1987) and “So You Think We Have Democracy?” (1988). He is co-founder and Trustee Emeritus of The World University. He is written up in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, and International Who’s Who of Intellectuals (1981). He died in 2007.
Articles: Mary Wollstonecraft
Kass, Amalie M.
Amalie M. Kass, author of Midwifery and Medicine in Boston: Walter Channing M.D 1786-1876, is a Lecturer on the History of Medicine in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. With her late husband, Dr. Edward H. Kass, she coauthored Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Thomas Hodgkin, M.D. (1988). She has also written many journal articles and book chapters, primarily in the field of medical history. For several years, she was associate editor of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences and presently serves on the Advisory Editorial Board of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. She has been President of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2002.
Articles: Walter Channing
Kelley, Jim
After graduating from Western Carolina University in 1969 with a degree in business, Jim Kelley served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Following military service, he spent the next four decades in marketing, primarily in the home furnishings industry. As retirement approached, he decided to pursue his lifelong interest in history and is now working on a masters degree at Georgia State University.
Born and raised as a Methodist, he later found Unitarian-Universalism, and is an active and long term member of the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. He is currently working on a history of George Leonard Chaney, the first Unitarian minister in Atlanta.
Articles: Harold Hitz Burton, George Leonard Chaney
Kellaway, Richard
Richard A. Kellaway, the Minister Emeritus of the First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was born July 27, 1934 in Newton, Massachusetts. He was educated at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio (B.A. in philosophy), Southern University in Carbondale, Illinois (M.A. in philosophy), and Harvard Divinity School (S.T.B.). He served the New Bedford church, 1960-68; served the Fourth Universalist Society in New York City, 1969-76; was Associate Director for United States Programs of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee in Boston, 1976-80; was Program Director of the Human Economy Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1981; served the Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, Florida, 1981-86; and returned to serve the New Bedford church, 1986-99.
Kellaway is on the boards of the U.S. Chapter of the International Association for Religious Freedom, the Community Center for Non-violence, and Market Ministries in New Bedford. He has recently completed two terms as vice-president of Friends of Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and has served as trustee of the Swain School of Design in New Bedford. He is president of The Tryworks Collection, which consists of more than 2,000 pieces of international folk art and founding president of the New Bedford Art Museum in the old Massachusetts whaling port.
Among his publications are The Trying Out, a book of meditations and a study program, Connections: Religion as Relating. He is currently working on a biography of William J. Potter.
Articles: Thomas Dawes Eliot, William James Potter, Samuel West
Keohane, John
John Keohane (pron. CO hayne) is a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas, where he serves on five committees and chairs one.
He developed and taught twice at his church, a course in UU history which utilizes many of the online biographies from the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography. It also uses online links to www sites for the University of Chicago, UUA World, the online history of the U. S. Senate, and the Unitarian Fellowship of Paris, France.
John is active politically, and recently organized non-partisan forums on an obscure but important elective office, the State Board of Education. A result is that both Democrats and Republicans are fielding candidates for the State Board of Education, in the districts which include large parts of Austin. Four years ago, only one of these parties did so.
Articles: Emily Taft Douglas, Paul H. Douglas, Maurice B. Visscher
Keyes, Clara
Clara Keyes, a Special Collections Librarian in Morehead, Kentucky, is the author of the biographical entry on Allie Young in the Kentucky Encyclopedia (1992). She has contributed to the development of the Kentuckiana Digital Library, and is the bibliographer for Larkspur Press, a fine press in Kentucky. She is a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Harry Toulmin.
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)