The Universalist Japanese mission is one of those episodes in denominational history that perplexes those who might be interested in it. It flourished through the twenties, barely survived the War (I gather) but a single congregation of it — the Doojin Christian Church, Tokyo (no Web site) — remains today.
There’s little one can read […]
Today I received an unexpected parcel from Peggy Ward Rawheiser, a well-known figure in heritage Universalist circles: her new revision of the classic A History of Universalism in North Carolina. I’m quite pleased to receive it. (Thank you.)
At first I thought I would review it in full, but since it functions more like a sourcebook […]
Ah, Flickr, the photo sharing service has been drawing some significant image collections and I just saw some stereograph from postbellum Boston, from the collection of the Boston Library. Might I recommend the slideshow? (Go fast; the stereographs are sorted by topic so you’re bound to get a whole bunch of very similar images.)
The churches […]
Chris Walton (Philocrites) muses about technology and his earliest writings via Internet, specifically on the Usenet group, soc.religion.unitarian-univ.
Ah! I wrote there too, in those heady days of the mid- to late-1990s. I wonder if I was edgier then?
If you care to see what I wrote . . .
Here are archived copies of two (1, 2) […]
I’ve listed below the fold seven annual observances recommended by the Universalist General Convention; I’ve pulled this list from the 1907 Universalist Register. Why?
I’ll be writing about the use of a church year and lectionary
the subject of Association Sunday (October 14) is live in the [...]
Quillen Hamilton Shinn — “the grasshopper missionary” — got his reward a hundred years ago this Thursday. OK, that’s not so great for Universalism’s most conspicuous missionary, but if you think about it, the epithet is double-edged, too. (Think of the ant and the grasshopper.)
I would have missed it entirely had it not been for […]
I was reading a post at Looking for Faith where its author quotes John Murray’s much-cited passage from his first sermon in America. You know the one — it is even in the gray hymnal:
Go out into the highways and byways of America, your new country. Give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling […]
One of the things that annoys me the most about the popular retelling of the story of the Unitarians and the Universalists is how poor or lowly the Universalists were. But many Universalists did quite well financially. Neither the lie nor the fact is all that compelling; wealth alone isn’t a marker of good or […]
The first episode of the third season (new series) of Doctor Who — “Smith and Jones” — premieres on SciFi tonight and I’m watching it. Why blog? What’s the Universalist significance?
It is set at a hospital — called Royal Hope but obviously (OK, maybe; like I know London that well) intended to be a variation […]
James Relly might fairly be called the first Universalist of the modern era. A disciple of Whitfield and contemporary of the Wesleys, Relly left a now little-read corpus of work, including his provocative Union, where he identifies Jesus Christ as the captain of humanity to whom our sins are justly imputed. American readers of Union, […]
