Jesse Babcock Ferguson (January 19, 1819-September 3, 1870), a renowned orator and minister in the Antebellum South, converted to universalist and unitarian beliefs. His conversion created turmoil in his own large Nashville church and throughout the region.
Angus de Mille Cameron (June 9, 1913-November 23, 1996) was one of a small group of Canadian ministers whose introduction into Canada in the 1940s of the topics and issues promoted in the United States under the rubric of Unitarian Advance, began a period of revitalization for the Canadian Unitarian churches.
John Cordner (July 3, 1816-June 22, 1894) was unquestionably the most influential figure in setting the tone for the emerging Unitarian movement in nineteenth-century Canada. Not only was he skilled at presenting his views effectively, but during his 35-year ministry in Montreal, then the leading city in Canada by a wide margin, he attracted a congregation largely composed of persons prominent in the business and professional life of the city and country.
Ephraim Peabody (March 22, 1807-November 28, 1856), an early Unitarian missionary to the (then) western United States and later a prominent and beloved minister of King’s Chapel in Boston, was widely recognized as an insightful and inspiring preacher. His theology of character was a central concept for antebellum Unitarian moralists.
Henry Solly (November 13, 1813-February 27, 1903), British Unitarian minister and social reformer, was one of the most remarkable social innovators of his time. He was the instigator and founder of three important social organisations in Britain—Working Men’s Clubs, the Charity Organisation Society and the Garden City movement—that had a significant influence on the provision made for the working classes in late Victorian Britain.
Béla Bartók (March 25, 1881-September 26, 1945), the greatest Hungarian composer, was one of the most significant musicians of the twentieth century. He shared with his friend Zoltán Kodály, another leading Hungarian composer, a passion for ethnomusicology. His music was invigorated by the themes, modes, and rhythmic patterns of the Hungarian and other folk music traditions he studied, which he synthesized with influences from his contemporaries into his own distinctive style.
Charles Francis Potter (October 28, 1885-October 4, 1962) was a Unitarian minister, theologian and author who changed, over half a century, from an evangelical Baptist to a radical Humanist. Such a transformation reflects remarkable openness to new ideas, flexibility of personality, and capacity for intellectual and theological growth.
Angus Hector MacLean (May 9, 1892-November 11, 1969), Universalist minister, theological school professor and dean, played a major part in reshaping the philosophy and practice of religious education within the Universalist and Unitarian denominations during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson (February 5, 1900-July 14, 1965), politician and diplomat, was twice the Democratic Party’s candidate for President of the United States. He brought a freshness, a depth, passion, wit and vision to American politics and to international diplomatic discourse, that illumined an era.
Ezra Ripley (May 1, 1751-September 21, 1841) served as minister of the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts for almost 63 years. Although not himself an intellectual, Ripley possessed extraordinary personal and spiritual authority. He, more than any other, created the religious and moral climate of this small town which nurtured far more than its share of the writers, artists, and political figures—whose names are synonymous with the flowering of the American Renaissance.
Horace Mann (May 4, 1796-August 2, 1859), was an educator and a statesman who greatly advanced the cause of universal, free, non-sectarian public schools. Mann also advocated temperance, abolition, hospitals for the mentally ill, and women’s rights. His preferred cause was education, about which he remarked that while “other reforms are remedial; education is preventative.”
James Luther Adams (November 12, 1901-July 26, 1994) was a Unitarian parish minister, social activist, journal editor, distinguished scholar, translator and editor of major German theologians, prolific author, and divinity school professor for more than forty years. Adams decisively shaped the minds of hundreds of students in preparation for the liberal ministry, and other scholarly professions as well.