President’s Message

Just as General Assembly and our Conrad Wright Lecture were conducted via Zoom this year, so too was the Annual Meeting of UUHHS. The result was the participation of far more members of the Society, a result so satisfactory that I suspect virtual annual meetings will become the norm.

We continue toward consolidation with Collegium, scholars of our faith tradition who are not only historians, but also from cultural and interreligious studies, theology and ethics. The new group is likely to be “The Society for Unitarian Universalist Studies.” or something close to that. Groups are currently drafting a mission statement and a compendium of proposed programs. Scholarly gatherings are likely to occur on a biennial basis. In August, the leaders of both groups took part in a joint study and discussion of Widening the Circle of Concern, the recent Report of the UUA Commission on Institutional Change. We agreed to bear in mind its insights about what is necessary to dismantle a culture of white supremacy as we plan the mission and governance of a new institution among us. A spirit of change is in the air, and we are committed to making the product of our shared efforts greater than the sum of its parts. We have set a timeline to work out details by spring 2021, in time for joint programming at the next General Assembly. 

We are in conversation with Meadville Lombard Theological School about the possibility of centering our financial administration and meeting planning at that institution. Dr. Elias Ortega, President of Meadville Lombard, has been encouraging, since our mission and purposes are clearly compatible. The School has long played a role in such matters for Collegium, and UUHHS readily admits that we need a base from which to continue to improve our systems for handling membership and financial matters. Already we are making some notable improvements. If you visit the UUHHS webpage to join or donate you will already find some, thanks to our member and leading IT volunteer, Jay Kiskel, of Atlanta, GA. Thanks, Jay! Another ambition is to put more discussions and resources online, and to make the Dictionary of UU Biography (duub.org) more complete, up-to-date, and user-friendly. We are eager to tackle areas of needed organizational work. 

We are also aware of areas of neglected scholarship. For example, recently I have been studying William Henry Channing, the far more radical nephew of the more famous Dr. William Ellery Channing. The younger man was a close friend of Margaret Fuller, a Christian socialist, an abolitionist, women’s rights advocate, the Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives during the Civil War, and successor to James Martineau in one of the leading Unitarian pulpits in England. We have a reading in our hymnal, #484, “My Symphony,” taken from a letter he wrote to Fuller. Yet only now are we about to include a brief bio of him in our Dictionary of UU Biography, thanks to the Rev. Dr. Barry Andrews. As its new editor, Rev. Connie Simon, will tell you, there are many significant biographies to assign, write, and post or revise. 

In his Memoir of William Henry Channing (1888), Channing’s friend O.B. Frothingham remarked that “Liberalism and socialism seem to go together. The Polish Unitarians of the seventeenth century were exceedingly radical.” Yet that is another strand of our history often overlooked since the great work of Earl Morse Wilbur, George Hunston Williams, and John Godbey. In that regard, we are pleased to announce that, thanks to a generous gift and bequest intention from Rev. Dr. Jay Atkinson, UUHHS has established a “Socinus Endowment Fund,” devoted to encouraging study of the history and contemporary relevance of the Polish Brethren. The first use of the gift will be for an essay contest in 2021. The Socinus Fund also intends to subsidize research and translation into English of the many Unitarian texts in neo-Latin that were read by people like John Locke and Grotius. 

Let me close by asking you this: What area of Unitarian Universalist studies do YOU consider a neglected area of scholarship? If you are not already on our list-serve, uuhhs-chat, please consider joining. Just go to UU Studies Form to join. Members active on the list are often very helpful. There may be works in print or online with which you are unfamiliar. Then again, who knows? Perhaps YOU will be inspired to do some research and writing in a neglected area and share your research with the group.  

Yours in shared scholarship

John A. Buehrens