Born and raised a Methodist, Bob converted to the Episcopal Church as a young man. By the time he was in his early 30s, Bob’s humanistic and agnostic religious leanings led to membership in the Unitarian Society of Hartford, part of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He is now an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Unitarians were a small, liberal religious body that evolved in America largely from the affluent and well-educated Congregational churches of late eighteenth-century Boston. They rejected the Calvinistic notion that God predestined certain people for eternal life and damned the rest, as well as the orthodox Christian belief in a tri-partite deity. The early Universalists were an equally small Christian denomination comprised of mostly non-affluent uneducated people, that preached a belief in universal salvation.
Due in part to the influence of Transcendentalism during the middle of the nineteenth century, the American Unitarian Association gradually lost most of its ties to orthodox Christianity, while the Universalist Church in America over time shed its image as a liberal church for poorly educated farmers and laborers. By the middle of the twentieth century, both churches were struggling to maintain membership - and realized they had much more in common than previously acknowledged. In 1961, they merged to form the Unitarian Universalist Association, with approximately 200,000 members nationwide.
Bob’s interest in the history of Unitarianism was piqued while he was belatedly earning a B.A. in History at Hartford’s Trinity College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His senior honors thesis, “One God in One Person Only”: Unitarianism Challenges the Connecticut Standing Order, 1800-1820, which he researched largely at the Harvard Divinity School, won the College’s 1991 D. G. Brinton Thompson Prize in United States History. Drawing from his thesis, in 1992, Bob delivered a paper, “The Unitarian Challenge to the Standing Order in Mansfield, Connecticut, 1801-05,” before the Association for the Study of Connecticut History on the case of the Rev. John Sherman, the first Congregational minister in the state to be dismissed by a Congregational Church body because of his Unitarian sentiments.
While earning his M.S. in Library Science at Simmons College in Boston, Bob authored “Nascent Unitarianism in New England, 1730-1830: A Literature Guide” (1992).
In 1994, Bob collaborated with Professor Freeman Myers in assembling and editing Hartford Unitarianism, 1844-1994, a sesquicentennial history of the Unitarian Society of Hartford. Bob’s Victor Lundy's Unitarian Meeting House, Hartford, Connecticut, which originated in 1995 as a graduate research paper while he earned his M.A. in American Studies at Trinity College, is online at http://www.ushartford.com/Lundy1.html.
A transcript of his August 25, 2002, lecture at the Unitarian Society of Hartford, “The Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston”: The Beginnings of American Unitarianism, is online at http://www.ushartford.com
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fatherhoodofman.html.
Bob’s keynote address at the dedication of the new Fairhope Unitarian Fellowship sanctuary in Alabama on October 5, 2003, Thomas Jefferson And Other Suspects: A Slightly Irreverent History of American Unitarianism, was well received despite his “heretical” assertion that Jefferson was a Unitarian only in spirit -not in fact.
Bob authored a chapter on Unitarian Universalism in Understanding Your Neighbor’s Faith: What Christians and Jews Should Know about Each Other in 2004. Compiled and edited by Rabbi Philip Lazowski,
the book was issued by the KTAV Publishing House.
Bob’s March 8, 2005, talk at the Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Durham, North Carolina, on “Pioneering Universalist & Unitarian Clergywomen” was based on his 1993 Trinity College research paper, Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Unitarian and Universalist Clergywomen: A Bibliographic Essay.
On September 9, 2007, Bob delivered a talk at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh on Unitarian Transcendentalist ministers.
Other papers Bob has written on religious topics include:
- “Archbishop Laud and the Battle for Anglican Uniformity” (1990)
- “Calvin’s Genevan Theocracy and its Influence on American Constitutional Theory” (1989)
- “Elizabethan Presbyterianism: The Via Media of Thomas Cartwright” (1990)
- “The Holy Fathers of Hell: The Popes of Dante’s Inferno,” in The Trinity Papers 8 (1989).
- “The Latitudinarianism of Samuel Clarke” (1990)
- “Major Religious Influences on the Development of Early New England Puritanism” (1990)
- “Medieval Christian Intolerance of Dissenters: Homosexuals, Jews and Cathars” (1989)
- Published Sermons in the Noah Webster Pamphlet Collection, Hartford Public Library: A Finding Aid (1994)
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