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Conrad Wright

A leading historian of American Unitarianism, C. Conrad Wright has led a movement in the reinterpretation of Unitarian history that has both influenced American historians and literary scholars. He has stressed the indigenous origins of the American Unitarian movements, locating them in the Arminian theology of 18th-century New England. Those liberals who called themselves Arminians did so "not because they were directly influenced by Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), the Dutch Remonstrant, but because their reaction to Calvinism was similar to his," Wright wrote in his The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (1955).

Thus it was in the reaction to the Puritan Calvinism of the New England churches that liberal Christianity took shape. At issue was their rejection of the doctrine of original sin, a "supernatural rationalism" that stressed the need for both human reason and biblical revelation, and an Arian Christology that rejected the doctrine of the Trinity in orthodox Calvinism.

Wright is the author of The Liberal Christians (1979), Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson, Parker (1986), and the co-author of A Stream of Light: A Sesquicentennial History of American Unitarianism (1975). He was also responsible for another monograph, Congregational Polity: A Historical Survey of Unitarian Universalist Practice (1997); two volumes of his collected essays The Unitarian Controversy: Essays in American Unitarian History (1994); Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches (1989); and an edited volume of readings, Religion in American Life: Selected Readings (1972).

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Conrad Wright

—From Philosopedia

Recommended Reading

Stream of Light: A Short History of American Unitarianism by Conrad Wright