Jenkin Lloyd Jones
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
Jenkin Lloyd Joneswas a Unitarian minister in the United States. He founded All Souls Unitarian Church in Chicago, Illinois, as well as its community outreach organization, the Abraham Lincoln Centre. A radical modernist, he joined the "Unity Men" and stressed a creedless "ethical basis" as the common element for churches. He tried to move Unitarianism away from a Christian focus and became a prominent pacifist at the time of World War I. He was a founder and long-time editor of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth14 November 1843
CountryUnited States of America
Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.
The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.
My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.
Introduced to this world in Llandyssul, Cardiganshire, Wales, November 14, 1843, I celebrated my first anniversary by landing at Castle Garden, in New York City.
Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.
You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?
The human soul finds its saddest imprisonment when it is helpless in the presence of cruelty, when it cannot right a wrong. It finds its highest freedom when it can secure justice to others.
The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn't slugged, raped and thrown into a Bessemer converter.
Are there not thousands who have loved virtue who did not accept Jesus Christ in any supernatural or miraculous fashion, who, if they knew of him at all, knew of him only as the Nazarene peasant - the man Jesus. Such was Abraham Lincoln, the tender prophet of the gospel of good will upon earth.
Seek the underlying harmonies of love and the overarching rainbow of hope, rather than the surface distinctions of creeds and of sects. Work for peace in religion.
Duty is a better guide than stars or statutes.
My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer - making hats for the local markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm during the summer time.
I am the third Jenkin Jones to preach that liberal interpretation of Christianity generally known as Unitarianism.
The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride