The Religious Education of an American Citizen. New York - 1918
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About the Book
The Americas were settled by people migr...)
About the Book
The Americas were settled by people migrating from Asia at the height of an Ice Age 15,000 years ago. There was no contact with Europeans until Vikings appeared briefly in the 10th century, and the voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492. America's Indigenous peoples were the Paleo-Indians, who were initially hunter-gatherers. Post 1492, Spanish, Portuguese and later English, French and Dutch colonialists arrived, conquering and settling the discovered lands over three centuries, from the early 16th to the early 19th centuries. The United States achieved independence from England in 1776, while Brazil and the larger Hispanic American nations declared independence in the 19th century. Canada became a federal dominion in 1867.
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(In another volume the teaching of Jesus has been consider...)
In another volume the teaching of Jesus has been considered in its relation to some of the problems of modern social life. It is an inquiry which, in one form or another, forces itself upon every mind which has, on the one hand, any reverence for the teaching of Jesus, and, on the other, any understanding of the present age. This is the age of the Social Question.
Francis Greenwood Peabody was an American Unitarian clergyman and writer. He was also a professor of theology and social ethics.
Background
Francis Greenwood Peabody was born on December 4, 1847 in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States. He was the second of two sons and the youngest of four children of Ephraim and Mary Jane (Derby) Peabody. His father, who was minister of King's Chapel, Boston, died in 1856, leaving the family in impecunious circumstances, but friends provided financial assistance.
Education
Francis Greenwood Peabody attended E. S. Dixwell's school in Boston, Harvard College (A. B. , 1869), and the Harvard Divinity School (A. M. , S. T. B. , 1872). He spent the academic year 1872 - 1873 at the University of Halle. Peabody later declared that during this year in Germany he was confronted with an "idea" for the first time in his life, the occasion being his reading of Otto Pfleiderer's Die Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre Geschichte (1869). The combination of post-Kantian philosophy, experientially oriented theology, comparative religion, and historical emphasis presented in this book became central to Peabody's religious thought.
Career
Upon returning to America, Francis Greenwood Peabody taught for a brief time at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio). On March 31, 1874, he was ordained minister of the First Parish Church (Unitarian) in Cambridge, Massachussets, but due to recurrent illness he resigned in 1879. He then became lecturer on ethics and homiletics in the Harvard Divinity School and a year later (1881) was appointed Parkman Professor of Theology. During these early years as a teacher Peabody developed what was probably the first systematic course on Christian social ethics in an American theological seminary. After 1882 - 1883, when the course was opened to Harvard undergraduates, it soon became a college favorite. The subject, moreover, gradually became Peabody's major concern.
In 1906 Francis Greenwood peabody founded and became chairman of a new department of social ethics and helped to gain endowment funds for a departmental library, a "social museum, " and a full program of graduate and undergraduate instruction. Though emphasizing ethics and social work, this department provided an important theatre for the carrying on of sociological studies at Harvard. Peabody best expresses the theoretical basis of his teaching in The Approach to the Social Question (1909). In the meantime Peabody performed other important duties. In 1886, upon his appointment as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, he was instrumental in ending compulsory chapel and in establishing a system of voluntary worship and religious counseling in Harvard College. His own preaching was a major contribution to this program's success; and five volumes of widely read college chapel sermons carried his pulpit eloquence far beyond the university. He also taught a wide gamut of courses in the Divinity School, of which he was dean from 1901 to 1906.
Francis Greenwood Peabody retired in 1913, but remained active for many years as a lecturer and writer. Peabody's most significant contributions to American life and thought lay in two broad areas. He was, first, a persuasive proponent of nineteenth-century German religious thought and scholarship to many students and to a wide American audience. Beginning with his early articles on "The History of the Psychology of Religion", he was an enthusiastic and thoughtful champion of a tradition that ran from Kant and Fichte to Lotze, from Schleiermacher and Hegel to Pfleiderer and A. E. Biedermann. Second, and more important, Peabody was an effective and prolific interpreter of what he called the "Age of the Social Question. " His often reprinted Jesus Christ and the Social Question (1900), which was also translated into German, French, and Swedish, was a pioneer American work focusing attention on the social and ethical problems of modern civilization from a biblical standpoint.
By every means of communication at his command, Francis Greenwood Peabody stressed these issues for over forty years. His social advocacy was generalized and never radical; the measures he applauded were moderate and often paternalistic. He called for morally concerned and well-informed stewardship of wealth and for a planned program of welfare, charities, and insurance. He actively supported cooperatives, settlement houses, various educational experiments, such as those of Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong of Hampton Institute (Virginia), and housing reforms of the type developed by Alfred T. White. Peabody's theology was optimistic.
Francis greenwood Peabody could thus draw inspiration from every age of the Church, including his own age with its troubled social conscience. Jesus Christ and the Christian Character (1905) sets forth his theology with considerable completeness. In The Christian Life in the Modern World (1914) he suggests the individual and social implications of his position. Peabody is not easily categorized. From one point of view he was a progressive, justifying the labor movement and demanding social justice. Yet the anti-Christian writings of the Hegelian Left and the radical demands of Christian Socialists evoked his underlying conservatism. He also spoke sometimes of Christian social action as a means of bringing "the masses" back to the Faith. Yet he showed very little interest in the institutional church. Actually, the materialism and commercialism of American life seem to have aroused him most.
Francis Greenwood Peabody died of coronary heart disease at his home in Cambridge on December 28, 1936 and, following cremation, was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery there.
(The Christian life in the modern world 256 pages)
Religion
Francis Greenwood Peabody saw the human establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth as the central Christian hope. Jesus Christ, to him, though neither a demagogue nor a social reformer, was a Revealer who sought to transform the world by transforming the inner vision of individuals. He drew a strong distinction between New Testament religion and the theology of the Church.
Views
Francis Greenwood Peabody attacked economic standards of value and action whether they were based on the presuppositions of Marx or of Adam Smith.
Personality
Francis Greenwood Peabody was an idealist in almost every sense of that word. He was always approachable and hospitable. Peabody had none of the scholar’s aloofness. He was entirely free from insularity. He was unconscious of intellectual or racial barriers.
Interests
Professor Peabody’s life was an exceptionally well-rounded one. He was a lover of books and of travel, of the sea and of the ships that sail thereon, a man of many and varied friendships.
Connections
On June 11, 1872, Francis Greenwood Peabody married Cora Weld of Jamaica Plain, Massachussets. His wife and his two youngest children: Francis Weld, a professor in the Harvard Medical School, and John Derby died before him. He was survived by a son and a daughter: William Rodman, a prominent Boston lawyer, and Gertrude Weld, a leader in public health nursing.