biography
| name: |
Channing, William Ellery
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1780–1842)
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| biography:
| Unitarian theologian, born in Newport, Rhode Island, USA. He studied at Harvard (1798) and was tutor for 18 months to a family in Richmond, VA, where he became an opponent of slavery. Ordained in 1803, he became pastor of the Congregational Federal Street Church in Boston, where he remained until his death. Broadly liberal, from 1815 he took part in the controversy over Calvinist doctrine and became a leader of the newly emerging Unitarians, calling their doctrine ‘a rational and amiable system’, and was largely responsible for the establishment of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. Channing Unitarianism, as his beliefs came to be known, influenced the intellectual development of Emerson and many others in the English-speaking world. A pacifist and proponent of public education and labour reforms, he threw his considerable prestige behind the temperance and anti-slavery causes. Among his published works were Essay on National Literature and Negro Slavery. |
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