Parker, Theodore

Parker, Theodore

(1810–60) Unitarian clergyman, reformer; born in Lexington, Mass. He overcame a background of poverty to graduate from Harvard Divinity School in 1836. Serving as Unitarian minister in West Roxbury, he was an associate of William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other Transcendentalists, and became a leader of liberal theological thought; his progressive views forced him to resign his first pastorate (1845) and he became a minister at a new church in Boston. He was active, too, in social movements, including school and prison reforms, temperance, and the abolition of slavery. He gradually withdrew from public life after his health began to fail in 1857.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.