author
Francis Ellingwood Abbot
1836–1903
A bold 19th-century thinker, he tried to bring religion into conversation with science and reason. His life also left behind an unusually vivid record of love, doubt, and intellectual independence.
1 Audiobook
Professor Royce's Libel A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University
by Francis Ellingwood Abbot
About the author
Born in Boston on November 6, 1836, Francis Ellingwood Abbot was an American philosopher, theologian, and writer who studied at Harvard and later at Meadville Theological School. He began his career as a Unitarian minister, but his increasingly radical religious views pushed him beyond the pulpit and into a wider public life as an author and editor.
Abbot became one of the founders of the Free Religious Association and served as the first editor of The Index, a journal devoted to free religious inquiry. His major works, including Scientific Theism and The Way Out of Agnosticism, show his central ambition: to rebuild theology in a way that took science seriously rather than treating faith and reason as enemies.
He died on October 23, 1903. Beyond his public career, Abbot is also remembered for the diary entries and letters that preserve his long relationship with his wife, Katharine Fearing Loring, giving modern readers a more intimate view of a man often described mainly through his religious and philosophical battles.