author
Lewis G. (Lewis George) Janes
1844–1901
A lively late-19th-century lecturer and writer, he helped bring big ideas about ethics, evolution, religion, and social progress to general readers. He is especially remembered for leading the Brooklyn Ethical Association and for directing Greenacre’s School of Comparative Religion in Maine.
1 Audiobook
Samuell Gorton: A Forgotten Founder of our Liberties; First Settler of Warwick, R. I.
by Lewis G. (Lewis George) Janes
About the author
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1844, Lewis G. Janes was an American author, educator, and public speaker whose work moved across philosophy, religion, ethics, and civic reform. He wrote on subjects ranging from health and evolution to early Christianity and local history, aiming to make serious ideas approachable for a wider audience.
Janes served as president of the Brooklyn Ethical Association from 1885 to 1896, a role that placed him at the center of many public discussions about science, belief, and moral life in the late 1800s. He also became director of the Monsalvat School of Comparative Religion at Greenacre in Eliot, Maine, where he helped shape an open, nonsectarian forum for studying different religious traditions.
He died in Eliot, Maine, in 1901. Memorial accounts remembered him as a generous and broad-minded teacher, and his career suggests why: again and again, he created spaces where people could wrestle with difficult questions in a spirit of curiosity rather than dogma.