George Thomson Knight

George Thompson Knight (1850-1911) was an American Universalist theologian who spent his career at the Crane Theological School, the divinity school of Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts. The son of an abolitionist Universalist, he graduated from the divinity school in 1875 and immediately joined its faculty, beginning as an instructor in rhetoric and church history and eventually teaching nearly every subject in the school's curriculum. He served as secretary of the divinity faculty from 1884 and contributed articles on Universalism to the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge. His book The Goodness of God (1904) defended divine benevolence in light of contemporary science.

A Tufts divinity professor confronts the hardest objection to his denomination's creed: if God is good, why is nature so cruel? Writing after Darwin, Knight takes the facts of struggle, pain, and waste in the natural world seriously and argues that they are compatible with — indeed only finally intelligible under — the goodness of God that Universalism proclaims. A specimen of the denomination's engagement with modern science and liberal theology at the turn of the century.

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