Clarence Russell Skinner

Clarence Russell Skinner (1881-1949) was an American Universalist minister, educator, and social reformer, often described as the most influential Universalist of the early twentieth century. After pastorates in New York and Massachusetts, he became professor of applied Christianity at the Crane Theological School of Tufts College in 1914 and served as its dean from 1933 to 1945. A pacifist committed to socially engaged liberal religion, he also helped lead the Community Church of Boston for some fifteen years. His book The Social Implications of Universalism (1915) urged the denomination to treat social reform as a central religious task.

The most influential Universalist book of the twentieth century. Skinner, professor of applied Christianity at Tufts, reconceives the old doctrine for the social-gospel era: Universalism's real subject is not the fate of souls after death but the redemption of society here — democracy, labor, peace, the brotherhood implied by the fatherhood of God. This slim manifesto reoriented the denomination's energies for a generation and remains the hinge between its nineteenth-century theology and its modern social liberalism.

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