Cleaning up UniversalistChristian.net

One of the problems of writing about Universalism so long is that when I search the web about something I don’t know, I often find something old I wrote or transcribed, but had forgotten about. Or sometimes, something I’ve written about but have neglected.

I’ve been thinking about how the Universalists viewed elders (the church office) much like I wondered about deacons last year. That lead me back to the 1790 Philadelphia Convention, its Articles of Faith and its Plan of Church Government. Oh look: the page has typographic and styling errors. I need to work on that.

It and Universalist Christian Initiative (UniversalistChristian.org) need a general refresh. I’ve not touched either in three years, and that also means relearning the engine that generated them, Jekyll.

But it’s not just a clean up job, or a polity dive. I’d like to know more about the church building the Philadelphia Universalist had (an interesting story in its own right) and more about a shadowy minister from what are now the far exurbs of Washington, D.C.

Sometimes a complaint works!

I was disappointed to see the 1927 issues of the Christian Leader (the Universalist denominational magazine) unavailable at the Hathi Trust site. They fell into the public domain on January 1, but since they had been misdated as 1930, they were not available.

A small (but nicely worded) email of complaint to the people at the Hathi Trust got a reply. The original scanner would have to examine and re-date the files to open them up. And they did.

Enjoy a Universalist window into 1927. (Hathi Trust)

(Now, who do I have to write at Harvard to get the issues from the 1930s to the mid 1950s included in their scanning program? They did the later ones.)