This page features some well known Unitarians that you may recognise from their life’s work. We are not trying to impress you through name dropping. We are just helping you to get to know us a little bit better by learning about the diversity of some of the people that you may recognise, who happen to have associated with us. These individuals may be recognised as past or current public figures, but for us, they are just Unitarians without any special designation of being saints or heroes. Some are counterculture and some are of the establishment, but all value independent thought, a passion for compassion, and a desire for a connection with the divine.
Here is a short list that illustrates the diversity of some of those notables – a diversity that is in many ways characteristic of our congregation:
- John Quincy Adams – US president
- Louisa May Alcott – children’s writer
- P. T. Barnum – circus owner
- Charles Darwin – naturalist and biologist
- Béla Bartók – composer
- Dorothea Dix – social reformer
- Rod Serling – writer / creator of The Twilight Zone television series
- Ralph Waldo Emerson – writer and thinker
- Elizabeth Gaskell – novelist
- Frank Lloyd Wright – architect
- Edvard Greig – composer
- Isaac Newton – physicist and mathematician
- Sylvia Plath – poet
- George Wald – Nobel Laureate in Medicine
- Mary Wollstonecraft – feminist
- Christopher Reeve – actor
- Tim Berners-Lee – creator of the world wide web
- Pete Seeger – musician
- Lord Bullock – historian
Below is a random list of a few better know Unitarians with a little detail about their lives. This list changes, so come back to this page to view some details about other well known Unitarians like the ones listed below: