page_title: William Laurence Sullivan
section_title: Unitarian minister
hierarchical_section_title: William Laurence Sullivan / Career / Unitarian minister
caption_attribution_description: 33 Central Park West, New York, NY (Ethical Culture School)
context_page_description: William Laurence Sullivan was an American Unitarian clergyman, prolific author and literary critic, whose Letters to His Holiness, Pope Pius X, was the last work by a U.S. author to have been placed on Vatican's list of prohibited books.
context_section_description: In October 1910, while living in Cleveland, Sullivan affiliated with the American Unitarian Association. From 1911 to 1912 he taught English and history at Felix Adler's Ethical Culture School in New York. In 1912, he became a Unitarian minister, and served at All Souls Church in Schenectady, New York, moving, the following year, to New York City's All Souls Church in Manhattan, where he remained for the next nine years, until 1922.
  During this period he also spent six years as a book reviewer for one of the most prestigious of the city's many daily newspapers, The Herald Tribune. Known for the eloquence of his sermons, he was much in demand as a speaker, especially after another of the city's papers, The Evening Post, started publishing his sermons. An indefatigable preacher, he delivered over forty sermons during a single month in 1916, while traveling in the West Coast for the Church. In 1917 he received a D.D. from Meadville Theological School. Also in 1917 he was the Dudleian lecturer at Harvard.
  At the close of his service in New York, he spent the following two years, 1922–24, preaching in 23 missions across the U.S. and Canada. During the 1920s, he led and participated in numerous theological discussions, disagreements and controversies regarding theism and the encroachment of humanism, which he opposed. From 1924 to 1928 he served as pastor in Missouri at St. Louis' Church of the Messiah, taught at Meadville Theological School and traveled as a lecturer.
  William Laurence Sullivan married Frances Estelle Throckmorton in 1913, the daughter of Hugh William Throckmorton and Rebecca Ellen Upton, and the granddaughter of U.S. Representative Charles Horace Upton (R-VA), all of Washington, DC. The marriage lasted twenty-two years, until his death, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, six weeks prior to his 63rd birthday. In 1929 he had accepted the Germantown ministry, his final one, where, after six years as a pastor, he was memorialized as "...towering in his ability to lift and to lead, yet warmly near in his tender concern for the smallest human suffering; a man oppressed by the problems of this world's evil, but radiant in his faith in a Kingdom yet to be".
caption: Ethical Culture School, 33 Central Park West
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