Rev. Dr. Jay Atkinson

Biography

The Rev’d Dr. Jay Atkinson retired in June 2011 from thirty-two years of full-time service in Unitarian Universalist parish ministry. During those years he served also on the adjunct faculties of Morningside College (1985), Starr King School for the Ministry (1994, 1999, 2006), and Meadville Lombard Theological School (2003). He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Process Studies in Claremont in 1996 and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His abiding interests are in UU History, social/economic justice, and process/relational theology. His scholarship has focused primarily on the Polish Brethren in the early modern period, 1560-1660.

Publications include:

• “Religious Tolerance, Feminist Ethics, and Loomer’s Second Kind of Power,” Edge of the Wave: Two Inquiries into Feminist Thought, Collegium Occasional Papers, no. 1, (Collegium: An Association for Liberal Religious Studies, 1985), 17-38, 44-47. Online: bit.ly/4bVtM1O
• “Third-World Debt and Economic Justice: A Religious Perspective,” Unitarian Universalism 1991: Selected Essays, ed. Frederick E. Gillis (UUMA, 1991), 90-96. Presented earlier at the IARF World Congress, Hamburg, Germany, 27 July – 2 August, 1990. Online: bit.ly/3KJ19c8
• “Religious Tolerance and Social Concord in the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions,” Ideas of Concord and Discord in Selected World Religions, vol. 2 in Research in Human Social Conflict, ed. Joseph B. Gittler (Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press, 2000), 385-426.
• “Engaged Dissent among the Polish Brethren,” The Role of the Dissenter in Western Christianity, ed. Alicia McNary Forsey (Berkeley: Starr King, 2004), 85-96.
• “Alfred Cole Unmasked: The Provenance of the Universalist Preaching Commission,” Journal of Unitarian Universalist History XXXVII (2013-2014), 100-125.
• “Unitarian Universalist Interfaith Worship and Prayer,” Interfaith Worship and Prayer, ed. Christopher Lewis and Dan Cohn-Sherbok (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2019), 239-47.
• “Unitarian Universalists face Covid: Challenges, surprises and new pathways,” The Covid Pandemic and the World’s Religions, ed. George D. Chryssides and Dan Cohn-Sherbok (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 177-83.
• Plus, many book reviews in the Sixteenth Century Journal and the Journal of UU History/Studies

Presentations at scholarly conferences include:

• “Religious Pluralism as a Response to Human Finitude: Christoff Ostorodt and the Polish Brethren,” Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 20-23 October 2005.
• “The Church as a Self-Critical Learning Community: Some Sixteenth-Century Precursors of Creative Interchange in the Ecclesiology of the Polish Brethren,” Ecclesiology Session, Sixth International Whitehead Conference, Universität Salzburg, Austria, 3-6 July 2006. Online: bit.ly/Whitehead-Conf
• “Poland as an Early Humanist Crucible for East-West Encounter,” American Academy of Religion: Western Region, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, 7-9 March 2014.
• “Neighborly Coexistence: The Polish Spirit of Tolerance and its Internationalist Roots,” Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, 16-19 October 2014.