Andover Theological Seminary
The oldest graduate school of theology in the U.S. (and oldest graduate school of any sort, for that matter) is the Andover Theological Seminary. It was Boston merchant Samuel Abbot Read more…
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Building Evangelicalism
As Unitarianism started to become fashionable in New England, a group of Boston Congregationalist parishioners joined together in 1804 to form a “Religious Improvement Society” that would reinforce traditional Christian Read more…
Charleston’s Hebrew Orphan Society
When America was born as a nation, Charleston, South Carolina, had the largest Jewish population in the U.S. The city had been the main receiving point for Sephardic refugees for Read more…
Rebecca Gratz
At the tender age of 20, Rebecca Gratz founded the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances, an 1801 charitable organization that assisted victims of Read more…
A Charity By Women for Women
In 1797, devoted Presbyterian Isabella Graham and future nun Elizabeth Seton founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children in order to provide food and financial Read more…
Sunday Schools Spread Literacy and Constructive Behavior
When the Sunday School movement began to spread across America in the 1790s and early 1800s as part of the Second Great Awakening, these gatherings were the only places many Read more…
Benezet and the Quakers Aid the Forgotten
Anthony Benezet immigrated from France to North America with hopes of becoming a successful merchant. When he fell on hard times instead, he sought support from the Society of Friends, Read more…
California’s Missions
For nearly a century starting in 1768, Spanish priests (mostly Franciscans) founded and operated 21 missions across California to bring Catholicism and European-style development to the far coast of North Read more…
A Shrine to Religious Liberty
As the oldest extant Jewish house of worship in America, dating from 1763, Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, would be famous under any circumstances. But Touro’s place in history Read more…
A Great Awakening of Mass Philanthropy
In the first half of the 1700s, a crucial religious revival swept the American colonies. In addition to setting the stage for a political revolution based on the sovereignty of Read more…
Ursuline School, Hospital, and Orphanage in New Orleans
When 11 Ursuline nuns arrived in New Orleans in 1727—at which point the French colonial city was a raw settlement just nine years old—they established a school for girls. It Read more…
Making Group Homes Work
In twenty-first-century America, orphanages might seem like relics of the past. Because research in human attachment has taught us that children need close and lasting human connections, when those with Read more…
Catholic Charities
The president of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., invited Catholic clergy and laity to gather on his campus in 1910 to launch Catholic Charities. Local parishes had been doing charitable Read more…
Getting the Word Out
In 1898, two traveling businessmen found themselves sharing a room in an overbooked Wisconsin hotel. On discovering that they were both Christians, they studied the Bible together and knelt in Read more…
Goodwill Industries
Edgar Helms was a Cornell grad and ordained Methodist minister hunkered down in a South Boston outpost in 1902 fighting some of the city’s worst poverty. His building was collapsing, Read more…
Andrew Carnegie, Organ Donor
By the beginning of the twentieth century the organ had become an important animator of worship in American churches. Andrew Carnegie turned up the volume by donating nearly 7,700 organs Read more…
A Cookbook Helps Americanize Jews
While working as a truant officer in Milwaukee in the 1890s, Lizzie Kander discovered that the home conditions of Russian immigrant families were “deplorable…threatening the moral and physical health of Read more…
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Wall Street banker J. P. Morgan was a devoted Episcopalian. He was an officer of his local church. He served on a national committee charged with revising the Book of Read more…
Katharine Drexel Devotes Her Fortune to Indians and Blacks
Katharine Drexel was born in 1858 into one of America’s wealthiest families—the namesake founders of Drexel University and the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment firm. Her parents were of French Catholic Read more…
Nettie McCormick Bolsters Religious Schools
Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of important farm machinery, was a generous religious philanthropist, giving away at least $550,000 in the second half of the nineteenth century to religious organizations—mostly the Read more…