Tag Archives: publications

2004

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Ball team with The Rev. Sara Irwin (front left), The Rev. Bill Blaine Wallace (back row, orange shirt) & Emmanuelites*

June 4. Boston Globe reported that The Rev. Dr. Willliam Blaine-Wallace had performed same-sex marriages despite The Rt. Rev. Thomas Shaw‘s proscription of such in the wake of a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling in May, which had made them legal.

June 20. Boston Globe quoted Bill Blaine-Wallace, who supported the Rev. I. Carter Heyward in her retirement from out diocese saying,  “I want the wider community to know that a straight priest and mainstream parish are participating in constructive disobedience.”

July. Our vestry endorsed our rector’s disobedience with a statement, “Support for Same-Sex Marriage”.

Summer. Emmanuel fielded a team* for an interfaith wiffle-ball match on the Boston Common with First Church (Unitarian Universalist). Behind them are Polish freedom fighters in a sculpture called The Partisans, which has since been moved to the intersection of Congress & D Streets.

Rabbi Howard A. Berman

Bill Blaine-Wallace invited the nascent congregation Boston Jewish Spirit to hold its services as guests at Emmanuel.  Rabbi Howard A. Berman became Rabbi in Residence.  The first meetings of what would later become Central Reform Temple were held in our library.

*If you know any missing members of this line-up, please advise us:  archivist@EmmanuelBoston.org.

  • Back row from the left:  Margo Risk (seated), ??, Donald Langbein, Jimmy Tirrell (straw hat), ??, Bill Blaine-Wallace, Marianne Iauco & Mary Blocher
  • Front row:  Sara Irwin, Kelly Reed, Hugh Doherty?, Victoria Blaine-Wallace & David York.

1988

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  • June.  Organist Michael Beattie joined Emmanuel Music for rehearsals in our Music Room of Peter Sellars‘ version of Mozart’s opera Le Nozze di Figaro, which played that summer in the PepsiCo Theater in Purchase NY.  Craig Smith conducted; Frank Kelley sang the part of Basilio; Jayne West, the Countess; and Susan Larson, Cherubino.
  • In her “Peace Pentecost” sermon at our Cathedral Church of St. Paul, poet Denise Levertov (1923-97) emphasized the connection between contemplation and action:  “If we neglect our inner lives, we destroy the sources of fruitful outer action.

    Thanks to U. of California Press for this image.

    But if we do not act, our inner lives become mere monuments to egotism.” At Emmanuel she founded a Peace Group to foster the links between spiritual thought and action among her fellow parishioners.

Earlier in the decade she had been attracted to Emmanuel by our social-justice activities, beautiful music and liturgy, and rector Al Kershaw, who counseled her.  “He assured her that doubt was part of spiritual growth and the darkness she encountered might increase her sense of dependence and lead her to God,” says her biographer Dana Greene citing Denise’s diary entry for June 13, 1988.

Denise’s father, Paul Philip Levertoff (1878–1954), born in Belarus, an early proponent of Messianic Judaism, took holy orders in the Anglican Church and preached wearing an alb with a tallit and kippa.

The Rev. Paul Philip Levertoff

In 1922 he had become director of what is now the London Diocesan Council for Work among the Jews and edited its quarterly journal, The Church and the Jews. He was a prolific writer on theological subjects in Hebrew, German, and English and translated into English the Midrash Sifre on Numbers (1926) and the Zohar  (1933).

See also:

  1. Dana Greene.  Denise Levertov:  A Poet’s Life.  Urbana IL:  U. of Illinois Press, 2012.
  2. Denise Levertov.  Making Peace.  Breathing the Water.  NY:  New Directions, 1987.
  3. Donna Hollenberg.  A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2013.
  4. Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, eds.  The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov.  NY: New Directions, 2013.
  5. Paul Philip Levertoff. Love and the Messianic Age.
  6. Timeline: 1994

 

1963

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The Rev. Alvin L. Kershaw became our ninth rector. He had previously served as  rector of Christ Church Episcopal Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky (1944 – 1947); Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Oxford, Ohio (1947 – 1956); and All Saints Episcopal Church in Peterborough, New Hampshire (1956 – 1963).

See his biography & papers.

See also our Timeline entries:  1956, 1966, 1969.

1960

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Our centennial was celebrated with a candlelit service and a dinner at the Plaza Hotel, Copley Square.

Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years, compiled by Harriet Allen Robeson, was published by the Vestry.  She credited these people for their help with her historical endeavor:  The Rev. Harold Sedgwick, the Rev. Rollin J. Fairbanks, the Rev. David Siegenthaler, Eleanor S. Hunneman, Mrs. Wells Mitchell, Gladys McCafferty of the Diocesan Library, and daughters of former rectors Ellen Parks and Constance Worcester.

See its introduction and appendix. For its chapters about the tenures of particular rectors, please see these years:

  1. 1861  F.D. Huntington
  2. 1869  A.H. Vinton
  3. 1878  L. Parks
  4. 1904  E. Worcester
  5. 1929  B.M. Washburn
  6. 1932  P.E. Osgood
  7. 1943  R.G. Metters
  8. 1957  H.B. Sedgwick

1959

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The Business & Professional Women’s Guild (formerly Club) had 98 members.  Its officers were Miss Lydia LeBaron Walker, President; Miss Caroline G. Whitney, Vice-President and Recording Secretary; Miss Margaret A. Cooke, Corresponding Secretary; Maude D. Gowen; Treasurer.  Our archives has its membership directory for that church year. The Guild was active for another decade.

Oct. 18-20. A series of five Healing Services were held with the Rev. Canon Alfred W. Price presiding, assisted by Rector Harold Sedgwick, the Rev. Dr.  Rollin J. Fairbanks,  and other clergy.  Their hands were laid upon more than 3600 heads.  After a nationwide outbreak of polio in 1955, the Salk vaccine had been widely administered.  People in the Commonwealth became alarmed by a recurrence of paralytic poliomyelitis, which peaked here in September. Since about half of the patients had been properly vaccinated, the vaccine’s effectiveness was called into question.  When the Sabin attenuated vaccine was distributed in oral form in 1961, the nation heaved a sigh of relief.

Dr. Fairbanks (1908-1983) was the Robert Treat Paine Professor of Pastoral Theology at Episcopal Divinity School.  Canon Price (1899–1992), who had been awarded a Purple Heart for his service in WWII, was for many years an international warden of the Episcopal Church’s Order of St. Luke the Physician. His works include:  Healing:  The Gift of God (1955), Religion & Health (1962), and a God’s Health:  Handbook for the Practice of the Church’s Ministry of Healing (1976).

Left to right: Rector Sedgwick, Dr. Fairbanks, the Rev. Don Hargrove Gross, the Rev. Canon Alfred W. Price & ?

1938

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    • The Rev. Samuel McComb, Associate Rector (1906-1916) died at the age of 74 in England.  Educated at colleges in N. Ireland and Oxford University, he became a Presbyterian minister in England, Ireland, and New York City. Ordained to the diaconate in our diocese by Bishop William Lawrence and to the priesthood in RI, he then worked with Rector Elwood Worcester to create the Emmanuel Movement. After serving as canon of the Episcopal cathedral in Baltimore, he taught at the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge MA. He finished his pastoral ministry as rector of the American Episcopal Church in Nice, France.  After having written (with Worcester) Religion & Medicine (1908), he published The Making of the English Bible (1909) and many other works. The New York Times published his obituary on Sept. 12.
    • Thanks to Nathaniel White Williams, Jr., we have these images of our choirs of men and boys, which were directed (c1930-1946) by Dr. Stone Thompson (2d from right in the banner image at the top of this page).


Nathaniel W. Williams, Jr. 1946 graduation photo, English High School, Boston

Nathaniel, (second from left in image above) born in 1929,  lived with his parents Rose and NWW, Sr. at 113 Poplar St., Roslindale (Boston) until 1952, according to research by Julian Bullitt, who digitized the above images and many of our archival images.

1932

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    • Feb. 12. The Rev. Dr. Phillips Endecott Osgood was installed as our fifth rector. For information about him and his tenure, please see the chapter on him in Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years.
  • Nov. 23.  Our former organist Lynnwood Farnam, who had become head of the Organ Department at the Curtis Institute of Music before his death in late 1930, bequeathed his papers to their library.   Theodore Presser published in Philadelphia Farnum’s Toccata on “O Filii et Filiae“.   Often played at Easter, the magnificent piece is employed to test organs. 
  • Charles Scribner’s Sons published The Rev. Elwood Worcester‘s autobiography Life’s Adventure: The Story of a Varied Career (OCLC# 1896075). For a description of his ministry based on it, please see our page and Wikipedia’s on the Emmanuel Movement 

1925

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May 12.  The poet Amy Lawrence Lowell died young of a cerebral hemorrhage. She had been born in 1874 to our parishioners Katherine Bigelow Lawrence (1832-95) and Augustus Lowell (1830-1900). Many members of the Lawrence and Lowell families attended Emmanuel.  Her partner Ada Dwyer Russell was the subject of many of her romantic poems.  A volume of her complete works was published in 1955.  She is buried in the Lowell plot (#3401) on Bellwort Path in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

 

1911

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June 2. Rector Elwood Worcester presided at the funeral of Dr. Emma W. Davidson Mooers, who had been a parishioner since 1880. She had died on May 31 at 52 of streptococcal meningitis contracted when she and Dr. Elmer Ernest Southard were performing an autopsy.  She was one of 13 women to receive an MD from U. of Michigan in 1884, then worked at Northampton State Hospital,  McLean Hospital, and the neuropathology laboratory of Dr. Alois Alzheimer in Munich before becoming Custodian of Harvard’s Neuropathological Collection in 1910.  Her articles on syphilis and other bacterial infections of the nervous system were published in the precursors to the American Journal of Psychiatry and  New England Journal of Medicine. May this pioneer rise in glory!

Dr. Emma W.D. Mooers seated in center with Dr. Alois Alzheimer (back row 3d from right) and co-workers in his Laboratory for Neurology, Munich, 1909.
Credit: Wikicommons

July.  Choirmaster Weston Spies Gales, young William Appleton Lawrence (1889-1968), and a cook, Mr. Wood, took thirty choirboys to Camp Lowell in Winthrop, Maine, for a fortnight of fellowship.