American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

WRIGHT, GEORGE FREDERICK

(22 January 1838, Whitehall, NY- 20 April 1921, Oberlin, OH). Education: B.A., Oberlin College, 1859; B.D. Oberlin Seminary, 1862. Career: Minister, Bakersfield, VT, 1862-72; minister, Andover, MA, 1872-81; professor of New Testament languages and literature, Oberlin Seminary, 1881-92; professor of harmony of science and revelation, Oberlin Seminary, 1892-1907; professor emeritus, 1907-21; editor, Bibliotheca Sacra, 1883-1921; noted amateur geologist.

The main feature of George Frederick Wright's career is indicated by the chair created for him at Oberlin, the professorship of harmony of science and revelation. Wright was in many respects an orthodox Congregationalist. For almost four decades he edited the theologically conservative Bibliotheca Sacra. But like many other Congregationalists at that time he was fascinated by the new discoveries of biology and geology.

By chance his second pastorate, at Andover, Massachusetts, placed him near a gravel ridge that geologists at first attributed to marine action. Wright studied it and decided that it must have been caused by glacial activity. He published his findings, won the support of leading geologists, and so embarked on a "hobby" that led him to undertake some of the major geological explorations of his time. At various times in his life he studied the great terminal moraine that runs from New York to Illinois, he made the first scientific study of the Muir Glacier in Alaska, he explored Greenland, and he traveled across Asia through Turkestan. He published his findings in several books; the best known is The Ice Age in North America (1889).

Typical of the era during which he lived, Wright was confident that science and traditional religion were compatible. He justified biblical miracles by arguing that they were consistent with a scientific understanding of the world. Even the parting of the Red Sea, the destruction of Sodom, and the fire from the sky that consumed Elijah's sacrifice could be explained by science. Wright collaborated with the great Harvard botanist Asa Gray, to write a series of essays arguing the compatibility of Darwinism and religion. Because Wright was prominent as both a geologist and a theologian, his claim that religion and science were compatible was especially comforting in an age when the two modes of thought sometimes seemed to lead in different directions.

Bibliography
A: The Logic of Christian Evidences (Andover, Mass., 1880); Studies in Science and Religion (Andover. Mass., 1882); The Ice Age in North America and Its Bearings on the Antiquity of Man (New York, 1889); Scientific Confirmations of Old Testament History (Oberlin. Ohio. 1906); Origin and Antiquity of Man (Oberlin, Ohio, 1912); Story of My Life and Work (Oberlin, Ohio, 1916).
B: DAB 20. 550-51; DARB, 534-35; NCAB 7. 66; NIT 21 April 1921, 13; SH, 12. 445.