Adin Ballou

Adin Ballou
Short Name: Adin Ballou
Full Name: Ballou, Adin, 1803-1890
Birth Year: 1803
Death Year: 1890

Ballou, Adin. (Cumberland, Rhode Island, April 23, 1803--August 5, 1890, Hopedale, Massachusetts). At the age of nineteen he was accepted as a minister in the Christian Connexion, but later entered the Universalist ministry and served churches in Milford, Mass.; New York City; and in Mendon and Hopedale, Mass. He is noted as founder of the famous Hopedale community (1842), an experiment in "practical Christianity." A hymn by him, beginning "Years are coming--speed them onward" was included in Church Harmonies, 1873, in Hymns of the Church, 1917, and in Hymns of the Spirit, 1937.

--Henry Wilder Foote, DNAH Archives

Wikipedia Biography

Adin Ballou (1803–1890) was an American proponent of Christian nonresistance, Christian anarchism and socialism, abolitionism and the founder of the Hopedale Community. Through his long career as a Universalist and Unitarian minister, he tirelessly advocated for the immediate abolition of slavery and the principles of Christian anarcho-socialism, and promoted the nonviolent theory of praxis (or moral suasion) in his prolific writings. Such writings drew the admiration of Leo Tolstoy, who frequently cited Ballou as a major influence on his theological and political ideology in his nonfiction texts like The Kingdom of God is Within You, along with sponsoring Russian translations of some of Ballou's works. As well as heavily inspiring Tolstoy, Ballou's Christian anarchist and nonresistance id
Wikipedia Biography

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