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A Small Alabama Paper Became North America's Oldest Liberal Journal

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A Small Alabama Paper Became North America's Oldest Liberal Journal

In 1847, in Wetumpka, Alabama, a Universalist minister named C. F. R. Shehane started a small paper called the Religious Reformer. It is still being published today, quarterly, nearly 180 years later, under a different name and from a different coast, and it claims, plausibly, to be the oldest continuously published liberal religious periodical in North America.

The name change came in 1850, when editor John Crenshaw Buruss retitled it The Universalist Herald, and the paper's own account of itself since then is direct: "the Herald's main church connection was the Universalist Church of America." That connection runs backward and forward past a single organizational name. The Universalist body did not take the name Universalist Church of America until 1942, nearly a century after the paper began, and the Herald's tie to the wider Universalist movement predates that renaming by 95 years and survives it without a break.

The paper moved from Alabama to Canon, Georgia in 1896 and stayed there almost a century, until 1991. In 1961, when the Universalist Church of America itself merged with the American Unitarian Association to form the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Herald's own church connection carried straight through the merger rather than ending with it, and the paper is still printing today from offices in North Carolina and Massachusetts, older than the denomination that now claims it and older, in fact, than nearly every American religious publication still in print.

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The Universalist Herald (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, WikipediaView the Source
Universalist Church Of America (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, WikipediaView the Source
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