The Uses of Sociology: By Religious Bodies

Abstract

R ELIGIOUS bodies, and individuals who have had their roots in the professional leadership of religious organizations, have been both producers and consumers of sociological knowledge since its beginnings in the United States. Albion W. Small, an ordained Baptist clergyman, reminds us in his classic history of Fifty Years of Sociology in the United States 1865-1915' that the first course in sociology offered at Harvard in the academic year 1891-92 was taught by the Rev. Edward Cummings, pastor of the South Congregational Church of Boston. Later he writes that ... a comprehensive view of the sociological movement in the United States for the last fifty years would include such a survey as Professor Francis G. Peabody of Harvard, or Professor Graham Taylor might supply . . .2 Professor Peabody was a popular speaker at Chautauqua and an early champion of the Social Gospel Movement in this country3 and Dombrowski in his history of Christian socialism surmises from an examination of records that it seems probable that Professor Peabody's course at Harvard in 1880 [a decade before the