Paul H. Beattie
From Philosopedia
Beattie, Paul Hamilton (7 May 1937 - 22 May 1989)
Beattie, born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was raised in Cleveland's inner city by his single-parent mother. From age 9, according to Daniel Ross Chandler, he held summer and part-time jobs, working in a steel mill, serving as a camp counsellor, and selling men's clothing.
He received a B.A. from Mount Union College in 1959 and a B.D. from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago during 1961 and a complete year-long interim ministry at Unity Unitarian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1961-1962. The following year he returned to Chicago, working in the practicum at the counselling center maintained by the University. He then pursued his doctoral studies seriously in the University's English Department. Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine articulated a common observation in The NACH Quarterly (Summer, 1989):
- Paul was deeply intellectual. He loved the world of ideas. His view of the ideal religious community was a continuous open dialogue of opposing view in which ideas and beliefs would be taken seriously. A lover of the ancient Greeks, he embraced the tragic view of life. Greek tragedy was neither pessimistic nor despairing. It was heroic. The heroic person confronts a morally indifferent universe, with all its unavoidable and undeserved calamities, with resolute courage and defiance and with a determination to live.
Beattie was a Unitarian minister and President, Fellowship of Religious Humanism, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II.
In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration.
At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), he addressed the group.
Beattie edited a Yellow Springs, Ohio, publication, Religious Humanism.
He died on May 22, 1989, while undergoing surgery to correct heart problems. Accordin to Earl K. Holt III in Religious Humanism (Autumn, 1989), at a memorial service conducted at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, St. Louis ministerial colleague Earl Holt summarized Beattie's enduring legacy:
- Many people knew Paul at a distance, through his writing and intellectual leadership as well as by his involvement in institutional causes. In this regard he came as close as anyone of his generation to fulfilling the ideal of what is called the Learned Ministry, a tradition, I should say, more often honored in word than in fact. Paul did honor it. The range and scope of his scholarship was truly astounding and even intimidating. He was in this sense a minister's ministeróan intellectual resource: what I mean is that almost everybody stole sermon ideas from him!
