James Thompson Bixby

He was born at Barre, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard College (1864) and Harvard Divinity School (B.D., 1870).[1] He entered the ministry, and served as a minister for Unitarian churches in Watertown, Massachusetts (1870–74), Belfast, Maine (1875-79), and Meadville, Pennsylvania (1879–83).[2] In Meadville, he was also professor of the philosophy of religion in the Meadville Theological School from 1879 to 1883.[3]

In 1883, he went abroad for study and travel, receiving the degree of Ph.D. at the University of Leipzig in 1885,[3] having also attended the universities at Jena and Heidelberg. He served as a minister in Yonkers, New York (1887-1903).[2] He retired in 1903, and spent his last years in Yonkers.[1]

He lectured on the philosophy of religious at the Lowell Institute, Boston, in 1876 and 1883. He was a member of the Authors' Club and Authors' League of America.[2] He was interested in founding theology on a scientific basis, and his studies of comparative religion also found expression in his writings. In his later life, he wrote on immortality for Bibliotheca Sacra and Biblical World.[1]

Bixby criticized the arguments of Felix Leopold Oswald, that Christianity was of Buddhist origin.[4]

• Similarities of Physical and Religious Knowledge (1876; 2nd ed. under the title Religion and Science as Allies, 1889)
• Evolution and Christianity (1891)
• James T. Bixby (December 1897). "Babism and the Bab". The New World; A Quarterly Review of Religion, Ethics, and Theology. 6 (24): 722–750.
• The Crisis in Morals; Examination of Rational Ethics in the Light of Modern Science (1891; 2nd ed. under the title, The Ethics of Evolution, 1900)
• The New World and the New Thought (1902)
• The Open Secret (1912)
• What is Bahaism? (1912)