Civil War Round Table of the Mid-Ohio Valley to hear presentation on frontier minister

(Civil War - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)
MARIETTA — A Marietta College professor will discuss the life and writing of a frontier minister who was an advocate for education and the abolition of slavery at the next meeting of the Civil War Round Table of the Mid-Ohio Valley.
The meeting is slated for 7 p.m. Thursday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 320 Second St., Marietta.
David Torbett, a member of the MC faculty since 2007 and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, will give the presentation on “The Autobiography of Daniel Parker, Frontier Universalist.”
That’s also the title of a book Torbett edited, in which Parker (1781-1861) recorded both the details of everyday life and the historical events he witnessed west of the Appalachian Mountains between 1790 and 1840.
Once a traveling salesman for a line of newly invented clothes washing machines, Parker became an outspoken advocate for abolition and education. With his wife and son, he founded Clermont Academy, a racially integrated, coeducational secondary school and the first of its kind in Ohio.
Parker’s real vocation was as a self-ordained, itinerant preacher of his own brand of universal salvation.
Torbett teaches courses at Marietta on alternative religions, biblical studies, African American religion, ethics, the history of Christianity and Buddhism, as well as classes in American, European and ancient history. His most popular class is “Five Big Religions, Five Big Questions,” which he created to introduce students to the five major world religions and topics in philosophy of religion.
Torbett is the author of “Theology and Slavery: Charles Hodge and Horace Bushnell.” He received a bachelor of fine arts from New York University in 1987, a master of divinity from Andover Newton Theological School in 1992 and a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in Virginia in 2002.