CHILD, LYDIA MARIA. Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) was a prolific author and a founder of the American abolitionist movement. Child wrote two books on religion: The Progress of Religious Ideas (1855), which offered a history of the world's religions and sought to put Christianity on a level footing with other religions; and Aspirations of the World: A Chain of Opals (1878), which collected what Child considered the most valuable religious texts, including many more excerpts from Greco-Roman, Buddhist, Persian, and Hindu sources than from the Bible. Child's radically universalist religious sensibility informed her life-long quest to eradicate racial prejudice.

Child did not fit easily into religious categories. She was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the daughter of a baker, and she rejected her parents' Calvinism as an adolescent. The older brother who educated her, Convers Francis, became a Unitarian minister, but she found Unitarianism cold and intellectual. She...