Nationality English
American Religion Methodist | Name Thomas Summers | |
Born 1812 England Occupation Clergyman
Book editor
Journal editor
University professor Died 1882, Nashville, Tennessee, United States Books Biographical Skjetches of Eminent Itinerant Ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church South | ||
Thomas Osmond (or Osgood) Summers (1812-1882) was an English-born American Methodist clergyman, editor and university professor. He is considered as one of the most prominent Methodist theologians of the nineteenth century.
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Early life
Thomas Osmond Summers was born in 1812 in England. He emigrated to the United States in 1830 and became a Methodist minister five years later, in 1835.
Career
Summers established a Methodist community on Galveston Island in Texas in 1840. He also served as a Methodist clergyman in Mississippi.
Summers moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1850 and worked as a book editor for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. He served as the editor of the Sunday School Visitor from 1851 to 1856, the Quarterly Review of the Methodist Church, South from 1858 to 1861, and the Christian Advocate from 1868 to 1878.
In 1856, a few years before the American Civil War of 1861-1865, and together with William Andrew Smith (1802–1870), the President of his alma mater Randolph-Macon College, he published an essay about domestic slavery in the United States. Later, in The Ladies' Repository, he justified punishment of the sinful as tough love.
In 1875, Summers served as Professor of Systematic Theology at Vanderbilt University, a newly established university in Nashville which was started as a Methodist institution by Holland Nimmons McTyeire (1824-1889), Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. By 1878, he became Dean of the Biblical Department at Vanderbilt University, later known as the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He became known as "one of the leading Methodist theologians of the nineteenth century."
Death
Summers died in 1882.