Student Life: Religious Organizations Records

The earliest records in this group reflect Oberlin’s support of missionary endeavors of Protestant organizations both at home and abroad in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The organizations affiliated with Christian missionary activity were the Foreign Missionary Volunteers, the Students Missionary Society, the Student Volunteer Band, the Union Missionary Society, the Young Ladies Missionary Society, and the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor. Later twentieth and early twenty-first century records reflect the wide diversity of faiths, philosophies, and political and sexual orientations expressed by students at Oberlin through participation in student religious organizations, particularly since 1965. In the 1960s and 1970s, student religious organizations included Baha’i, Christian Science, the Interfaith Religious Council, Hillel, Jewish Socialist Community, Kadima, the Newman Club, Nexus, Sangha, Society of Friends and the related American Friends Service Committee in the 1970s and 1980s, and Student Religious Liberals. More recent groups include Agape Fellowship, the Latter-day Saints Student Association, Liberated Unitarian Universalist Voices, Muslim Students Group, Nichiren Shosha Soka Gakkai, Oberlin Atheists and Freethinkers, Oberlin Zionists, Pagan Awareness Network, and Queers and Allies of Faith, among others.