Biography
Parsons was born 13 December 1902 in Colorado Springs. Parsons was the son of Edward Smith Parsons (1863–1943) and Mary Augusta Ingersoll (1863–1949). His father had attended Yale Divinity School and was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, serving first as a minister for a pioneer community in Greeley, Colorado. At the time of Parsons' birth Edward S. Parsons was a professor in English at Colorado College and vice-president of the college.
During his Congregational ministry in Greeley, Edward S. Parsons had become sympathetic to the social gospel movement; yet, at the same time, he tended to view this question from a higher theological position and he was hostile to socialism as a sheer ideology. Also both Edward S. Parsons and his son Talcott would be familiar with the theology of Jonathan Edwards. The father would later become the president of Marietta College in Ohio. Parsons' family is one of the oldest families in American history; his ancestors were some of the first to arrive from England in the first half of the seventeenth century. The family's heritage consisted of two separate and independently developed Parsons lines, which both went back to the early days of America and indeed deeper into British history. On the father's side the family could be traced back to the Parsons of York, Maine. On the mother's side, the Ingersoll line was connected with Jonathan Edwards and from Edwards on there would be a new independent Parsons line because his eldest daughter Sarah married Elihu Parsons on June 11, 1750.
Read more about this topic: Talcott Parsons
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)