Florence Buck

Florence Buck (July 19, 1860 – October 12, 1925) was an American educator, suffragist, and minister. She was an ordained Unitarian pastor and worked alongside her partner, fellow Unitarian pastor Marion Murdoch. She was on the national staff of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) from 1912 to 1925.

Early life and education Buck was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, the daughter of Samuel Pearse Buck and Lucy Reasoner Buck. She was raised in the Kalamazoo home of her uncle, George M. Buck. She graduated from Kalamazoo College and trained for ministry at Meadville Theological School in Pennsylvania. with further studies at Manchester College, Oxford. She was ordained in 1893, at All Souls Church in Chicago, during the Parliament of the World's Religions. Antoinette Brown Blackwell attended Buck's ordination ceremony, and Jenkin Lloyd Jones presided.

Career Buck taught high school science, and was a school principal in Michigan as a young woman. From 1894 to 1899, Buck and her partner, Marion Murdoch, were co-pastors at the First Unitarian Church (Unity Church) in Cleveland, Ohio.

From 1901 to 1910, Buck was pastor of a Unitarian church in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In 1910, she was temporary pastor of a church in Palo Alto, California, and from 1911 to 1912, she served a church in Alameda, California.

She moved to Boston, and was an executive of the AUA Department of Religious Education from 1912 to 1925. and The Beacon Hymnal, wrote for other denominational publications, and ran summer institutes for teachers. including at Boston's King's Chapel. "She has given her own enthusiastic self most unreservedly, and it would be a dull, damp fire that would not be kindled by her presence," reported The Pacific Unitarian in 1920, about her speaking tour of California that year.

Publications The Story of Jesus: A Manual for Religious Instruction in the Intermediate Grades (1917) "Religious Education for Democracy" (1919) "Can We Have an Intelligence Test in Morals and Religion?" (1924)

Personal life and legacy Buck had a long personal and professional partnership with fellow Unitarian pastor Marion Murdoch. Buck died in Boston, from typhoid fever, at the age of 65.