Neil Albert Salonen (born 1946) served as the ninth president of the University of Bridgeport, a private university in Bridgeport, Connecticut from 1999 to 2018. [1] [2] He is a member of the Unification Church and became the president of the Unification Church of the United States in 1972. [3] In 1974 he led the National Prayer and Fast Committee, a group founded by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon to support United States president Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. [4] In 1976 Salonen met with Senator Bob Dole to defend the Unification Church against charges made by its critics, including parents of some members. [5] In that year he was president of the Freedom Leadership Foundation, an anticommunist and pro South Korean propaganda organization, as well as church president. [6]
In 1980 Salonen was succeeded as the president of the American church by Mose Durst. [7] In 1997 he served as master of ceremonies at a blessing ceremony for about 20,000 engaged and married couples presided over by Rev. and Mrs. Moon and held in Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington D.C. [8] In 2002, Salonen was selected to serve on the Presidents Leadership Group, "a body of higher education presidents and chancellors who have declared their commitment to student substance abuse prevention." [9]
Sun Myung Moon was a Korean religious leader, also known for his business ventures and support for conservative political causes. A messiah claimant, he was the founder of the Unification Church, whose members consider him and his wife Hak Ja Han to be their "True Parents", and of its widely noted "Blessing" or mass wedding ceremonies. The author of the Unification Church's religious scripture, the Divine Principle, he was an anti-communist and an advocate for Korean reunification, for which he was recognized by the governments of both North and South Korea. Businesses he promoted included News World Communications, an international news media corporation known for its American subsidiary The Washington Times, and Tongil Group, a South Korean business group (chaebol), as well as other related organizations.
The 1976 United States presidential election was the 48th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. Democrat Jimmy Carter, former Governor of Georgia, defeated incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford in a narrow victory. This was the first presidential election since 1932 in which the incumbent was defeated, as well as the only Democratic victory of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.
Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was United States Secretary of State under president Ronald Reagan and White House chief of staff under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Prior to and in between these cabinet-level positions, he was a general in the U.S. Army, serving first as the vice chief of staff of the Army and then as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In 1973, Haig became the youngest four-star general in the Army's history.
Massena Campus of Bard College formerly known as Unification Theological Seminary (UTS) from its founding in 1975 until July 2023 is a private Unification Church-affiliated graduate seminary headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York. The seminary was granted an absolute charter from the State of New York in January 1984 and received accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education in November 1996.
Bo Hi Pak was a prominent member of the Unification Church. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a major leader in the church movement, leading projects such as newspapers, schools, performing arts projects, political projects such as the anti-communist organization CAUSA International, and was president of the Unification Church International 1977–1991. He was also the president of Little Angels Children's Folk Ballet of Korea.
The University of Bridgeport is a private university in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The university is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. In 2021, the university was purchased by Goodwin University; it retained its own name, brand, and board of trustees.
The Unification Church (Korean: 통일교) is a new religious movement derived from Christianity, whose members are called Unificationists or sometimes informally Moonies. Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) began gaining followers after the Second World War. On 1 May 1954 in Seoul, South Korea, Moon formally founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC), the Unification Church's full name, until 1994, when it was officially changed to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. It has a presence in approximately 100 countries around the world. Its leaders are Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, whom their followers honor with the title "True Parents".
Hak Ja Han Moon is an international religious leader. Her late husband Sun Myung Moon was the founder of the Unification Church (UC). Han and Moon were married in April 1960 and have 10 living children and over 30 grandchildren. In 1992, she established the Women's Federation for World Peace, and traveled the world speaking on its behalf. Since her husband's death, she has assumed leadership of the Unification Church, whose followers call her "True Mother" and "Mother of Peace".
Birch Evans Bayh Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who served as U.S. Senator from Indiana from 1963 to 1981. He was first elected to office in 1954, when he won election to the Indiana House of Representatives; in 1958, he was elected Speaker, the youngest person to hold that office in the state's history. In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Homer E. Capehart. Shortly after entering the Senate, he became Chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, and in that role authored two constitutional amendments: the Twenty-fifth—which establishes procedures for an orderly transition of power in the case of the death, disability, or resignation of the President of the United States—and the Twenty-sixth, which lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the United States. He is the first person since James Madison and only non–Founding Father to have authored more than one constitutional amendment. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the Electoral College.
Richard Lowell Rubenstein was a theologian, educator, and writer, noted particularly for his path-breaking contributions to post-Holocaust theology and his socio-political analyses of surplus populations and bureaucracy. A Connecticut resident, he was married to art historian Betty Rogers Rubenstein.
Chung Hwan Kwak, is a South Korean religious leader. He was a leadership in the Unification Church until 2009. He was appointed to many lead positions in organizations related to the Unification Church by its founder Sun Myung Moon. Since 2002, he was the chairman and president of News World Communications, which owns United Press International, and other publications, including the Middle East Times, and Tiempos del Mundo, a Spanish-language newspaper published in 16 countries throughout the Americas. He was 0palso the president of the Family Party for the Universal Peace and Unity, a South Korean political party founded by Unification Church members, one of whose main goals is the reunification of Korea. He was also the chairman of the ″Social Responsibility Committee″ for the Asian Football Confederation.
The Holy Marriage Blessing Ceremony (축복결혼식), often abbreviated to Blessing, is a large-scale wedding, or a marriage rededication ceremony, sponsored by the Unification Church. It is given to married or engaged couples. Through it, members of the Unification Church believe that the couple is removed from the lineage of sinful humanity and engrafted into God's sinless lineage. As a result, the couple's marital relationship—and any children born after the Blessing—exist free from the consequences of original sin.
Hyung Jin Moon, also known as Sean Moon, is an American pastor and, along with his wife Yeon Ah Lee Moon, founded the Pennsylvania-based World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church. The Sanctuary Church is a schismatic and militant sect of the Unification Church, which was founded by Hyung Jin Moon's father Reverend Sun Myung Moon and now led by his mother Hak Ja Han.
In 1984, Sun Myung Moon, the founder and leader of the Unification Church, was imprisoned in the United States after being found guilty by a jury of willfully filing false federal income tax returns and conspiracy. Church members and supporters stated that the prosecution was politically motivated, discriminatory, and unfair.
George Augustus Stallings Jr. is the founder of the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation and was long active in the Black Catholic Movement. He served as a Catholic priest from 1974 to 1989, and was based in Washington, D.C., for many years. He established the Imani Temple as an independent denomination in 1989, making a public break in 1990 with the Roman Catholic Church on The Phil Donahue Show. The Archbishop of Washington excommunicated him that year.
The Unification Church of the United States is the branch of the Unification Church in the United States. It began in the late 1950s and early 1960s when missionaries from South Korea were sent to America by the international Unification Church's founder and leader Sun Myung Moon. It expanded in the 1970s and then became involved in controversy due to its theology, its political activism, and the lifestyle of its members. Since then, it has been involved in many areas of American society and has established businesses, news media, projects in education and the arts, as well as taking part in political and social activism, and has itself gone through substantial changes.
Since 1937, the United States presidential inauguration has included one or more prayers given by members of the clergy. Since 1933 an associated prayer service either public or private attended by the president-elect has often taken place on the morning of the day. At times a major public or broadcast prayer service takes place after the main ceremony most recently on the next day.
Daniel G. Fefferman is a church leader and activist for the freedom of religion. He is a member of the Unification Church of the United States, a branch of the international Unification Church, founded by Sun Myung Moon in South Korea in 1954.
Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, believed in a literal Kingdom of God on earth to be brought about by human effort, motivating his establishment of numerous groups, some that are not strictly religious in their purposes. Moon was not directly involved with managing the day-to-day activities of the organizations that he indirectly oversaw, yet all of them attribute the inspiration behind their work to his leadership and teachings.