Edmund Opitz, R.I.P.

Brian Doherty | February 17, 2006

Rev. Edmund Opitz has died at age 92. He spent his career advocating individual liberty in a mostly religious context at both the Foundation for Economic Education and before that, at the unjustly obscure Spiritual Mobilization. He started his religious life as a Unitarian minister, but resigned that ministry and switched to Congregationalism in the early 1960s. He was an indefatigable correspondent, trying to spread his vision of God-rooted minimal-state libertarianism to everyone from Reinhold Niebuhr to Mildred Loomis. He was an early booster of the curious syncretist religious figure, and early psychedelic pioneer, Gerald Heard and a huge fan of Old Right-libertarian essayist Albert Jay Nock and founder of the Nockian Society.

Kenneth Gregg provides a link-filled note on his passing here.