Paul Minus Obituary

Paul Minus CLAREMONT, CA - Paul Minus, born on July 26, 1935, in Columbia, South Carolina, died on February 12, in Claremont, California. He suffered a heart attack., The middle child of Mildred and Paul Sr., Paul Jr. was raised in Charleston with his sister, Betty, and younger brother, Joe. He played basketball and worked summers in the warehouse of his father's wholesale appliance business, the Gas Engine and Electric Company. A few weeks after turning 16, Paul took advantage of an experimental program offered by the Ford Foundation to leave his Charleston high school and attend Yale University. Eleven years later, he received a doctorate from its Divinity School. For a year he was the chaplain at Florida State University, and then he moved with his wife, Nancy, and two young sons to Ohio. In Columbus, Paul taught church history at the Methodist Theological School. Upon retiring, after 24 years he retired and founded the Council for Ethics in Economics to help business leaders address ethical ramifications of their work. He wrote books on the reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants; on Christian responsibility in the face of a hungry world; on the life of Social Gospel pioneer, Walter Rauschenbusch. He played handball and tennis and raised a family. After the death of his daughter, Susan, Paul and Nancy were divorced. In time, he remarried Carolyn McIntyre, becoming stepfather to her son, Andrew. After ten happy years, Carolyn passed away from cancer. With new wife, Jean Dickinson, a friend of Carolyn's, Paul moved in 1999 to Cape Cod. Here he formed Care for Creation committees at the two churches he attended, and as a board member of the Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative founded the Faith Communities Environmental Network, which to date includes more than 30 Cape Cod faith communities who are battling the climate crisis together. At the end of his life, Paul lived at Pilgrim Place, a senior community in California committed to peace, social justice, and care of the Earth. There he visited and read to fellow residents in the infirmary, oversaw a systematic audit and subsequent dramatic reduction in the campus' carbon consumption (and energy bills), and established the Napier Initiative, a program by which students of the city's five colleges are matched with mentors at Pilgrim Place and given awards to further environmental and social justice programs of their own devising. But Paul never forgot his roots. In Charleston, to his family, he was "Sonny", and he took pride in the name. He researched the family's roots relentlessly, with a historian's rigor, tracing it to the 1760's immigration of his great-great-grandparents, Jacob and Mary Minus, to the South Carolina low country. When Paul Jr. died, he was busy planning a reunion of his three nuclear families with the family he grew up with in Charleston. Paul is pre-deceased by his first wife, Nancy; daughter, Susan; son, David; and second wife, Carolyn. He is survived by his older sister, Betty, who still lives in Charleston; son, Stephen; stepchildren, Andrew, Kathryn, and Tim; grandchildren, Justin, Erin, Emily, Eliot, Elinor, Madelyn, Cordelia, Charlotte, and Aimee; and wife, Jean, who lives in California. A zoomed memorial service will be held Saturday, April 10, at 12:30 EDT. To receive a link to this service, please contact [email protected]. Paul used his gifts to create institutions that would survive him, and continue his mission to help realize the Kingdom of God on Earth. A memorial fund has been established to honor his life and legacy: to contribute to this, and learn more about his environmental leadership on Cape Cod, please visit https://capecodclimate.org/paul-minus-memorial/. Visit our guestbook at legacy.com/obituaries/charleston