(18 Feb. 1877-6 July 1948), theologian. (D. C. Macintosh) Born presumably on his parents’ farm, which was on S1/2 of Lot 14, 9th Concession of Lochiel Township, Breadalbane, GC. Parents: Peter McIntosh (d. 1910) and his wife Elizabeth Charlotte Everett (d.1901). He was educated at the local primary school, the high school at Vankleek Hill, McMaster University (B. A., 1903) and the University of Chicago (Ph. D. 1909). While in Chicago he was ordained as a Baptist clergyman. He taught at McMaster for a year after graduation, at Brandon College (Manitoba) 1907-1909, and from 1909, at Yale University, the institution associated especially with his distinguished career. First appointed an associate professor of systematic theology at Yale, he was Dwight Professor of Theology there from 1916 to 1932, and was afterwards professor of theology and the philosophy of religion from 1933 to 1942. During the First World War, he served overseas as a chaplain with the Canadian forces and afterwards served with the American YMCA. In the early 1930s, he attracted considerable attention when he was refused American citizenship on the grounds that he refused to support the U. S. unconditionally in any war in which the country might be involved. An austere man of deep seriousness, he was regarded with awe by many of his students. Outliving his brother J. E. McIntosh by less than half a year, he died at his residence in Hamden, Connecticut. He was married (1) on 13 Feb. 1921, to Emily Powell; she died the next year, and (2) in 1925 to Hope Griswold Conklin. He had no children.

     D. C. Macintosh was a distinguished thinker in the field of liberal Protestant theology, and in the philosophy of religion. He is the only GC native who has a life in the Dictionary of American Biography, and the only one also who has a life in its successor the American National Biography, and he has his own entry also in the New Catholic Encyclopedia. We have the statement, quoted somewhat indirectly from a Yale colleague, that Macintosh was one of the most distinguished theologians in the world of his time. (Harbaugh, p. 286) Elsewhere, he has been called “one of the most important of the modernistic liberal theologians in American Protestantism” in the period c.1900-1940. (Cauthen) Despite his distinction in the United States, he has remained virtually unknown in Canada–an unusual example of a Canadian whose great reputation abroad was unnoticed at home. The Nature of Religious Experience (1937), a festschrift presented to Macintosh, includes his portrait and a list of his publications. In 1978, one year late, the Yale University Divinity School celebrated his centennial. He was the author of nine books and many articles. His writings include a religious autobiography, published in V. Ferm’s 1932 volume, Contemporary American Theology: Theological Autobiographies. In his Personal Religion (1942) Macintosh includes some family history. Through their mother, D. C. Macintosh and his brother John Everett were related to the distinguished Cotton and Mather families of New England. (Their ancestor John Cotton 1584-1652 is in the DAB)

     D. C. Macintosh frequently re-visited his brother John E. McIntosh on the McIntosh family farm in GC. (The two brothers used different spellngs of their surname) At least two of D. C. Macintosh’s books were dated at Breadalbane, his The Problem of Knowledge (1915) and his The Problem of Religious Knowledge (1940). Another brother in the family, Donald Howard McIntosh, taught at Okanagan College and Summerland High School, both in Summerland, B. C., but died, at the beginning of his 40s, of TB at Kamloops, B. C., in 1921.

Lives (which includes a description and appraisal of his theology) by Kenneth Cauthen in DAB, Fourth Supplement, and by William H. Brackney in ANB * brief notices in standard works such as The Westminster Dictionary of Church History (1971), Dictionary of Christianity in America (1990), and Dictionary of Christian Biography (2001), give an idea of his continuing reputation * John R. Shook, ed., The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 4 vols. (2005), III, 1560-1564 * sources as per life of J. E. McIntosh * sources on him as per Bibliography of Glengarry: index * obituary Glengarry News 9 July 1948 * citizenship case: see esp. William H. Harbaugh, Lawyer’s Lawyer: the Life of John W. Davis (1973); the Macintosh case is also mentioned in the ANB life of Davis, who was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1924 * testimonial dinner for at Yale, GN 16 April 1937