Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

While attending Colgate University he joined the Delta Upsilon Fraternity. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1903 at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church at 31st Street.

Fosdick became a central figure in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy within American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s and was one of the most prominent liberal ministers of the early 20th Century. Although a Baptist he was guest preacher in New York City at First Presbyterian Church on West Twelfth Street and then at the historic interdenominational Riverside Church. Harry Emerson Fosdick (May 24 1878 – October 5 1969) was an American pastor.