Between Two Rivers : A Memoir of Christian Social Action and Ethics 9781442250055, 9781442250048

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Between Two Rivers

Professor Ronald H. Stone in 2008 (Credit: Lifetouch)

Between Two Rivers A Memoir of Christian Social Action and Ethics 2

Ronald H. Stone

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stone, Ronald H. Between two rivers : a memoir of Christian social action and ethics / Ronald H. Stone. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4422-5004-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-5005-5 (electronic) 1. Stone, Ronald H. I. Title. BX4827.S76A3 2015 230.092—dc23

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[B] 2015009231

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

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Introduction This intellectual biography carries a theme of “Between Two Rivers,” which locates my life geographically, parentally, and philosophically. I have always been aware of my life existing between two rivers. In my youth and childhood I thrived between the east and west banks of the Des Moines River, and the confluence of the two provided a playground and a fishing hole for me. My college years were spent on the banks of the Missouri, in which I fished. As a self-conscious Iowan, I was aware of the eastern boundary of the mighty Mississippi. I walked along the banks of the Hudson as a graduate student and fledgling professor, and I crossed the East River only for vacations or ball games. Pittsburgh’s myth of three rivers informs my daily existence; I am closer to the Allegheny than the Monongahela, though for four years I crossed the Mon on my drive to work. My parents were of different spirits. Dad, though born wealthy, was determined to live his life as a “good ol’ boy.” He was happiest working manually whether behind horses on the farm, driving tent stakes for the auto shows, or pouring concrete. After work hours entertainment was shooting the breeze over beer with the “boys” or playing pool. His love of hunting and pickup driving completed the picture, except for his latent intellectual interests expressed mostly in his reading of history. Mother would tell us Dad believed, but we never really saw any sign of it. Mother’s intellectual curiosity was deeper and combined with later-life vocational needs to drive her back to complete her interrupted college education. She also loved the Church and believed its symbolic language literally. She found solace in her faith to shelter her from Dad’s drinking, and travel and intellectual needs were transferred to her four boys. She never achieved in any son her hopes for a medical doctor, but she birthed a minister, a lawyer, a college president, and a professor. All of them knew she would have preferred a physician or a daughter. The two rivers reflect this parentage, and the opposite attractions of the secular vision and the religious form a confluence in my life. The theme also symbolizes my life between critical rationality and Christian faith. Sometimes rationality has predominated, and other times faith has dominated. The mixing of the waters of the two is in my liberal Christian faith. I have coexisted between relatively secular universities and theological seminaries. An acknowledgment of this fact is found in the saying that “the widest street in New York City is Broadway Avenue between Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University.” In the 1960s I coexisted in both and took classes and taught in both institutions. My predominant teaching in 1968 was at Columbia, where the humanism disappointed me. If I had been teaching more at Union and less at Columbia, I might have remained in New York City. As I graduated from Columbia I filled out the curriculum vitae with an eye to teaching religious/theological social ethics in a working eastern city. After interviewing at Claremont Graduate School and Yale University, the call to promotion at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1969 was enriched by an adjunct graduate appointment at the University of Pittsburgh. Without the invitation to Pitt, I

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would not have left Columbia for the inland city. But at Pittsburgh Seminary I found my home after some restlessness in the seminary between the rivers. A friend at Morningside College, where I taught for a couple of summers, had advised me, “Teach at the level where you found the most excitement in your own studies.” The most excitement had been at Union Theological Seminary, and so Pittsburgh Theological Seminary became my home, with ventures in other universities. Before my story finished I taught at Duquesne University on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University between the rivers, and I ventured out to the coast to teach summers at Pacific Lutheran University. The 1960s in New York City turned this Iowa boy into a Union Seminary man. My faith deepened, and my sins increased. I was attracted to the more rational of the faculty. The philosophers of religion, Daniel D. Williams, John Macquarrie, James A. Martin, and Roger Shinn, attracted me more than the orthodox theologians or biblical scholars. John Bennett’s liberal Protestantism meant more to me than Paul Lehmann’s Calvinism. Most of all, the elderly philosophers of Union, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, came to dominate my mind, and I made my interpretations of their work mine. These mentors provided opportunities for me in fellowships, special programs at Columbia, National Council of Churches’ conferences, appointments to Church work in international relations, and appointments to the Union and Columbia faculty. I was blessed in my teachers and in the opportunities they provided for me. I have haltingly modeled myself on the faculty from Union more than any others, but two men from Oxford, John Plamenatz and Isaiah Berlin, were also great teachers. The influence of Union cannot be overestimated in my becoming who I am. But years of life in Iowa preceded Union, and these years are detailed in the following pages. There were three major influences at Morningside College in Sioux City before I went to New York City. Dr. Albert Sellen directed my major in history there, and he and his wife, Jane, turned me toward teaching and living close to campus. Joseph Uemura, a Columbia man, encouraged me to pursue graduate study at Union and challenged me very forcefully in philosophy class and in my summer school teaching for him. Walter Benjamin introduced me to intellectual Methodism and provided an outstanding example of the professor of religion in college. By the time I left the banks of the Missouri for the school on the Hudson, I had interacted as teacher, counselor, and sportsman with Native Americans. I had taken professional risks on behalf of African Americans. I had developed toward a Christian social activist. I was a confirmed churchman, having preached as a student in three churches near the Missouri River. But I still did not know what it was to live as a Christian intellectual in a world drifting toward secularism and superficial Christianity. On the trip to New York City, just before I crossed the bridge over the Mississippi, I saw the road sign that read, “Iowa, a Great Place to Grow.” My thoughts were “It’s a great place to grow in and then leave.” More than a couple of decades later, after dropping a friend off at her parents’ farm in Illinois, I would reenter the state. After crossing the Mississippi, a huge stag sprang across the highway in a beautiful western sunset, welcoming me home. I pulled off the interstate highway to eat, and after the great

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steak the restaurant provided free soft ice cream, which I welcomed as Iowa hospitality. A couple more decades, and I returned to Iowa to write a book on my pioneer grandfather, who lived between the rivers. Through it I celebrated Iowa, but with writing skills honed in New York and Oxford, and practiced in Pittsburgh. I returned to Iowa about twice a year until very recently, and now I return less frequently. Though the book is about my life, it is basically an intellectual memoir of a social activist. Consequently, a lot of it is about my books. It focuses more on my books than on my classes, though there are references to classes taught. Those of my readers who know my career will recognize that my scholarship is derived more from the printed word and archives than from interviews or personal experience. Most of the valuable things I taught in classrooms for forty years made it into my more than twenty books. Probably whatever nonsensical mistakes I made in the classroom I also made in my books. I read the draft of one of my colleague’s memoirs in which he did not emphasize his intellectual contribution through his writings, and I have deliberately set out in the opposite direction. I hope there is enough reflection on personal experience and social action to put the books in the context of my life. There are many stories in this book, but there are five major themes: Christian intellectual life, Christian social action for peace and justice, the solidness of Reinhold Niebuhr’s approaches to social reform, the depth of Paul Tillich’s social philosophy, and the emphasis on the relationship of religion and morality to international politics. 1. The Christians I have attempted to follow through their changing paths have all been deeply intellectual. Jesus was brilliant and confounded his critics, threatening their legitimacy until they killed him. Paul changed the world, turning his knowledge of Jesus the Christ into a movement that would eventually overcome the alternative systems in Europe and temporarily in Africa and Asia, until overcome by Islam. Augustine synthesized classical culture and Christianity to lay the ground for a new culture. Much of his intellectual synthesis is still relevant today, and it lived in the later figures I follow. Martin Luther, the scholarly monk, started the revolution that changed Europe in the sixteenth century and laid the ground for faith as assurance of salvation and meaning that I hold today, as well as beginning the struggle for the freedoms of the Christian person. John Calvin, the brilliant classical scholar, driven into exile, came back to overcome superstitious power and to free Christian humanism to flourish in schools in Geneva and then in the world. The Oxford scholar John Wesley merged his immense learning into evangelical Christianity in a movement to reform church and society in England and later in America. Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, by teaching a generation of students, laid the intellectual ground for Christianity in the later twentieth century and a base for relevant Christian faith in the twenty-first. The book represents a personal appropriation of this in one person and an attempt to write about it for another generation.

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2. Christian social action began in the Methodist Youth Fellowship in a small Iowa town and moved to the Navajo reservation in high school. It blossomed in race relations work in the Methodist Student Movement in 1957 and found a theoretical base in the 1960s in New York City at Union Seminary. It took action in civil rights; school reform movements; the United Nations; Washington, D.C.; unionization of workers; socialresponsible investment; and the fight against apartheid. Later it was acted out in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and in southern Lebanon in dialogue with Hezbollah, demonstrations in Israel, and teaching in India. Its most extensive work on theory for practice took place in the Presbyterian Church from 1975 to 2013 in the development of progressive Christian realism in Presbyterian Church policies. 3. I became interested first in expositing Reinhold Niebuhr’s perspective on international politics and social theory. Then I undertook to restore his reputation after he fell under extreme criticism within his own school and journal as well as by various forms of more radical Christian social theory. He has never been free of criticism from proponents of the pacifism and Marxism that he abandoned in the 1930s. His combination of empiricism, pragmatism, Christian theology, and progressive reform remains the best approach to mainline Christian social action. It is challenged and inspired by more radical movements based in the sufferings of the oppressed populations. 4. The interpretation of the depth and experience of Paul Tillich as a social theologian has been part of the work since 1975. His socialism failed to stop Nazism, but his exile provided an opportunity to fight back in his broadcasts into occupied Europe. The depth of his works on social theory was matched by social action essays in both Germany and America. My interpretation has been that though he was more active in Germany, his work in Christian social action was important in the United States. In some issues he went deeper and was more correct than Niebuhr. The interpretation of Tillich, like the others I have written less about, is an important part of the story of Christian faith’s relevance. 5. On a more general level, I have been writing about the importance of morality and religion to the practice of international relations my whole career. Now as the career fades into its twilight, I am glad to be able to recognize that many others are taking up this task in writing and practice. The cause seems to have been won, as it has prevailed over the more secular consensus during my formative years in the Kennedy presidency. Of course, I not only wrote about it but also often took students to the United Nations for seminars and wrote about it for the Council for Christian Social Action in 1963 and developed programs for it in the Presbyterian Church. One of my favorite courses for half a century was the course developed by Niebuhr, “Moral Issues in International Politics.” He taught it, John C.

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Bennett and I taught it, and eventually I taught it at Union and Pittsburgh and wrote several books about it. The theme runs throughout this book. As befits an intellectual biography, some aspects of my life are missing from the story told here. I do not say much about all of the courses I studied from high school through graduate school, though they added up to eight years of post-college study. I have refrained from mentioning the women I dated out of respect for their privacy and to avoid any embarrassment to them or to myself. I married two wonderful women and dated in between those marriages, and those I married are mentioned as important aspects of my life. I married a third time, and it is a grand marriage that will last, as the vows pledge, until I leave this earth.

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Chapter 1

Birth In the early years of the Great Depression, my father, Hubert Stone, returned to work in Humboldt, Iowa, in 1932. He had transferred Humboldt High School credits to Washington High in Los Angeles to help his sister Carol care for her professor husband and their two sons. The reason for his transfer for a year to Los Angeles remains unclear, but he learned architectural drawing there. He had been born in 1914 as war approached in Europe. He grew up in the farming-market town of Humboldt, founded by Unitarian utopians. They had hoped to create a Harvard of the West, but instead they ended with their numbers diminished by more evangelical denominations. They founded an ecumenical, liberal church that was pastored by the first woman graduate of a seminary. Their high moral atmosphere, abstinence, and abolitionism left a heritage of no liquor stores, and a town park named after John Brown of Harper’s Ferry infamy. In Hubert’s school days the town’s national stature rested upon its fame as the home of the world-champion wrestler Frank Gotch. His son was a school friend and playmate of Hubert, who would often say that Frank Gotch Jr. was not particularly tough. The Stone family lived on First Street across from the Methodist Episcopal Church in the great mansion of the community. It was built by an earlier mayor whose daughter followed her father into the practice of law. Hubert had arrived rather late in his parents’ marriage, and the best family picture has his six siblings looking upon him quizzically as if to ask, “What do we do with this one?” More important to his storytelling than his education in California was driving his Whippet over the Rocky Mountains on his way home. He would pass the transcontinental trailers on the way up the mountains, and they would rush past him on the downside. High school and one term of technical college in California provided the extent of his education. His brother, Harold, and sisters had been educated at Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls, where they lived in a house their mother, Lois, had purchased. Grandfather Stone remained in Humboldt to run the hardware, realty, and farming sources of income. Two of his sisters married college professors, but Hubert’s experience in Carol Stone Metfessel’s home in Los Angeles persuaded him that college professors had no advantage over anyone else. Hubert met Bernice Tilton while working on farms west of Humboldt, where she taught school. Hubert never farmed for himself, as his ancestors had, nor would he follow them in the teaching trade. As an older man his reminiscences were often about his horse-working days for his brother-in-law Ed Dyvig. His sons could not help but think that those days behind the horses and the hard work of picking corn by hand were some of his best days. Bernice boarded with the Perry family, and they introduced the two. She had been formed intellectually as a valedictorian from Eagle Grove High School and one year of college at Eagle Grove Junior College. Her illiterate, mechanical genius of a grandfather, Walter Tilton, found money to assist in her last year of high school and first year of college while she boarded privately in Eagle Grove. He could fix

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most machinery, and Bernice recalled reading him from picture catalogs the names of parts he needed to repair his threshing machinery. In her declining, later years she would write to her grandson at Harvard as to how she wished she had his experience or that of her sons, who studied at Morningside, Iowa; Yale; the University of Chicago; and two at Columbia. Handsome Hubert, as the son of the owners of the grandest home in Humboldt, with his winsome personality, reputation for hard work, and discipline, seemed like a fine catch. The school mistress herself was winsome and beautiful. Their courtship was interrupted by Hubert’s work “back east” in Indiana and Illinois in a dairy managed by brother Harold and as a foreman of a traveling auto show. Bernice properly refused all advances to cross state lines to visit him. Their correspondence brought him back to Humboldt to work as a carpenter, and marriage followed. Nine months after their May 1938 wedding, a family tragedy impelled an early birth for me. Mary, Hubert’s older sister, had married Edward Dyvig, who farmed near the Perry place. The traumatic death of their son suffocating in a corn crib shook the Stone family, who gathered in the family mansion for Sunday lunch on March 26, 1939. Before the midnight hour, Ronald was delivered in his grandparents’ bed. Soon he was put to rest in the drawer of the walnut bureau of the grandparents’ bedroom. In a few days, the first Dyvig’s death was followed by that of his inconsolable brother, who had contracted pneumonia. In those years, women teachers were expected to be single, and by her marriage Bernice retired from teaching. She would return to teaching in 1961 out of financial necessity after Hubert lost his construction company. Chautauqua was important in keeping her alive intellectually during those years of enforced homemaking. Bible study at the Congregational Church, the successor to the earlier Unitarian foundations of the town, also enriched her life. Their home was full of books, and discussions, particularly of history, were part of the family staple diet as remembered by the eldest son. Life, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, the Palimpsest (the publication of the Iowa historical society), three newspapers (from Fort Dodge, Des Moines, and Humboldt), and the Saturday Evening Post were always present. Later, occasionally, Dad’s smoking table would have an Esquire on the lower shelf. Gun and hunting magazines were present for a while, and there were sometimes copies of Sports Illustrated. He read cowboy books and history, and Mother’s choices were broad and selected from the local Carnegie Library in Humboldt. Dad filled a large room under the eaves off the second floor guest bedroom with shelves for the books we kept (mostly paperback cowboy books, with the whole collection of Louis L’Amour and decades of National Geographic). Each parent had a built-in bookshelf beside a personal chair in the living room. Dad’s had volumes of history from his father’s house: Churchill’s history of World War II and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Mother’s cabinet had volumes of condensed books from the Reader’s Digest, selections from the Book of the Month Club, and volumes from the Chautauqua reading circle, several of which she had reviewed for the society. Though Dad dominated discussion of the facts of history and how the world worked, Mother was the better reader of the two, and she exercised her intellect more than he did. Dad

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did not seek out opportunities for intellectual discussion, but maintained social relations with workers who were met on the job, in the bars, or around the pool table. His heritage had been intellectual from his father and grandfather and grandmother, but he was proud of keeping his feet on the ground and happiest with the workers of our small town. He had a strong egalitarian streak, of which he often reminded me with his frequent references to “we all put our trousers on one leg at a time.” In retrospect, I think there was a note of self-defense in his choice of lifestyle and friends. Mother, on the other hand, valued education highly and chose her friendships among the besteducated women in the town. She looked up to the women leaders of the community and played her role among them.

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Chapter 2

Childhood My home in Dakota City was humble compared to the corner, three-story mansion in the larger Humboldt. Our home, located near the Dakota City garbage dump and a ravine on a gravel street, is remembered as warm and cozy by me and my three-and-ahalf-year-younger brother, Alan. It was next to an empty lot, and across the street was a small cornfield adjacent to the garbage dump. The home had an outside toilet that stood beside the garage where Hubert kept his tools. Hubert built a wooden trailer he pulled behind his Plymouth to carry his tools to job sites. He consistently reminded his boys of his disrespect for workmen who could not furnish their own tools. Eventually he would found his own company in which he hired men to use his tools and equipment. When I was six the family used the trailer to move to the larger, cement-block house three blocks away. I remember how proud I was that I could ride on the back of the trailer while my younger brother had to be transported in the car. The new house, built (but not finished) by a block layer, was on a corner lot with an orchard lot adjoining. The house across the street was inhabited by an elderly couple who were permitting the house to fall down around them. Across the other street was an empty field that visiting circuses sometimes used. Next to the lot used by the family as an orchard and garden was a hay field. If one stood in the middle of the street, one could see the cornfields on the edge of town, which was only a block away. The other side of the town was farther, and the street ran three blocks to the school and another four blocks to the railroad tracks and cornfields. The Iowa skies dominated by the Milky Way were an inspiration to the young boy, who, impressed by the grandeur of nature, gave thanks to God. The association with my grandparents’ house provided a sense of entitlement, which both my parents mildly encouraged. Their house had its own orchard and small grove. Its corner turret was flanked on two sides by a front and side porch. Grapevines, a chicken yard and house, and a fish pond completed the yard. Each of the Stone children could have his or her own room, and sliding doors opened up the two living rooms and entryway for balls or other festive occasions. The grand staircase was lighted by a twostory stained glass window leading up to the master bedroom where I was born. Crowning the staircase were several glass-covered bookcases containing mostly history books. When as a little boy I visited my widowed Grandfather Stone I usually found him in his workroom-study in the basement reached by dark halls and lit by a welcoming light and the smell of apple-scented tobacco. He spent his working hours on the family genealogy. The small, wild grove was not large enough for me to become lost, but it was large enough to escape the view from houses around it. Belonging or entitlement was largely passed on by admonitions that we were different, and we honored our family’s ways, not the ways of our Dakota City neighbors. “Others were doing it” was not an excuse for failure or bad manners. Grandfather’s work on

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genealogy in his pipe- and apple-scented workroom reinforced the sense of belonging, with claims to Revolutionary War and Mayflower ancestors. He kept writing drafts of an essay titled “What Makes Iowa Great,” using his family stories as a theme. To my knowledge, it was never published. He did finish a massive study of family genealogy, including the lines of his wife, her parents, and other lines tracing finally to his family. He covered two copies of it for his two sons and also produced copies for some of his daughters. The hardcover volumes contained not only names but also incidents surrounding the lives of some of the ancestors. Of course, in the Iowa way, we were expected to be innocent of knowledge of family finances. Only when I was working in the Council Oak grocery store, two blocks from my Humboldt High School, carrying groceries after school was I provided with a clue. Dad, as the owner of Stone Construction Company, had built the grocery store in which I stocked shelves and carried farm wives’ purchases to their cars. One day, after school, I was directed to carry an order of groceries to apartment number five in the “Stone” block. My questions led me to discover that Grandpa owned most of the buildings and second-floor apartments in that block. The mansion, its ballroom and seven fireplaces, and warrens of passages and rooms, should have informed me, but the discovery of the “Stone” block in 1955 furnished more information than I had earlier discerned. About this time, my father was losing control over Stone Construction Company due to drink and less skill in business than in building. The strain of business mixed with alcohol was too much, and a year after my high school graduation he declared bankruptcy. He then finished his career as a concrete foreman for two other successive Humboldt corporations. Grandfather, at eighty-five years of age, followed his wife in death, ten years earlier, the year before I graduated from high school. The mansion would be sold, with the farm, and several buildings to provide considerable inheritances to the seven children. Dad’s inheritance was consumed by the failure of Stone Construction, but other siblings had their comfort increased. The mansion of my premature birth would be divided and subdivided for apartments. As late as 1980, I could wander its halls with a friend from Pittsburgh. A couple of years later, it was demolished. In my memory, that mansion was almost midway between the East and West forks of the Des Moines River, guaranteeing my place between the two rivers. Two towns coexisted between the East and West forks of the Des Moines River. Dakota City was the older and poorer of the two. We lived there first in the little frame house and after my first year of school, in the larger cement block house with gray stucco. The little house has memories of World War II, war toys, a brother dying soon after birth, and the birth of Alan, whose nighttime sleep in our room was often interrupted by colic. Dad had volunteered for military service immediately after Pearl Harbor with the other young men from Humboldt County. But an injured arm prevented his acceptance, though he tried several branches of the service. He was absent from home for months while building barracks in Missouri. Next to Dakota City, its name full of memories of the former occupants of this beautiful area of Iowa was Humboldt. The railroad depot and tracks marked the unimportant border between the towns. Dad’s construction office was in Humboldt, as were our

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Methodist church and high school. Dakota City managed to retain the county seat status it had achieved, being the earlier town, while Humboldt prospered as a rural trading community and small manufacturing center. The respective populations were about six hundred and six thousand. Bernice, our mother, would take Alan and me on spring walks in the ravine near our first house to pick wildflowers and sometimes to transplant them in our small yard. It was a deep ravine formed by two creeks that merged on their way to the East Fork of the Des Moines River. Mother never gave notice to the vertical cut in the side of the ravine, but later in my research I would conclude that it was the remains of the very dugout the first pioneers to Dakota City had lived in during their first winter and that our grandfather Eber had visited on his journey to dig his own dugout across the Des Moines River in the fall of 1854. We boys became oriented to the ravine, and we continued to play in it into our high school years. As we approached adolescence, we would branch out, following the railroad tracks of the Minneapolis and St. Louis or the Chicago-Northwestern rail tracks to boy-time adventures. The banks of the Des Moines River were graced by unofficial walking trails, and the river became our swimming hole and fishing place. Dad built a picket fence around our yard to contain us growing boys and our first puppy. My first memory of Dad is his playing with me and my new toy Caterpillar tractor with a blade and an attached wagon as we pushed and loaded orange peels on a breakfast table one Christmas morning. He built me wooden toys, including a huge machine gun that rotated and made noise as I fired it. I was born in 1939, and the sense of the presence of war never left me, even though I would become a peacemaking activist in later life. My life would never see an absence of war, preparing for war, or internal war within allied countries with U.S. involvement. A swing and a horse made out of a sawhorse soon followed the machine gun; in my mind, the sawhorse represented the cowboy West, which has continued to fascinate me into my elderly years. I did not return home after my first day of school. Instead, I went home with Virginia Terwilliger and spent the afternoon playing in her sandbox with her. (Was this a harbinger of future problems?) Eventually her mother phoned my mother to find out when I was expected home; my mother requested I come home immediately. I remained sweet on Virginia through most of grade school, though when she started wearing bras and showing shape it was frightening to me. She matured much faster than I, who was already too young for my grade, and I remember being frustrated when she wanted to flirt with the other boys rather than properly playing fox and goose in the pathways in the snow of the schoolyard. Before we moved to the larger house, one Christmas, Dad gave me a cardboard train. During the war, electric trains were not readily available. It was difficult to assemble, and I don’t think we ever got it all built. It reflected Dad’s longing that the boys have trains. One Christmas when he desperately wanted an electric train as a boy, his father gave ten dollars to the Methodist Church, and so, according to Dad, he could not afford to then buy him an electric train. I do not know if this contributed to Dad’s ambivalence about the Church, but it was clear that it drove him to provide each of his four boys with electric trains. As we grew up in two pairs (Ronald and Alan, and Hugh and Roger),

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the older boy of each pair got a head start on the trains and received more of Dad’s bounty in the trains. Their commitments developed accordingly, and the two older boys of each pair maintained their interest in electric trains into their adulthood. My and Alan’s train boards stood side by side in the basement until the smaller one was taken down or moved aside to make room for boxing in the basement. I was given boxing gloves when I was around seven years of age and instructed to never run from a fight; it was okay to be beaten, but never to desist from a proffered fight or challenge. I had started first grade at four-and-a-half years of age. This led to several losses to larger, heavier boys in grade school. I do not remember any of the other kids in school having boxing gloves, and this eventually led to our building a boxing ring in the side yard, and the boxing becoming a focus in our house. This led inevitably toward my discovering that even the bigger boys did not like to be hit in the nose, and gradually I won a reputation as skilled with my fists. The reputation, as was often the case in my life, was bigger than the reality, but after knocking the wind out of a much larger boy in the school gymnasium I won a reputation as a boxer. I’ll always remember the prettiest girl in eighth grade, Sheryl Severson, complimenting me on my victory over my older and larger friend Jerry. The event that could be regarded as my first date was buying her a Coca-Cola at the restaurant across the street when we were both in eighth grade. The boys in the small classes at Dakota City were an undistinguished lot in academics. We all regarded it as best to be average, and so we were average. I cannot remember my straight-A-average mother ever complaining about my grades. Dad, however, did intervene in fifth grade and insist to the teacher that I be kept after school until I learned my math. It only took a couple of detentions for me to decide to master mathematics. Dad at the time was a major employer in the town and a member of the school board. Several of the children in my classes were from families whose father worked for Dad’s construction company. Sometimes they knew things about my father that I had not learned. It seemed that there were always trucks rolling by with the name of Stone Construction Company on their doors, and this somewhat embarrassed me. I think I probably wanted him to be less successful so that I would seem average. I remember that pretty girl who had complimented me later, upon seeing Mother in her fur coat and her new 1952 Hudson, blushing and asking me if we got a new car every year (we didn’t). I continued to be an average student, except in history and geography, through eighth grade and even into high school, when we moved from the Dakota City grade school to Humboldt High. Though three-and-a-half years younger, Alan was four years behind me in school, and he found it easy to adore and admire his older brother. I really did not deserve his admiration until years later, when I started to take life seriously. Our school days were lazy and gentle in the small-town school of red brick. In the fall, we walked through a blaze of Iowa color, our own red maple that Dad and I planted adding to the fall glory. Apple trees, a plum tree, a walnut tree, black cherry tree, a spreading box elder tree, and a row of poplars completed our home, which also contained a chicken house and many rabbit hutches.

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Each morning before school there were the chores of feeding and watering the hens and the rabbits. The collection of eggs regularly supplied our needs, and occasionally we would eat a chicken or a rabbit from the collection. Mother or Great-Grandmother would, until we grew into the task, skin the game we hunted by the river or the railroad tracks. Eventually we learned to dress our meager fish catches from the East Fork of the Des Moines River. Mother taught us to fish, and she would accompany us before we were able to go ourselves, and then in the summer Alan and I would go off to the river to fish for bullheads, carp, and occasionally a catfish. The river was a major recreational spot for us; summer afternoons under a mulberry tree with a line in the water were rewarding regardless of the catch. The river was also our swimming hole, and we usually were careful. An exception was one day when the two of us went to the river with our dog, a Newfoundland–water spaniel mix named Blackie. Mother knew the river was high, and she explicitly forbade any swimming that day. Neither Alan nor I could really swim yet, but the river we thought we knew well was usually so low that one could wade across. Alan became concerned that the dog was venturing out in deeper water, and he followed. The dog was fine, but Alan was soon swept into deeper water and was drifting downstream. I followed him, realizing he was in danger; I could usually hit solid bottom by jumping up and down, but Alan’s shorter legs denied him any solid footing. In a mixture of boys and dog we finally reached the other side safely. I left Alan naked on that side of the river with Blackie while I went for help. I crossed the river on the railroad bridge and ran into my parents in the woods. Mother had become concerned and had phoned Dad, and they had come looking for us. We retrieved my brother and the dog; Alan claimed the dog had prevented his attempt to recross the river. All was well, and spankings that ensued were not too severe. Eventually we learned to swim in classes provided in a neighboring town, and the river became safer; it took me an inordinately long time to learn to swim. Alan learned to swim more quickly, and my memory is of his always doing things a little earlier and better than I was able to achieve. His memory was of trying to keep up. Other children often accompanied us to the river, and I was embarrassed when some of the boys jumped up in the river to expose themselves to the Chicago and Northwestern passengers on the afternoon train crossing the railroad bridge we called the “Black Bridge.” Russell Christenson introduced me to the joy of raising rabbits. It started with the purchase of a New Zealand White doe with my own money. Dad had his men build us two rabbit hutches. Possibly the builder had never seen what passed as a rabbit hutch in Iowa. My pair of hutches were beautiful. Actually, one was for Alan, but as the older I assumed responsibility for his as well. The rabbit population grew through nature, but also by the purchase of Checkered Giants both black and blue, and later by the purchase of Dutch chocolate and black. The final additions were Champagne, purchased in a neighboring town using Charles Wessel’s old car to make the journey. Some of the rabbits won prizes at the local county fair, and some were retailed live or as meat in the local grocery. In the winter we played hockey on the ice, and when the river froze without wind, we could skate for endless distances on the ice and enjoy the clear ice spots where fish

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were visible. One winter, Blackie found herself in open water, where she could not crawl out on the ice, as her front paws kept slipping. There was nothing for it but for me to jump into the icy water of the Des Moines and lift her out. Despite the attempts to warm me with a huge bonfire, I continued to shake from the cold, and so our hockey game was discontinued and I hiked the mile home in freezing blue jeans. Our first camping trip along the other river was spoiled by the bellowing of cows throughout the evening. Other forest noises must have added to the din, which kept us awake most of the night. Most of our excursions along the river were harmless, but there was some minor vandalism that accompanied our expeditions, and some eggs and honey were confiscated for campers’ breakfasts. My early best friend besides Alan was George Tompkins. He played a monkey in a school play, and I enjoyed the role so much I wanted to meet him. My mother arranged the meeting, though George was a couple of years ahead of me in school. We became very close friends. The memory is coupled with stepping out of my house on a winter morning to walk to his house and the cold hit my head so hard it ached. The journey of two-and-a-half blocks was accompanied by the singing of the power and telephone lines as they contracted tightly in the Iowa cold. Before finishing grade school, George contracted polio, and for two years I visited him in his home after we had both moved to different houses. Afternoons were spent playing Lone Ranger with the buildings, maps, and figures from the back of the Cheerios boxes. The exploits of the Ranger and Tonto were also part of our radio fare and later of TV. He got started in Humboldt High School a couple of years before I did, and our friendship waned as the grade differences and maturity levels mattered more in high school than grade school. He later fulfilled his destiny and dream by becoming a forest ranger in the far West. My second best friend was Charles Wessel, a freckle-faced kid with a winsome personality. We enjoyed the river together along with the playing fields. He was the first one to tell me that that we were at war in a place called Korea as we met one afternoon between our houses. Korea did not dominate my consciousness as World War II had. None of our immediate relatives were called to serve. Still we read about it, and special plaster-toy soldiers came from Dad and Mother’s business trips to Sioux City. Chuck and I were endless wrestling companions in our backyard. We hunted some together, and his school came to an end with a hunting accident. He was my age, but a year behind me in high school. He skipped school one day to go hunting and shot himself in the foot while climbing a fence. For weeks I brought him his school lessons and provided some tutoring, but he never returned successfully to high school, and before I graduated from high school he and his family moved away. Dad had his men erect a basketball bang board on the double car garage they had built. The crushed rock driveway provided a better surface than anyone else had, so the driveway became a frequent gathering place for hoops. Ted Perry and Donald Nave were the most frequent players from eighth grade through high school. The boys would play until the yard light from the back porch was inadequate for seeing the hoop. Don was the only one gifted enough to make the high school team, while I played intramural basketball. Ted’s night job at the bakery interfered with his playing. Ted remained a correspondent from his navy service on Adak Island and through the years

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to his retirement from his police officer’s position in Henderson, Nebraska. A few trips west permitted stops to see him and his wife over the years. Richard Moench, a farm boy, and I were close. He recruited me for the 4-H Club basically to bolster the basketball team; my rabbits, which I was showing in the County Fair, became the prerequisite livestock project. His leadership also guided me in motor scooting. His was the better bike, but I remember a trip to give Sandy Kunert a ride on my Allstate scooter. He later married her, and they farmed west of Humboldt after moving from a farm south of Dakota City on the road to the forks of the Des Moines River. He was the other academically gifted boy in my class, and, while friends, we may have been subtle rivals as well. He was the captain of the safety crossing guards, and I served as lieutenant. For reasons unknown to me, our eighth-grade teacher and coach made me captain of the basketball team and the baseball team, though there were many bigger boys than I, and they played better, too. Our junior high team had five players over six feet tall, three of whom were starters along with Richard and me. I remember being especially awed that his family prayed twice over their supper meal when I visited his family to stay overnight. We were not close in high school, as he and the other farm boys hung out in the Future Farmer’s Shop and Educational Building. I identified more with the Humboldt boys whom I met through the Methodist Youth Fellowship. As we grew older, he became captain of the football team and I remained a third-stringer. My turn to amateur boxing fulfilled my athletic needs to compete at my own size and to win. My scores on standardized tests were usually off the charts in several subjects, but the grades continued to be pretty mediocre until eighth grade and my first male teacher, Mr. Zimmerman, the aforementioned coach. The county superintendent of schools, Mrs. Messer, had an administrative role in the standardized tests, and I remember the teachers communicating a fear of her, which I also absorbed. Only a score of years later would I learn that my great-grandfather, a homesteading pioneer from New York State, had been an early county superintendent of Humboldt County Schools. Again, Iowa reticence about family roles and accomplishments kept information from the growing children. It took me until I was myself retired to learn that Great-Grandpa married Miss Knowles, who had been one of his school teachers. The Knowles family introduced Quaker strands into our family, who in earlier generations had been found in the more warlike churches of Baptists or Presbyterians. Grandparents were often in our home. Grandpa Stone’s wife died when I was four. He would often take supper in our home, and he was a regular overnight guest on a couch in our dining room. Before the younger boys’ births there was a guest room upstairs, but in my memory he always slept on the couch in the dining room. In some ways unknown to me he helped my father financially in the closing years of Dad’s construction business during my high school years. A few years we hunted in the dry slough on his farm east of Dakota City, but never with much success. Grandpa was pretty quiet, but occasionally he would tell us stories of early pioneer days. We never learned enough to be really informed, but only enough to whet our appetites. He would occasionally buy the beefsteak for supper, and he built us boys a beautiful wooden barn about three feet long in his workshop in the basement of his mansion. He

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may have felt limited by our father in his outreach to us boys, or maybe he was not that interested in his last years. I have a dim memory of his suggesting Darwin’s evolution was a better guide than Christian faith, and my father shushing that conversation. He played chess with Dad, but I don’t think he played with me. Alan and I honed our skills on each other, as it was not popular or known among our peers. Great-Grandmother Sadie Tilton lost her husband, Walter, to a heart attack. With his death the support he had provided for my mother’s college dried up, and her siblings ended formal education with high school and service in World War II. Sadie lived in an upstairs apartment after farming with her son, Wilbur, proved unsuccessful. He and his wife, Teresa, moved to Humboldt as renters in a house beside Sadie’s apartment. They scraped together a meager living with him working first at the DeKalb corn plant and then as a dishwasher in the Eateria on Main Street. Grandma Tilton worked as a cook and housecleaner for the mayor and as a cook at the hotel. Their youngest child, Helen, was quite clear that she was conscious of growing up poor. She was a senior in Humboldt High School when I entered as a freshman in 1952. So we boys learned that one side of the family was relatively wealthy while the other side was poor, but that was not of too much consequence to us in egalitarian-pretending Iowa. Years later I would hear of Mother being honored to serve as a maid in white gloves at one of Grandmother Stone’s socials in the mansion. Jonieta, a sister-in-law, related to me decades later that Bernice thought she had married the richest young man in the county in 1938. Except for a few years in the 1950s they lived relatively humbly, with money going quickly into the company’s expansion. Mother dreamed of a new house, and Dad explored building it in a forest southeast of Dakota City, but it would never become reality. However, he built for a customer perhaps the finest home in Humboldt at the year of its construction in 1956. I would often visit Grandfather Stone in the rest home between the high school and our home in Dakota City. Earlier I had visited him in his home across from our Methodist Church in Humboldt. In these later years Grandpa liked to pee out beside the garage or near the chicken house, and I learned this manly art from him. His father had been a writer, and though he never talked about it, I think Henry had ambitions to write something besides the genealogy that he was forever working on, but I don’t think he succeeded. He produced several drafts of a story of pioneer life, though. He smoked a pipe until one day in his eighties he asked the doctor about it. The doctor advised him to quit, and he did. Henry often played cards in the Masonic Lodge, and our paths would sometimes cross there if I stopped by to play pool with some of the boys from DeMolay, the junior organization of boys for the Masons. Twenty years later I would visit the grave of Jacques DeMolay, martyred by the French king, on the Île de la Cité in Paris. He took the Masons seriously, and the Church less so. I do not remember him attending services, though he had been a member of the Presbyterian Church in a smaller town in the county, Livermore, where he had served as mayor. He and his wife, Lois, were members of the Congregational Church in Humboldt, where he was memorialized with full Masonic rites as part of the service. Grandma Tilton had been raised Roman Catholic, and she would have remained such except in rural Iowa the Methodist Church was closer and she wanted her children to

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be raised Christian. Without a car the Methodist Church was a good option in the bitter winters, and so the family destiny turned toward the Methodist Church. Dad and Mother married in the Methodist Church in Humboldt, and the Stone boys grew through the Sunday schools and Methodist Youth Fellowship. Grandma, Teresa Riley Tilton, brought the Irish strand into the family, which, composed of Tiltons, Stones, Knowleses, and Coles, was decidedly English. This would not have been so significant except for Dad’s emphasis on things English and his encouraging us to discuss English history, famous English battles, kings, and Winston Churchill. Certainly, my visit with Alan to Gibraltar and with Randall to the field of Waterloo were predetermined by my father’s stories of England. Much the same is true for my study at Oxford and his first visit abroad to see me at Cambridge University. The big event of his first trip to England was to stand on the deck of Nelson’s flagship Victory. On that visit I took him to Stonehenge and the battlefield of Hastings. Introducing him to England was partial payment for lessons learned years earlier as a small boy listening to his perspective in the living room. My appreciation of the Hymn of Agincourt, the need to see the Bayeux Tapestry of the Hastings battle, and to walk the field of Waterloo all grew out of those tales of English history from Dad. Brothers Michael and Bruce lived only a short time. Sister Cecilia lived for six months before her death. These were times of depression and mourning. Mother derived comfort from her folk-orthodox belief that she would be reunited with them in death. Dad had no such comfort. Mother bore her grief openly and in discussion; Dad drove his mourning and grief deeply into himself. Mother recovered her spirit with the birth first of Hugh and then of Roger in 1952 and 1954. She still longed for a daughter, as she often reminded her oldest. But she now had four strong sons. Hubert found solace in beer and after-work drinking, which ill prepared him for following business reverses and disappointments from associates whose assistance he had counted upon. Hugh and Roger were bright, strong leaders, and with the paths blazed by their older brothers they dominated their classes and schools. Alan, as student council president at the high school, could show them expectations, and Hugh and Roger added to his laurels with their own. I was gone, first to college in Sioux City and then to seminary in New York City, and it was Alan who really provided guidance. I fled Iowa and the unhappy family I had known. Joan Loftus and I married early, at twenty, with my parents’ legal consent, and the next year we left for New York. Alan first and then Hugh and Roger became Boy Scouts, founding the Dakota City Troop. There were, of course, adult leaders they recruited, but the Stone boys were the driving force. Their scouting would take them to Japan’s Mount Fuji during a typhoon. The project one year was to sell and install the first street signs and house numbers Dakota City had ever had. This gave the townspeople real addresses, and not just mailboxes at the Ulrich family–run post office. (Reinhold Niebuhr explained to me once that the reason he hadn’t answered my letter the past summer was because there was no street address, only the name Dakota City, Iowa. Being a small-town Midwesterner himself, he later bashfully admitted he should have known no street address was needed.) But by the time Hugh and Roger had funded their scout troop, Dakota City had real addresses.

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Joan and I would come home, usually once in the summer and once during the winter holidays. Joan was almost a sister to the boys and something of a lost daughter to Bernice, as Joan’s own family had rejected her for marrying a pre-theological student and moving away from her Roman Catholicism. In later life I would exert some influence as a counselor, particularly to Hugh, who followed me and Alan to seminary. I sent Roger Samuel Terrien’s children’s Bible one Christmas, and Roger devoured it, as he did most reading. The raising of questions from this French scholar’s New York perspective did not sit well with Roger’s Sunday school teachers, and the minister finally asked Roger not to ask questions in the class. This might have deterred probably the most able of the Stone boys from seeking a church vocation. The love between the two younger boys expressed in school, home, scouts, and church is caught by Roger’s testimony to his brother’s scouting. Hugh, I treasure so many memories of us as scouts. I remember earning my tenderfoot badge in the car with you headed to Okoboji for my first summer camp. I remember your Eagle Scout ceremony, your being the first troop member tapped for the Order of the Arrow, your going to the national jamboree in Idaho, serving on the camp staff together, and so many campouts and troop meetings. I recall with great emotion a weekend at Peterson, when we divided our troop into the athletes and others, so that we might better compete in the contests. The patrol of scouts you had trained and I led that day, easily won first place because of our training. But the miracle of the day was that you brought our second team of many challenged scouts in as the third-place finishing team among 60 teams. That result speaks volumes about my memories of you as leader, motivator, friend and brother. Our youth was filled with so many things: signal towers, monkey bridges, swimming in the lake, canoes, square knots, Morse code, constellations, “the men from Nairobi.” Dakota holes, huge bonfires, 5 mile hikes, walking across the black bridge, riding logs near Paradise Island, burdock roots, folding the flag, reveille and taps, mess kits, burgers and American fries wrapped in tinfoil, pancakes, the Scout oath and motto, pup tents, basketry, merit badges, the God and Country award. We would struggle to rank what experiences or persons have most shaped who we are: Mom, the luxury of growing up in a small Iowa town, our older brothers, our friends, education, church, or scouts. Although it is hard to single out any one of these and know its lasting impact, our years as scouts certainly have had a great formative influence on both of us. For me, you remain one of a few people who best exemplify the Scout motto. You provided me such a great standard of a person who is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

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Best wishes and happy 58th birthday, love, Roger, March 31, 2010 In retrospect, it was quite important that I had an experience of Hubert as a strong, successful man before beer distorted his character. As his drunkenness increased, my problem was Mother’s sadness and criticism of my failing father. We would wait at the dining-room double window, hoping that the next headlights might be Hubert’s returning. Only occasionally would I go into the tavern to ask Dad to come home. Hubert would comply with the requests. I did not see Dad lose his business prowess until I entered high school, and my memories of the earlier father stood me in good stead. My brothers could follow me with support from other men in the church and town. For me, the church was the basic support, and I was encouraged to turn that success into leadership at the high school. All four boys were presidents of their high school classes or the student council, receiving all sorts of awards, academic and social. My scholarly achievements were less stellar than those of the other three boys. I did not really separate myself from being average until the senior year in Humboldt High School. The success in Methodist Youth Fellowship and amateur boxing translated into an ego security and, particularly from the Church, a faith that instilled a basic trust at about sixteen years of age that permitted me to achieve my goals. Royal Bennett, a banker, and Albert Morehouse, the executive officer of the local DeKalb corn plant, took me under their wings, encouraging me in religious faith, education, and leadership. Our local Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) followed the curriculum of the national Methodist Church. This course of study often dealt with Church thinking and action about social justice issues. It also covered more than the school issues of sexuality. I date my first introduction to Christian social thought to this MYF about 1953. One year I gave my paycheck from the Council Oak grocery store to the MYF mission fund, and I remember that we organized visits to under-churched youth in the community. Bennett, who served as a delegate to the national Methodist General Conference, heard my question as to why there was not a work camp for high school students. He learned of one for the summer at the Navajo Methodist Mission in Farmington, New Mexico. The summer working in New Mexico formed in me a passion for justice for the Native American that never disappeared. My first public speeches were reports on the Indian situation to local service clubs, and the next year I carried the topic into public speaking events at the local high school. The trip also fueled my love for the West, which I inherited from Dad’s fondness for cowboy novels. The summer before going to high school I had taken a bus to Moscow, Idaho, to work on a cousin’s ranch. I couldn’t give much significant assistance to the farm work, but I had a great summer, developed a crush on my cousin Lois Ann, and saw eastern Washington and Idaho through her eyes, growing in admiration for Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce. I had read the novel The Virginian that summer in preparation for the bus stop in Laramie. An afternoon’s stop in Omaha provided me time to visit the Northwestern Taxidermy School, from which I had completed a correspondence course, earning the largest diploma of any of my academic adventures. All of us boys knew of our parents’ talk of divorce. Ronald and Alan saw Mother smash a dinner plate over Dad’s face, and knew that she had confined him in jail overnight. At times I was angry, but I lacked the self-transcendence to understand the reason for this

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anger. I knew the anger was distorting. At the time, I couldn’t grasp that it might have a positive function. I escaped the pain of anger through prayer. Though some of the pain was dispersed, arrows of it were driven deeply into me. I wished for my parents to divorce, though in the 1950s no one I knew had divorced, and certainly no one in my family. The deep family pain and recurring thoughts of the answer of separation and divorce to an unending conflict, of course, contributed very little to the future of my marriages. Still in college, I failed to understand what the sociologists meant by the family as the foundation of society. I failed for years to understand that which my nearly broken family had contributed. I saw myself as an individual buttressed by a town, a school, and a church rather than as the social animal and family creature I truly was. Among other interpretations, the metaphor of two rivers came to mean the tension between parents. Mother was the religious person who, until she returned to full-time teaching, volunteered in the community’s welfare work. Dad was the hard businessman who was skeptical regarding both the Church and its participants’ integrity. He often remarked about the hypocrisy of those who attended church but could not live out its ethics. He would explain to his sons that he “bought his workers like a bunch of bananas, and that our living depended on his charging more for their labor than he paid them.” He expected us to work hard, and we all worked for him and with him for other companies after he lost his. The construction workers were mostly a hard bunch, and I only remember one ever coming to our church except for funerals. Rolly would sometimes sit in the church balcony alone during the service. Mother’s life before needing to return to full-time teaching was that of a service volunteer, substitute teacher of the adult Sunday school class, church circle leader, and Eastern Star member. My life of teaching would then follow Mother’s pattern more than Hubert’s, but his skepticism has remained a haunting possibility in my mind even to the present. Mother felt my religious commitments were too intellectual and not enough of the heart. She remembered my answering the call to Jesus’s discipleship during the evangelical revival at the church under the leadership of Lawrence La Coeur. She knew the young adolescent had an emotional religious experience then, but she did not discuss it, and the revival was not mentioned at home after the first evening, when Aunt Mary mentioned it in the living room with Dad and Mother present. An altar call was probably too emotional and too public for the more private, gentle religious commitments of the family. The two rivers flowed together as all forked rivers do. The waters eventually mix, though for a while their different compositions may be evident in the one stream. I was aware of both streams—though sometimes ashamed of one and hurt by the other, they were my sources.

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Chapter 3

High School Under the watchful eye of Mr. Zimmerman, I began to excel in grade school. Mr. Zimmerman, the principal of the eighth-grade elementary school, chose me for special attention. My grades improved, so I entered the far larger Humboldt High School with some confidence. Still, my association with the Dakota City boys did not permit me to excel in high school until my senior year. By that time I had found my way through the church to associations with the better students in Humboldt. Eventually I became student council president, class treasurer, and winner of awards. I even moved my grades up close to my ability. I really hoped to succeed in football. But after serving as waterboy for Dad’s construction prior to my freshman year, I found the workers on the town’s curb-andgutter project that Dad had contracted for playing as seniors on the football team. They weighed between 180 and 200 pounds, and I weighed 115 pounds. Even in my sophomore year the 125 pounds seemed puny. I kept trying, learning to tackle and block on the frozen playing fields of an Iowa winter. I never made it past third team, which basically was a practice team outfitted with inferior equipment in a high school that had sixty-five young men on the team roster. Though finally I scored a touchdown in the opening game of my senior season, I didn’t play much the rest of the season, and finally I injured a tooth in a no-pads drill before the last game of the season. I had more success boxing, winning two bouts before being defeated for the 147-pound novice championship in Des Moines. The coach, who had ignored me throughout my years of trying to play football, became very attentive, and now he urged me to attempt physical feats in gym class with which I had no experience and little skill. I took a job working at the local grocery store from 8 AM to 10 PM on Saturdays and after school on afternoons when I did not have football practice or responsibilities in debate. Various skills such as cutting meat and running a cash register were eventually learned. Basically, I worked as a stock boy or grocery-bagging boy. I kept this position until my senior year, when I learned of a job at the jewelry store waiting on customers and fixing clocks under the supervision of the jeweler. It had shorter hours and more pay. My partner on the debate team was Leola Loftus, a bright junior who had come to the public high school from St. Mary’s grade school, which, like the Dakota City elementary school, was a feeder school for Humboldt High School. The next year her younger sister, Joan, moved to the high school and the debate team. Her partnership on the debate team eventually grew into a romance. Before that I had dated several other girls from the Methodist Youth Fellowship casually. There was a bashful first date with a freshman to the DeMolay Dance, and occasional trips to Fort Dodge to movies and treats afterward. Usually the boys went in a group to the after-game sock hops. Alice Johnson from Dakota City and I were an item before my attention turned to Joan, and I postponed making a decision between the two for many months. They were both a

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year younger, and after I left for college, Alice would become the homecoming queen and Joan would graduate valedictorian of her class. The intellectual intimacy on the debate team led to discussions about religion, and Joan’s allegiance to her local Roman Catholic Church weakened. Her parents did not object at first to our dating. But as my turn toward a church vocation became more certain during my sophomore year of college, her parents’ opposition to our continuing as a couple became clear. At their insistence we visited with a monsignor from Fort Dodge, a nearby city. Joan’s father, Tom, was counseled not to allow Joan’s defection from the Catholic Church to disrupt the Catholicism of the rest of the family, and she eventually had to leave home and finish her senior year of high school living with a supportive teacher of English, Mrs. Helen Rank. The rupture destroyed the relationship between Joan and her father. Other members of the family saw her as they could, but Joan suffered intensely from the estrangement from her large family. My visit to Tom on the farm to discuss the matter brought no understanding. Tom told me that not having parental support for the marriage would put additional pressure on the union, which would be difficult enough without parental displeasure. The summer after graduation from high school, I worked for Dad in replacing the windows and frames in the high school building. My father offered me a contract at so much for each window I glazed. But at the rate agreed upon I could not save any money for college, so we annulled the contract and I worked for a laborer’s wages that summer. Sometimes the construction work was dangerous. Uncle Glen and I were shingling a new barn that Hubert had built. I threw a bundle of shingles onto the two-by-four toehold that already contained a bundle and Uncle Glen. The toehold gave way, dropping shingles and Glen onto the pile of dirt that had been dug out for the footings for the barn. My shingle hatchet followed Uncle, only narrowly missing his head. I wrenched my back clutching the rafters, and no further injury was sustained. Glen’s patience saved me further embarrassment. On another barn job we were attaching aluminum plates to the highest barn in Humboldt County. Shorty Nelson reached out at a height of forty-five feet to detach the aluminum sheet from the rope that hoisted it up to the workers on the barn. He disengaged the aluminum only to have an unexpected thrust of wind carry him off the scaffold with the sheet acting as a full sail. As he let go of the sail he fell directly down onto the rotten building connecting the silo to the barn. The rotting wood saved him as he crashed through the roof and the rafters. Bernie and I scrambled down the scaffold to learn that Shorty was relatively unhurt, though the connection between the silo and the barn needed to be rebuilt. I drove him to Dr. Arendt for a checkup, and the next day Shorty returned to finish the barn job. The next summer I worked for a concrete pipe manufacturing company. The cement mixer at Concrete Products Corporation for the making of concrete pipe was relatively unsafe, as there was no bar to prevent me, the operator, from slipping into the moving mixer, which was loaded from above. The loading process required working at two levels, and there was no ladder but only a way one could clamber up and down. The other dangerous part of this job, which paid a few cents more per hour than other

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laboring jobs in pipe production, was unloading the train hopper of its cement. Some days it would work perfectly; other days one would have to open the cement car and enter it to dislodge the cement from the sides to the conveyor below the hopper. I always approached the entry into the cement hopper car with dread. The final accident worth mentioning was in the restoration of a Main Street building in Humboldt. We were building an extension of the store into the area boarding the alley. I was on the second floor catching bricks being heaved up to me from the truck below. I missed one, which fell between the open timbers and narrowly missed two gentlemen looking at the plans below. One of those who escaped injury was my father, who warned me, “Be more careful!” Construction work, whether for my father or the Concrete Products Corporation, presented challenges to overcome and rough companions to work with and to learn from.

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Chapter 4

Morningside College The glazing work on the windows of the high school building led to the glass supplier, the representative of Cook Paint Company from Fort Dodge, promising me a job at the Cook Paint store in Sioux City, Iowa. That assurance of a job sealed my decision to enroll at Morningside College rather than the others to which I had applied. Dad was losing the company. Driving me to Morningside, Dad gave me $5 for spending money, and that was the end of financial support from the family. On application to the Cook Paint store, I learned that no arrangements for my job had been made. The company took me on in any case. For the first few months at Morningside College I drove the delivery truck each afternoon for the paint company. A typical day that freshman year was to attend class in the morning, take a bus to downtown Sioux City to work in the warehouse, drive the delivery truck until about 5 PM, and walk a few blocks to the police gym for boxing. I was still vocationally uncertain, as I thought about teaching, law, or educational administration. My major academic interests were history and the little political science offered by the college. I took up debating again and participated in the budding International Relations Club, which met at the home of Dr. Albert and Jane Sellen. I had a few dates, but no one intrigued me as much as the girl back home.

BOXING I trained hard at the police gym and managed to drop a few pounds with a protein and vegetable diet. In February, I returned to Des Moines and entered the open lightweight division. The open division had no age limits, and it often involved contests with military personnel and very experienced amateur boxers. Uncle Harold, Hubert’s older brother, warned me about fighting urban men in Des Moines. He had lived in the larger cities “back East,” and his warning was taken seriously, but not to the extent that it dissuaded me. The first evening I scored a technical knockout over a relatively inexperienced fighter. The second night of the tournament I knocked down and defeated a much better boxer. Then I had to face a former football captain from Humboldt with whom I had sparred once in an upstairs room used for a gym in Humboldt. When I entered the ring, a woman behind Bernice said, “Oh no, here’s another one of those mean Stone boys from Dakota City.” Mother Stone had to turn around and inform the lady they were really very nice boys and leaders of their Methodist Youth Fellowship. Younger brother Alan had already won two bouts that evening in the novice division as a middle weight. Dakota City, with only the two-boy team, was listed as in second place in the state tournament the following morning. I won over Jack Hibbard in a well-fought contest. My championship victory over the former football star gave Hubert bragging rights in the Humboldt taverns for a few evenings. A few weeks later I won a bout over a fighter from the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska in the Sioux City tournament, and one from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. I lost to Eugene Wolf, a fighter from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, in a five-round championship match. I admitted

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that I underestimated the skill of my opponent. The sportswriters indicated Stone never could guard against Wolf’s left hook, and I was knocked down several times. Sioux City, which had expected me to represent it in Chicago’s tournament, awarded me the 1957 Sportsman’s Trophy. The difficulty of commuting to train with the Des Moines team and the necessity of earning a living while studying led me to forgo traveling to Chicago with fellow members of the Des Moines club. So I missed the stunning performance of Cassius Clay from the Louisville club that year in the 1957 Golden Gloves.

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Chapter 5

Mexico City College I met Larry Powell at one of the college orientation picnics. The meeting was on the lawn of the Methodist Church beside the campus where the president of the college hosted the picnic. Larry, or “Red,” and I became close buddies that first year. We were both working off the hill of the college. Larry worked in the stockyards, mostly on a night shift, and I worked afternoons. Our tales of Sioux City industry bonded us together, as did our ability to easily receive A’s in the Morningside College work. We found the college a little too easy and slightly dull. We occasionally double dated, and Larry on one occasion escorted Joan Loftus’s sister Patty to the movies in the early weeks of our going home from Morningside. Larry lived with his parents on a farm near Pomeroy, not far from Dakota City. Larry’s boredom with Morningside led him to suggest we go to Mexico City College to study in a seminar organized by Professor Ronald Hilton from Stanford on Mexican politics and society. Larry had a 1952 Chevrolet, and so, after my working for six weeks at Humboldt’s Concrete Products Corporation and Larry at the stockyards, we abandoned our jobs and left for Mexico City in Larry’s Chevrolet. We camped out beside the highway or in parks to save money. One evening in Louisiana we were asked, “Are you all with the Camp Fire Girls?” We had staked out our sleeping places too near a camp of the young Louisiana girls. We gracefully moved on, but that night we were raided by the largest mosquitoes we Iowa boys had ever seen. The mosquito wounds continued to irritate us most of the way to Mexico City. The Mexico City College on the outskirts of the sprawling metropolis was beautiful, featuring tropical trees and bushes we had never seen. We shared the boarding house near the monument to the nationalization of Mexico’s oil with others studying at the college. One of the older men, a professor from the Citadel refreshing his Spanish, introduced us boys to Mexico City brothels. I found them interesting, but my Methodist discipline was pretty effective, and sipping a beer while talking to the girls in the parlor was as far as I would go. My Spanish teacher from high school had advised me to drink the beer and leave the water alone, and I had been pretty shocked by Mrs. Smith telling me to drink beer. I had also been advised by high school friends, including my sparring partner Randall Strand, to explore sexuality with high school dates, but that was out of bounds for me. My reluctance to participate with the prostitutes led the Citadel professor to call me el Niño. The course was well taught, and it involved many interviews with Mexican leaders and visits to industrial sites. The assembly plant for the production of household electrical irons demonstrated the exploitation of Mexican women by American owners. The women who assembled the irons could never have afforded to buy one, even if their homes had electricity. Both of the young Iowans were fascinated by studies of the Mexican Revolution, and I wrote a research paper on American hegemony under the title “The Colossus of the North.” Red typed it for me on the machine he had brought with him, as my typing was still pretty rough.

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Weekends usually involved trips to the beach. I had never seen the oceans before, and two trips to Acapulco and one to Vera Cruz filled that lacuna in my education. We slept on the beaches. In Vera Cruz our slumber was interrupted first by the tide, which we had misjudged, and then by a party of young Mexican drinkers. The Iowa boys accompanied the Mexicans to a bar on the beach, where we all sang and drank. Luckily for me, Red could carry the tunes. He led as we sang “Que Sera, Sera.” When the course ended, Red offered to take me on a trip to California, where he was going to enter the California educational system as soon as he established residence. I had been offered a job in a canning factory near Santa Cruz by a boxing coach at Santa Cruz University after I won the Central Iowa Golden Gloves lightweight championship in Des Moines and was runner up in the Sioux City Golden Gloves for Western Iowa, South Dakota and Nebraska. But my plan was to return to Iowa, and Joan Loftus’s welcome still beckoned. I caught a ride from the college to El Paso, and then I struck out hitch-hiking. Texas was longer than I had remembered, and in Arkansas my money ran out as I bought some soda and lunch meat. But a watermelon truck from Little Rock provided a long ride to Des Moines. There I replenished my cash by unloading the semi-truck of its load. My last hitch-hiking ride home was due to the generosity of Gunny Sande, the owner of the Sande Construction Company, which had replaced Stone Construction as the leading contractor in Humboldt, and for whom Dad would eventually work.

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Chapter 6

Junior College I finished the last weeks of the summer working in the meat department at the grocery store in Dakota City. The returning fall semester found me without sufficient funds to return to Morningside. The educational junket to Mexico City had blown my resources. My sparring partner, Randall Strand, was now in the Marines and finding it not too difficult to win the Marines’ championship in the welterweight class in the Pacific; he urged me to sign up and box my way through the military obligation. Joan Loftus joined me for my visit to the Marine Recruiting Center in Fort Dodge. There I learned that the corps had closed some of its short-term active-duty tours with remaining years in the reserves. I could not see myself as a Marine for a three-year tour, so Joan and I discussed options in a park in Fort Dodge. I had no knowledge at the time that my great-grandfather had chosen his direction for homesteading in the fort, now the site of the park. A little more than one hundred years previously he had talked with the founder of the town, Major Williams. In the next week or two a decision was reached. I would live at home remodeling a basement room into a study and a bedroom, and piece together a living setting pins in the bowling alley some evenings and working in the grocery store by day with time off to attend Eagle Grove Junior College. The college was now led by a dean who had taught my mother in her one year of college. I resumed boxing, fighting mainly in Webster City and in Des Moines for Webster City. I dreamed of repeating as champion in Des Moines and taking the trip to the Chicago Golden Gloves for Iowa, which I had rejected the previous year. Starring in Webster City was rewarding, and I was honored by having the feature fight one night and standing in the corner while the National Anthem was played. It thrilled me. I fought to an exhausting win over the welterweight novice champ from Des Moines. As a lightweight, I was stronger than most opponents; as a lightweight fighting a welterweight, I was overmatched. An even harder fight followed with the same opponent, Eugene Kramer, in Des Moines. There I lost in a disputed decision, which was blown up on the front page of the Des Moines Register sports paper as the Webster City coach complained about Des Moines judging and exploited my case. He claimed I said things about the judges that a Webster City boy had actually said. When I was approached by boxing promoters offering me a place in a Texas boxing camp, I realized I was taking boxing too seriously for my life plan. I hung up my gloves and left amateur boxing for my studies. At the junior college, my sense that theological studies were beckoning deepened. I didn’t know whether it was to teach religion or serve as a pastor. I considered law further and thought about academic administration, but I decided to return to Morningside College as a pre-theological student. My minister, Fred Schultz, encouraged the decision and asked me to assist him as a liturgist in worship, and he arranged for me to preach once. He also led Joan through the equivalent of a confirmation class for Methodist Church membership. Albert Morehouse and some of

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his friends stepped up and arranged to cover half of the tuition at Morningside; the other half would be covered by the college itself. On my return, I was particularly welcomed by the Sellen family, and Dr. Sellen accepted six credits from Stanford–Mexico City as credits in political science. The courses in economics, government, and science from Eagle Grove all transferred into Morningside, and so I actually gained credits through my summer and fall migration.

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Chapter 7

Pre-Theological Student With boxing behind me and Joan before me, I applied myself to studies in history, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Science and advanced math courses were relatively easy for me, and an astronomy course foreshadowed an opportunity later at Columbia University. The student Methodist Fellowship was an important community for me, and I became its president. During the time at Morningside we changed it into an ecumenical fellowship named the Morningside Christian Fellowship. The statewide Methodist Student Movement (MSM) also provided a venue for my development, as I became vice president my junior year and took the MSM study tour of the United Nations and Washington, D.C. The organization integrated with persuasion and action many of the service facilities around the colleges and universities of the chapters of MSM and reported their actions to an annual meeting hosted by Morningside College. The local fellowship received permission from the president of the college, Richard Palmer, to host the meeting. But once the president learned that the meeting would involve activist blacks from Mississippi, he wanted to deny the campus to the meeting. I succeeded in persuading him not to withdraw the offer. Among other arguments regarding racial justice, I indicated that as managing editor of the college’s Collegian I would have to report on why the MSM Conference was being held in the nearby church and not on campus. Through the International Relations Club sponsored by Dr. Albert Sellen, I attended the first conference on African affairs at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Unfortunately, the keynote speaker from Nigeria used Gunther’s volume on Africa for his keynote speech, which I had read in preparation for the conference, so I experienced my first use of high-level plagiarism. A statewide model United Nations seminar permitted me, along with colleagues (notably Donna Peterson), to represent the Soviet Union. This experience prefigured many other developments in my life, and at the college a course in the Russian language soon followed. The next year Joan and I would participate as students with Warren Conner in Dr. Sellen’s televised Russian history course. Between sophomore and junior year, I worked again at Concrete Products in Humboldt, where Dad was also working. After running a cement mixer to produce concrete for the pipes manufactured in the facility, I was assigned to the construction of a new plant. I was carrying block for the wall when Dad turned a table of mortar from a two-story scaffold onto a young fellow who had mixed the mortar improperly. For a while I drove the ready-mix truck, but an accident with a passing car ended the soft job as driver, and I was soon helping on the reinforced concrete beam works. The summer included the ongoing romance with Joan, who was working in a restaurant after graduating from high school.

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Joan decided to come to Morningside on a speech scholarship and a promise of a job babysitting a child and a German shepherd dog for her room. She lived about two blocks from where I lived as a dormitory proctor. That year I earned half of the tuition as managing editor of the Collegian and the other half was a pre-theological scholarship. We were debate partners representing the college for the year. I drove two other Iowans to the Methodist Student Movement’s United Nations and Government Seminar in New York and Washington, D.C. It was the first trip to both centers. The 1951 Chevrolet lost a timing gear on the turnpike outside of Youngstown, Ohio, and we spent the night in the garage. In New York, I was asked to robe in the Union faculty locker room to help lead worship in the chapel. It would be another eight years before I would return there as a faculty member of the seminary. The high point for me was challenging Hubert H. Humphrey in the discussion period following his endless lecture in the summer heat. I wanted the liberal senator from Minnesota to support tax deductions for college tuition or to otherwise support federal government help with college expenses. At the time, he regarded such a program as impossible. Driving from New York to Washington, D.C., I had no idea how often I would make that trip in succeeding years. Lamar Cope asked me if I wanted to be nominated as president of the Methodist Student Movement for the state, but I declined, as I had other plans for my senior year.

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Chapter 8

Marriage and Church Joan and I were married in the Humboldt Methodist Church on August 23, 1959. We honeymooned in Minnesota and Canada following the route my family had used vacationing. Once I put Mother’s Ford Fairlane in the ditch, but there was no damage. From the Lake of the Woods we turned south toward a camp in South Dakota, where I taught a Bible study to fellow members of the regional MSM. We concluded our tour in the parsonage of the Methodist Community Church in Salix, Iowa, where I was serving as a student-pastor. I had spent the summer learning my way around the Missouri River community, and now my sense of Iowa stretched from the Mississippi to the Missouri, where I occasionally fished. Joan settled in running the parsonage, meeting the congregation, and preparing for her sophomore year of college. That fall we joined two other Methodist student-pastors who were commuting from nearby towns to Morningside. Student-pastorates took their toll on the young men trying to be both pastors and students. The colleagues with whom I commuted were dropped by the college, as they could not keep up with the demands of their studies while pastoring. There was not much money in those small towns for part-time pastors. Joan and I found ourselves replacing the tires on the $125 1951 Chevrolet with retreads until it quit. The college activities of speech, debate, editing the newspaper, and MSM gave way to the demands of establishing a home and finishing classes. The pressures on us as two youngsters had other costs as well. Professional and marital demands were probably too much for me to handle. Counseling from the sociologists at the college who taught courses on marriage and family did not give me the advice that I needed. They were sympathetic, but not really qualified to understand my needs. The church prospered. Attendance grew to over a hundred. The youth group flourished, enrolling most of the non–Roman Catholic senior highs in the small town. A visitation to a community, mostly of a grain elevator and a few houses, produced an adult baptism and new church members. A new educational wing of three classrooms and new bathrooms were constructed by the farmers of the surrounding countryside under the cajoling of a woman who was enrolled at the college in continuing education. My lack of musical talent was covered up by persuading the organist to stay in his position while I relieved him by engaging a music major to lead the choir. Miss Becky Hope from Humboldt was glad to have a position while attending college, and she brought a professional level of leadership to the church. The building drive had been inspired by a pair of old bachelor farmer brothers offering to pay for new inside toilets. Mary Christenson urged the pastor to seek out funds for the larger innovation. With my encouragement the Session of the church rose to the challenge of renovating the kitchen, installing inside toilets, and building the classrooms. The ministry was not entirely a success story. The church had two treasurers. One was for mission offerings and projects. The other administered the regular church budget. Traditionally the Christmas offering was for missions. But no one informed me, and I

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did not announce it as such. Both treasurers were large men. The peace of Sunday Christmas morning was broken by both men claiming the offering plates as the congregation filed out of the church into the beautiful snow. The regular church treasurer insisted, and he won the contest, as no special announcement had been made. The treasurer of missions was alienated from the church, and though he continued to befriend Joan and me, we never learned whether he was eventually reconciled. In the nearby town of Whiting my colleague was suffering under the toilet issue. His congregational leadership voted to move the outside toilet to a new position nearer the church. Some members, mindful of the heat of the Iowa summers, resisted the move. At night they moved the toilet back closer to where the original hole had been before it was filled up. The resulting flap contributed to that minister’s failure at the college. That winter the ministers of Salix, Sargent Bluffs, and Whiting struggled to find a car that would start and get them safely to Morningside College. Sometimes one car would start in the morning, and sometimes all of them would start. Their frequent late arrival to the class in abnormal psychology, which began at 8 AM, led the professor to suspect that they resented the class. It was very difficult to convince Dr. Henry that the problem the student-pastors had was mechanical and not psychological. After graduation, I was assigned by the Methodist Church to the Whiting congregation. Gentle preaching and flannel-board stories for the children led to a successful summer in which several migrant farm workers joined the church. The community knew better than to object, even if they were suspicious of the pastor’s evangelization of such a class. The toilet sagas were not irrelevant to my later experiences in New York City. The only major social controversy at the church was easily resolved. I had described our air force strategy of planning obliteration bombing of Soviet cities as inherently immoral, and we had discussed it in the youth fellowship. The young female leader brought the discussion to the attention of her father, an air force officer at the nearby base at Sargent Bluffs at the airport that served Sioux City. His visit to the parsonage and the following conversation led to the distinction between fighter pilots for defense, of which he was one, and the Strategic Air Command’s Offutt Air Force Base of strategic bombers. The air force personnel from the Strategic Air Command near Omaha were regular participants in the Sioux City Golden Gloves tournament, and our only complaints about them were that they used headgear, which we did not have. He continued as a participant in the church, and his daughter was a helpful leader as president of the youth fellowship. One other issue was the fall election of 1959 in which the mayoral candidates, both of whom were members in name of the church, were throwing verbal dirt at each other. At the suggestion of Mary Christenson, I visited both of them and issued an invitation to my election sermon. Both of them had asked for my support for the election, as they were both Protestants and the only other public institutions in the town were the Roman Catholic Church and school and the public school run by the Session members of our Protestant Church. The sermon has long been forgotten, but it pled for the participation of all in the political process and that appropriate decorum in language befitting Christians be used in the process. By the time of graduation in 1960, my

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involvement in race issues, religion and politics, issues of war and peace, and Christian social ethics was well begun, even if surrounded by a certain innocence and naiveté. Despite my good relations with campus ministers from Illif Seminary, Duke Divinity School, and my own pastor’s Garrett Evangelical Seminary experience, I chose Union Theological Seminary over the other schools. The new professor of philosophy at Morningside, Dr. Joseph Uemura, persuaded me that Union was the outstanding seminary at the time. He said other schools’ reputations go up and down, but Union persisted as an outstanding graduate school for theological study. I had taken the yearlong course in the history of philosophy with Dr. Uemura during my senior year, receiving a B+ for the course rather than my usual A, but I was impressed by the new professor’s brilliance and demeanor. We were discouraged when the Union letter of acceptance informed us that we probably could not afford New York City with plans for both of us to study. I preserved the letter for years, hoping to read it if I became president of the school. Before we could drive our $500 DeSoto to New York and abandon it, I needed a job. By walking the streets of Sioux City, I arranged for a position starting on Monday running a cement mixer for new construction. That Friday the Reverend John Hantla phoned offering me a job directing the Good Will Children’s Camp. I seized the position, which offered $100 per week and a house at the camp near Dakota City, Nebraska. The camp was for the poor children of Sioux City and the Native American children from the Winnebago Reservation. It also involved some house sitting for the former director of Goodwill Industries. The other group served at the retreat was handicapped employees of Goodwill Industries who would visit for a day at a time. The job of director was hardly a professional position, as it involved driving the bus to pick up campers, construction work at the camp, as well as picking high school students as counselors. I chose mostly high school students from my Methodist Youth Fellowship, and that was mostly successful. One young tough whom I had recruited to the church by boxing with him had to be dismissed for telling off-color stories to his assembled nighttime campers. A couple of others on garbage duty dumped the refuse on the ground in the woods rather than burying it in a lime pit as they had been instructed. This caused some embarrassment to the director when the mess was discovered by the Nebraska Health Inspectors. The weeks passed quickly with baseball, swimming, games, and Bible study. A camp regular who served as dean turned out to be a fundamentalist, the first one I had known. We had to agree to disagree, and I do not think any of the campers suffered. Before leaving Salix and Sioux City we vacationed with close friends Lamar and Sandy Cope in the Black Hills. We borrowed the umbrella tent of the Sellens. The first night it blew over in a strong wind. It was the Stones’ first camping trip, whereas Lamar was more experienced. Lamar would graduate the next year and, with Sandy, go to Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C. Despite his experience, the outstanding memory of that trip was Lamar approaching the wild buffalo herd so closely. He got his desired pictures, and all returned safely. Over the succeeding years other trips with tents would take the four to the Blue Ridge and the Poconos. Much later, son Randy and I would canoe and camp with Lamar and his son Mark on the Brule River in Wisconsin. The two

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couples would see the Pentagon lighted up prior to the announcement of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later Lamar and I would hear the announcement of Kennedy’s assassination in the parking lot of Wesley Seminary. Another leave-taking was from Dick Gregory, my friend who partially supported himself at the college by purchasing booze and cigarettes in Nebraska for the Morningsiders and reselling it in dry Iowa. We played chess too often instead of studying. Dick’s religious experience led to his consulting me, and we leaned on each other in various matters. Often he would drop me off in Dakota City on his trip home further east in his 1950 Hudson. Dick’s father treated both of us boys to a fishing trip in Northeast Iowa. As a game warden he had good knowledge of the location of the trout. The taste of those fresh trout from cold Iowa streams is still savored half a century later. I served as Dick and Jan’s best man at their wedding in a Methodist Church, and they, like the Copes, have remained correspondents through life’s joys and travails.

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Chapter 9

New York City We left for New York City in the fall with all our belongings in the failing DeSoto. It was leaking transmission fluid as it labored with its second used transmission. We had a few hundred dollars, a college degree (plus two years of college behind Joan), and hopes. We left behind beloved brothers and sisters and two troubled families on the Iowa prairies. Our first stop on the journey east was with Joan’s uncle’s family in Peoria. The family was Presbyterian, and the elderly uncle was thrilled that I was going to learn Hebrew to study the Bible. At the time, as a Methodist, I had no requirement to study Hebrew, and I hadn’t considered it. Joan’s uncle knew that ministers were required to study Hebrew in the Presbyterian Church. I was still pretty naïve about seminary, having visited only Union, where we had worshipped, on the trip to the United Nations. Uemura had advised me to study world religions with Professor John B. Noss, who had retired. I rather expected Tillich and Niebuhr to be there, not knowing that Tillich had retired five years earlier and Reinhold Niebuhr just that spring. My Methodist district superintendent, Charles Mason, had given me Niebuhr’s two volumes of The Nature and Destiny of Man from his own study at Union. I had read them, in part, in morning study and meditations in my first few weeks as a student minister. After visiting Goodwill Industries in Indianapolis and the Reverend Doctor John Gingerich’s family at Ohio State, we penetrated New York City via the Holland Tunnel. “Where are you going, Iowa?” called the big Irish policeman as I paused in bewilderment after exiting the tunnel. “Union Theological Seminary,” I replied. “Take the West Side Highway to 125th and then turn on Broadway to 122,” he yelled. It did not take long to unload our few possessions after Dr. James Muilenburg told us where to find the dolly. For the first year we would live in one room with a sink; the bathrooms were down the hall. The hide-a-bed was a sofa during the day, and the shared kitchen was only a couple of doors away. We were on the second floor above the Claremont Avenue entrance. Claremont was generally quiet unless it was youth night at Riverside Church or the gymnasium down the street was open for basketball. For that first year many of the kids using the gym or the church were either in my youth group or on my teams. Despite having already pastored, my first-year field work would be as a youth worker to the kids of Morningside Heights and Harlem. Riverside Church was entering a new program of youth work in which it tried to integrate the Morningside Heights youth—mostly children of Columbia faculty or other professional people—with the kids from Harlem. That summer, police had succeeded in breaking up many of the West Side gangs, and our youth program attempted to reintegrate them into its society. I coached the junior high basketball team and helped a few youngsters learn to box. I also had responsibilities for helping the youth develop worship services for Friday night. One evening I led a young man out of worship into the hall after he had whistled at the beautiful Miss Salter, daughter of the bookstore owner on Broadway. I explained to him that he could compliment her on her appearance after the service if he wished, but that he could not whistle during the service. He replied,

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“Hey, teach, I haven’t seen a woman for months.” Doubting this, I asked him where he had been. “Riker’s Island,” he explained. He had been confined for six months and came directly to the Friday night program after his release. Gradually I learned from both the Morningside Heights faculty children’s culture and the Harlem culture. One wanted Bach in the worship service, and the other wanted “Sweet Georgia Brown” as their basketball song. A basketball trip to a Baptist church in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge nearly turned into a rumble. Our kids sacrificed the game to avoid the fight they feared. I had to disarm them of the scissors they had stolen from the Sunday school room, which we used as a dressing room. Still, once we exited the church, the street was filled with young men screaming and breaking off car radio aerials with which to beat us. We escaped in the station wagon we had used to come downtown. A film I introduced on a Philadelphia gang murder of a basketball player received the response from one of my more troubled youth, “Hey, teach, that’s us.” I worked out on some punching bags in the Columbia gym, and I tried to coach a few youth at Riverside Church. My most successful boxer lost in the finals of the novice division at Madison Square Garden, making some of the same mistakes I thought I had coached him not to make. I talked to him years later on the subway: he was fighting in the stable of Emile Griffith, who had killed Benny “Kid” Paret in 1962 in the Garden, where I had seen him lose. The face, and particularly the cabbage-looking ears, did not bode well for his boxing career. I thought of this jovial sad-faced kid again when Boom Boom Mancini killed Duk-Koo Kim in Las Vegas in 1982. Another favorite young man worked in the 1960s as a doorman on Riverside Drive. The middle-class kids from Morningside Heights went on to college and their careers. Joan worked first at the Interchurch Center in the Protestant effort to support John F. Kennedy’s campaign. The vice president of the Center, Mr. Harmon, directed the campaign, and Joan furnished secretarial work. The former Catholic girl from Iowa swung right into high-level politics in New York. The dinner of rice, medium-rare steak, and green beans that Mr. Harmon furnished for us and Jim and Mrs. Livingston was my introduction to fine eating in New York City. Jim was the tutor in theology, and at the time that seemed like the height of academic achievement to me. His wife also worked at the Interchurch Center. My best friend among those asked to serve at Riverside Church as youth workers was John Peale. His father, Norman Vincent Peale, was on the other side of the presidential campaign from Joan’s work. John handled the tension between the liberals at Union and his father well. Almost all the seminary supported Kennedy against Nixon. John told us we could travel to Europe in the summer with very little money. From midyear we began to save toward our goal of $1,000 for our trip, trusting in Europe on Five Dollars a Day. After her short stint at the Interchurch Center, Joan took a position in the Dean of Studies office, which brought her into close work with Dean Roger Shinn and Dean Cyril Richardson. Her college career was postponed a year while I studied and worked at Riverside Church. The next year she would begin studies at City College, and those

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classes, along with a class at Barnard College with Mrs. Ursula Niebuhr, would eventually be transferred to Morningside to complete her first degree. We were clear that Joan would finish her college education, but the priority was given to my studies, with the expectation that I would be the major support for the family. While working and studying, Joan became a leader in the Women’s Society at the seminary, eventually hosting Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt there. She developed close friends among the seminary staff, but her closest friend the first year was Sandy Smith across the hall in 99 Claremont Avenue. After an intern year took the Smiths off campus, the Stones moved across the park to the new building on 527 Riverside Drive. Barb and Richard Crouter lived across the hall; Joan became close to Barb and they directed the Women’s Fellowship together. William Harter, who would become the president of the student council, advised Joan concerning City College and introduced her to a friend of his on the history faculty of the college. Other friends besides William and Linda Harter included Bob and Carole Hammer. Bob had come from Morningside College, and we had been leaders in the independent and Greek society rivalry on campus. Whatever competition existed between us concluded in a basketball game where I had a bloodied nose and Bob a sprained ankle on the Riverside Church gym floor. Another reversal was that I seemed to take to the philosophy of religion while Bob prepared for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. Both the Harters and the Hammers would take pastorates in the Catskills and continue their friendship there. The Stones greatly enjoyed holiday and weekend visits to both of these families as we continued to stay in New York. Other close friends were found in a cell that served as a support group within the seminary. This particular cell became more of a social gathering than a spiritually disciplined group. Austin and Norma Riterspauch and Stewart and Julie Pierson composed the group. Stewart would become an Episcopal clergyman; Austin would pursue doctoral studies in the Old Testament at the Theological Union in San Francisco and serve for a few years in a college in Pennsylvania. Stewart’s position was assistant rector in Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, and he and Julie would welcome the Stones to their home when life brought them eventually to Pittsburgh. I found a competitive educational environment. The lads from the Ivy League understood that competition, and I had to learn. Seminary required serious study and attention from everyone, but for some it was grueling. My grades for the first semester were A- or B+. They improved after that first dose of reality, and I caught up with those better prepared than I had been. The first big assignment was to prepare a lengthy paper on the source analysis of the Pentateuch through historical study and exegesis of a particularly complex passage. I loved the Old Testament study and the Old Testament professor, James Muilenburg. I had been puzzled by the professor’s reference to the Jordan River as a small, muddy stream no more significant than the Des Moines River. Hanging on a bus strap on the return from the Metropolitan Museum, where Muilenburg had translated hieroglyphics for us from Egyptian tombs, I told the distinguished professor that I wondered about his criticism of the Des Moines River, as I had swum in it as a boy. The professor responded, “Which branch?” When I said,

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“East,” Muilenburg informed me that he had learned on the west branch of the same river.

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Chapter 10

Europe John Peale persuaded me that a couple could travel in Europe on $5 a day, so with cheap flights at $450 and another $500, a couple could live in Europe for a month. Joan and I discussed how our educations would be incomplete without exposure to the museums, art, and historically significant sites in Europe. John and Lydia Peale were to be in Europe during the summer after completing a trip to the Holy Land, which Dr. Peale was sponsoring. My field work helped meet the Union Seminary requirements, but it did not produce much income. With the seminary’s academic year concluding, I took two jobs. One was leading kids from Harlem in summer vacation school exploring the resources of the city. I took them to Coney Island and Long Beach. A high point was a trip to the United Nations, where I was reprimanded by one of my charges for not telling them far enough ahead so that they could wear their best clothes. The High Tower swimming pool in North Manhattan was another regular favorite trip. Day trips to mountain parks and the water courses where small fish could be caught enriched the summer. One of my favorites, the smallest boy of the camp, asked me in the Museum of Natural History, “Why did they have to kill the baby bear for their exhibit?” My second job was working as a night watchman at Riverside Church. The watchman’s job was from 11 PM to 9 AM, and the day-camp job was from 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM. Tutorials in Hebrew were from 4:30 to 5:30, so sleep was inconsistent. The rushed Hebrew tutorials by James Weimer gave me the elements of rudimentary Hebrew, and the fall semester in Hebrew exegesis would allow further development. Sometimes the security company had to phone the church to wake up the sleepy guard. Virgil Fox practiced his organ playing at night, and often he would play my requests before leaving with friends in his pink Cadillac convertible for night prowling. He also urged me to deny entrance to the organ maker who had installed an organ in Fox’s home; apparently there was anger and a threat of retaliation over an unpaid amount for the work. The organ music in the Gothic cathedral–like architecture bent my preference toward large Gothic churches forever. Even the roar of all of the toilets flushing automatically on the fifth floor of the educational wing impressed me. I resolved not to spend any more time building toilets for churches. I knew that no toilets could ever outdo Riverside Church’s educational wing commodes. In addition to the shocking splendor of the church building, I also learned about practical church politics. The church asked me the week before my regular stint as night watchman would begin to guard the entrances to the carillon. Someone, maybe a dismissed musician, was entering the carillon at odd hours and setting its tune to “Three Blind Mice.” That song playing out over Morningside Heights at irregular times did nothing to further the church’s mission. So I hid on the twentieth floor or sometimes higher in the carillon works waiting for the suspected trickster. No one ever arrived when I was on duty.

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Joan’s income and my two jobs provided the necessary funds for the European trip. Though I would develop bronchitis from overexertion, almost ruining the “grand tour,” by the second week in Europe I had recovered. We flew on a chartered flight on President Airlines from Idlewild to Shannon, London, and finally Paris. We spent three days exploring museums and the Left Bank while staying in a Frommer-recommended budget hotel, Hotel des Deux Continents. The “five-dollar-a-day” breakfast in Paris was a croissant with jelly and a cup of coffee brewed from instant coffee with a wire coil heater in the room. The service in Notre Dame on Bastille Day was a high point of the sojourn, but the first trip to the Louvre would become the first of half a dozen splendid introductions to the art of Europe. Lunch was usually a bottle of wine, some cheeses, and bread in a park. Dinner would be in a restaurant on the Left Bank, and our French was almost adequate to avoid embarrassment. Joan’s naturally was better than mine, but I was more willing to exert it with the waiters. Once we misunderstood the 7 with a line through it and underpaid the bill. It was no problem; the attentive waiter chased us down in the street and called us back to settle it. The usual night’s entertainment was a walk on the banks of the Seine gazing at the lighted Gothic hulk of Notre Dame. On one occasion, a French veteran spit on us on exiting the Metro. Apparently he had mistaken the light-haired Americans for Germans. The French, having recently been exposed to American soldiers, had not yet learned their later graciousness to American tourists, but still, for the two Iowans just becoming New Yorkers, Paris was the city of illumination. We walked the quais of Marseilles with the Peales, and rode with them into Italy with suitable stops on the Riviera. Three days in Florence and Venice apiece introduced us to the splendor of these rich museums of the foundations of our lives. Milan’s cathedral still remains memorable after that one visit; the splendor of light penetrating the ancient windows is never forgotten. Leonardo’s The Last Supper failed to move our religious sensibilities, but it has remained the model for judging other attempts to capture that crucial moment of our spirituality. I would return in later years to Florence, but the mountains of Switzerland demanded many return trips throughout my life. Our first introduction to them was in lovely walks with John and Lydia and his father and mother, Norman and Ruth. The view of the Jungfrau through the trees of the swimming pool in Interlaken remains etched in my memory. The Peales saw us to our train in Basel, and from there we returned to Paris for a short visit and then took the train to London. We hitchhiked to Canterbury. Later we rode a bus to Oxford without ever dreaming we would return a few years later as students. More hitchhiking took us to Sheffield and eventually to the ferry for Ireland. Dublin and Cork were fun. My Irish grandmother and Joan’s Irish father led us to kiss the Blarney Stone. Our favorite spot in Ireland was the Rock of Cashel, the burial place of Irish kings, the ruined castle and cathedral. We overheard a priest telling some Irish folk, “That cleft you see in the surrounding hills is where St. Patrick stubbed his toe chasing the Devil out of Ireland, the rock we are standing on, this very ‘Rock of Cashel,’ was formed when he kicked the rock of that hill over here.” Our flight out of Shannon Airport near Limerick was delayed by a hurricane. The charter airline was also short of planes, as they had crashed one the previous week flying out of

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Shannon and all on board were killed. We spent an extra night in Ireland, for which we were told the airline’s credit was not good in Limerick, and they could not inform us where the airplane was located. The next morning we departed after climbing around felled trees to reach the airport again. We shuddered as the pilots in the seat next to us looked out to locate where the previous week’s flight loaded with Wisconsin farm equipment dealers had crashed. Our extra day in Ireland broke us, and on arriving in New York we lacked the fare to get us back to 122nd and Broadway. But a Union librarian we met by chance on the flight lent us the fee.

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Chapter 11

Christian Social Ethics On an occasion when Joan and I were gathering names on a petition in the seminary rotunda, Professor Muilenburg passed near. I suggested to him that by his own rules of poetic construction a poem of II Isaiah could be better reconstructed according to my model. Muilenburg said he would think about it. An hour later in the Hebrew exegesis course of II Isaiah, Muilenburg gave Mr. Stone recognition for amending the strophic structure of II Isaiah. I blushed, but underneath hopes for an academic career grew. I had intended to study for a teaching position, but encouragement in terms of scholarship made me begin to dream about possibilities of staying at Union and Columbia University for doctoral studies. My term paper on Isaiah 52:13–53:14 was the most important biblical scholarship I had ever achieved. I argued for understanding the suffering servant as both Israel and an unnamed person, which the Church read as Jesus. It could also be read as the true Church as Christ’s body suffering for righteousness. Gradually my interest in history and biblical scholarship was eclipsed by my introduction to the study of Christian social ethics. I received a grade of A- in the introductory course with Dr. Bennett, graded by a teaching assistant. My final examination in the course “Christianity and Communism” caught the attention of Dr. Roger Shinn, who in following years would open opportunities for me. The course was begun by Reinhold Niebuhr, and it included John C. Bennett, who taught it with Roger Shinn and Dr. Searle Bates after Niebuhr’s retirement. By senior year I was clearly identified as a specialist in Christian social ethics with interests in Christianity and political ethics and the ethics of international affairs. Dr. Shinn urged me to apply for Columbia University’s International Fellows Program. I was accepted, and the program paid my tuition, plus a living stipend. This freed Joan more to pursue her own studies at City College and Barnard College. My field work transferred from youth ministry at Riverside Church to serving as an assistant to Dr. Herman Reissig, the United Church of Christ’s international relations secretary. This meant two afternoons of work a week at 23 Park Avenue South. I became familiar with subway commuting into the heart of the city. The work involved both research for Dr. Reissig and helping administer UN seminars for the Church. I also traveled to meetings of social action Church leaders and met with the Church’s advisory committee on international relations. My senior year also involved a course at the seminary in ethics and international relations with Bennett. That year I wrote two papers on the political philosophy of Hans Morgenthau for the seminary and Columbia. My extracurricular work at the seminary was as chair of the Social Action Committee. Four projects stand out for the academic year of 1963–1964. The committee educated the staff of the seminary about unions and organized a vote on whether the employees wanted to be unionized with the prospect of being represented as a teamsters’ local. The vote to organize was narrowly defeated. The committee had failed to adequately work with the maids who served the single men in the men’s dormitory, Hastings Hall.

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It turned out that the maids had been disinclined to organize, partially due to a promise to relieve them of their Saturday morning work. The second project was to mount an insulting demonstration against Madam Nhu’s 1963 visit to the United States. The eleven protesters were brushed aside by the New York City police at Idlewild Airport when they tried to block the driveway from the runway to the street. The organizing for the demonstration was done under the name Les Petit Predicateures, a reference to Madame Nhu’s dismissal of the Buddhist priests who had immolated themselves protesting President Diem’s policies of persecution. Another protest was shared by Methodists from Harlem’s Methodist churches. The seminary and the churches sent two busloads of Methodists to Pittsburgh to demonstrate against the continuation of a separated jurisdiction for African Americans within the Methodist governmental structure. The so-called Central Jurisdiction was criticized in meetings held at the Lutheran Church on Grant Street, and picket lines were set up outside the Convention Center. I was approached by my district superintendent on the Sioux City District, who asked me, “Stone, what are you doing here in Pittsburgh?” I responded with an unsuccessful invitation to the superintendent to join the line. Joan and I stayed at the parsonage of Stewart and Julie Pierson. He was serving as assistant rector at the Calvary Episcopal Church in the East End of Pittsburgh. The lighted Pentagon we saw on returning to D.C. from a camping trip to the Blue Ridge with Lamar and Sandy Cope signaled the Cuban Missile Crisis. As social action chair it fell upon me to organize an educational event for the seminary on the situation. I attempted to do so while working downtown for the United Church of Christ. Phone calls led to Drs. John Bennett and Zbigniew Brzezinski agreeing to speak the following evening. Members of the committee made announcements and put up posters announcing the meeting. Soon, while still downtown, I was informed that the signs on the walls of the seminary had to come down. Adjustments were made, and the event came off the following evening. Both Bennett and Brzezinski were alarmed about the possibility of nuclear war and cautioned prudence in confronting the Soviet Union. Both would reflect later on the near miss of conflict and the wisdom of the young president in securing the removal of the missiles without war. Later that week I was summoned to the president’s office, where I was criticized soundly for the placing of posters on the walls of the seminary and for moving furniture in the Social Hall, where the meeting was held. I responded weakly to the president at first, denying the moving of furniture, but then the president said he had observed the same, and I remembered seeing the president passing by the Social Hall windows. Then I lost my cool, as I remembered I had removed two lamps from the library table behind which the speakers had stood to address the crowded room. I said I could not take the president’s criticism seriously given the crisis, and I left the office shutting the door firmly behind me. Before I could write about my interview with the president in the student newspaper, Professor Muilenburg called me to his office and cautioned me that the faculty were aware that sometimes the president did not get the dosage of his medicine exactly correct, and that such outbursts of temper on the president’s part

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were due to medical mistakes. I dropped the issue, and subsequent conversations with the president about organizing the workers were cordial. Though all four events bore the marks of ethical sensibility, they attracted only a small part of the student-faculty community. Union Seminary remained unorganized for many years afterward, and in 1963 very few students participated in the educational effort of the employees. This first religiously based demonstration against U.S. policy in Vietnam under John F. Kennedy attracted only eleven students. Assassinations in both Vietnam and the United States would deepen the issues that same year. The racialintegration demonstration in Pittsburgh would aid in the dismantling of the racially defined system of governance in the Methodist Church, and while the numbers of students participating was larger than in the other two, the numbers from both the churches and the students were few. It still had not dawned on me that hopes for an awakened Church to participate in social ethical issues were to remain unfulfilled except for minority actions. The educational event with Bennett and Brzezinski attracted the most participants. The criticism of the ways that demonstrations occurred was a constant. The president of the Student Council objected to the Social Action Committee’s procedures vis-à-vis the airport demonstration. The Methodist district superintendent complained about the demonstration in Pittsburgh. The business manager and the president of the seminary overcame the attempt to unionize poor employees, and finally the president objected to the educational event regarding the Missile Crisis. In retrospect, the president should have been asked to preside over the public meeting with the guest professor from Columbia. At the time, I would regard all of the objections on the particular issues as grounded in lack of insight. Only later on reflection would I understand how resistant to social change the Christian Church and other organizations are naturally. My own ethical perspectives had been shaped by the very institutions I found myself challenging, and I in all likelihood could not foresee the criticism and some punishments that dissonance regarding social justice would bring. Our Christmas letter for 1962 reflected events of our first European trip as well as the season of Christmas, and excerpts reveal signs of our ongoing concern for Catholicism: A wonderful season has descended upon New York. The streets are aglow with lights and thronged with Christmas Shoppers. Church bells invite us to carol sings, candlelight services, elaborate Christmas pageants, and the seminary, daily chapel services infused with a note of expectancy. Snow flurries and a giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center remind us of home and of all our far flung friends. . . . We have witnessed the Vatican Council debating the same issues that produced so much havoc when raised five years ago. We have heard a leading New York prelate regret his inability to officially take part in a Protestant ordination service and hint that before long he would be able to do so. As admissions secretary, Joan helps Roman Catholic priests get admitted to UTS’s graduate school, and Ron shares a seminar with a Jesuit. It is a broken Church, desperately

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trying to regain her unity, which brings us to the Advent message this year. The major requirement for graduation was a thesis during the senior year. I chose to write a paper on the dilemmas of Christian statesmanship in the case of John Foster Dulles. The contrast between Dulles, the super-churchman advocate of peace, and his threatening to use the atomic bomb as secretary of state set the problem. Probably the Church was at its strongest witness in international affairs under his leadership. The United States may never have been more dominant in international affairs than under the Eisenhower-Dulles leadership. The contradictions rested both in Dulles’s understanding of Christian ethics and in the inevitable clash between Church responsibilities under the guidance of Christian ethics and the responsibilities of power guiding an empire in struggle. Roger Shinn was the major reader for the paper, and Ralph Hyslop was the second reader. All through the process, Shinn had urged me to improve my composition. Shinn himself may have been the best writer in the field at the time, and I could never equal the clarity of Shinn’s writing. As the assistant to the secretary for international relations of the Council for Christian Social Action, I received an invitation to join the United Church of Christ bus to the March on Washington in 1963. I knew very little of its controversial nature. I might even have missed it except that my first-year friend from across the hall, Melvin Smith, agreed to accompany me. We boarded the bus at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and made one more trip to Washington, D.C., on behalf of civil rights. Several seminary groups had gone down Highway 95 before to lobby or to demonstrate. Early in the morning, the crowd began to form, and I ended up carrying one of the poles of the United Church of Christ banner for Freedom. I spoke to an African American of grandmotherly age: “Somebody must be making a lot of money off of all of these professionally made signs.” She replied, “Yes, but after today we’ll never have to march again.” I thought about her reply as we marched. It was in part a rebuke implying, “White boy, how easy this is for you, but I had to skip my work as a cleaner to make this event.” Beyond that, I saw it as an example of the relevance of hope to political action. Of course, her statement included illusion, but it impelled her participation. The music was great. John Lewis of SNCC’s opening speech seemed too militant for the occasion, but I knew nothing of how much the leaders had toned it down just before the march. Even Martin Luther King Jr.’s talk seemed formal. Why had so many preceded him? White patience was running out. But then, as we stood by the cherry trees quite close to the Lincoln Memorial, King abandoned his prepared remarks and soared into his “I Have a Dream” speech. Later, it was said Mahalia Jackson had urged him to share his dream. It, too, had illusions, but he was using the American Dream and Christian eschatology for an American civil religion of change for justice. It worked. I would listen to him in public twice more, but that was his best speech. After that, he was the undisputed leader of the civil rights movement until he was killed. Still, the civil rights bill was in danger. We would come back to witness as seminarians by the Lincoln Memorial around the clock as President Johnson pushed the legislation through. It took the bombing of the Birmingham church and martyrdom of Kennedy to finally secure the moral force to

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achieve it. In the end Kennedy was seen as more of a supporter of racial justice than his timid efforts ever deserved. During my first year as an international fellow at Columbia, Reinhold Niebuhr returned to teach a course at Barnard College on democracy and its possibilities in other cultures. I sat in on the course and arranged appointments with Niebuhr to discuss the course and my own future. My own self-image was distancing me from the Methodist ministry, though I had been ordained a deacon at Bridgeport, Connecticut. My ministerial committee members all seemed too plump and self-satisfied, and their white-buck shoes rather undignified. In addition, I smoked and took an occasional drink, both of which were forbidden to the Methodist ministry. I also felt insecure in my marriage, which boded trouble for ministers in those days. Without revealing the more personal character of my doubts, I asked Niebuhr about ordination. Niebuhr advised me not to be ordained “unless I had to.” Those habits and those words would guide me as I undertook a more secularphilosophic attitude toward religion as studies in religion at Columbia influenced me. Mother’s words about lacking the emotional commitment to Christian faith and Dad’s own secularism were working themselves out in the student. Ordination would disappear from my possibilities as I grew through study toward an appointment to the Columbia faculty as an assistant professor of religion. However, it was only ordination that disappeared, while my church attendance and fascination with Christian social action and ethics deepened.

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Chapter 12

Philosophy I had a minor in philosophy at Morningside College, and at Union I studied philosophy of religion seriously. Daniel D. Williams became a favorite professor, and I took advanced courses in process philosophy with him. On one occasion I chided him for being too easy in honoring ill-informed student opinions in seminar discussion in his class on God. In the very next seminar discussion he criticized a contribution from me very vigorously. A few months later he asked me to tutor for the theology department, as he did not believe the students in theology were ready to accept the responsibility. The other professor in philosophy that was very helpful at Union was James Martin. He suggested my paper in his course “Religion in Higher Education” should be published in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review. I filled the essay out with some arguments I had developed for Dr. Williams’s final exam, and the result was publication of my first academic essay. I distinguished between the metaphysical arguments for God within process philosophy terms and the particular religious traditions one might have inherited from tradition. The idea that specific occurrences required a principle of value to sort out the possible occurrences appealed to me. The understanding of God as limited by the past and the given, but relevant in allowing particular outcomes to appear, continued to appeal to me. My conceptions of God, though changing, have preferred these mostly Platonic interpretations, coming to me through Origen, Augustine, Whitehead, and Tillich. I have always appreciated the history of ideas, and Tillich, whom I have followed more, is not the same as Whitehead. Assuming a reality of God in the evolving process of the universe assumes a union of the vital forces of our own physics even though God is known by the human mind. The idea of God shaped by the human mind impacts the universe’s union and evolves in reciprocal action with that dynamic universe. As the whole universe relates, the ideas of God contribute to the development of the unity of the universe, though a lot less than popular religion assumes. Popular religion, as represented by Hindu temples or Puritan churches, fills out the abstract notion of an idea of God with religious symbols, and these are all relative to the human processes of culture from which they come. For me, the idea of God is rather abstract, but quite relevant and relative to my own inherited and accepted traditions. The personal characteristics of God are not foreign to the human personality, but the experience of the person of God depends upon the categories held by the particular human mind. The mind that participates in God can speak on occasion to the perception of a human being in sentences or words that the human mind apprehends as coming from beyond itself. So philosophy to me in my study and life consisted mostly of the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy (including Christian social ethics), and the philosophy of politics and society. These subjects have made up the core of my teaching and my study. Other forms of philosophy appear in my thinking, but the above three are the centers of my interest. Philosophy evolved with the approach of different schools of thought. At Union I began with process philosophy; learned existentialism as I worked with Niebuhr, Tillich, and Macquarrie; and studied linguistic philosophy with Gilkey and several professors at Oxford. I have continued to read widely in the history of philosophy, but I never moved deeply into phenomenology

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or postmodern thought. I remained attracted to Whitehead’s idea that the best education is religious in nature. That is, it permits one to grasp the unity of the universe in broad understanding, and it develops a commitment to the care of the neighbor. It is religious inasmuch as it develops awe before the universe and humane ethics in practice. My studies in philosophy from Joseph Uemura to Paul Tillich inclined me to the lifelong pursuit of knowledge, and I love it. Union up to that time limited its own students’ admission to the two doctoral programs, the one at Union and the one at Columbia. Many graduates of Union at the time went on to study religion or ethics at other schools, though they were as capable as those that remained on Morningside Heights. The two programs at Union and Columbia were distinguished mainly by more intense work in Christian tradition at Union and broader religious studies combined with other fields at Columbia. As we graduated in 1963, several of us were admitted to Columbia and a few to Union. We were all close friends. Richard Crouter entered the doctoral program at Union in Church history where Robert Hamerton-Kelly was already studying the New Testament. John Raines was a doctor of theology candidate at Union, having returned from his Methodist pastorate for a master of sacred theology degree. Clifford Green entered as a doctor of theology candidate. William Harter, Steven Rockefeller, and I all entered Columbia in different fields within religion, sharing the world religions eight-hour course together as well as the history of philosophy course, which I audited while substituting the history of political philosophy course. Crouter, Rockefeller, Harter, and I all struggled through an introductory German course together. Eventually we passed the Columbia German examination. The French was much easier for me. Five of us bonded together in a dining, drinking, and discussion group to improve upon our teachers’ work. The predominant topic was philosophy of history, but it provided a support group of peers, all of whom became significant scholars in their individual pursuits. Richard Crouter received an invitation to teach at Carleton College, and there he became an excellent scholar of Schleiermacher and German scholarship. As he retired he published a fine book on Reinhold Niebuhr. William Harter produced a distinguished dissertation on the fall of Jerusalem, and he became known for his defense of Israel against critics in the Presbyterian Church, which he served. He ran for Congress once in the Catskills and served as a distinguished pastor in the Falling Waters Church of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Clifford Green became one of the outstanding scholars on Bonhoeffer, editing his collected works and writing several books on the martyr. Robert Hamerton-Kelly taught the New Testament at Scripps College, and served for many years as dean of the chapel at Stanford University. He is respected both for his books on Paul and for his study and publications on violence with the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. John Raines became head of the Religion Department at Temple University and is renowned for books on privacy; writings on Karl Marx, including introducing his collected works on religion; and antiwar activity with the radical Catholic left. Steven Rockefeller had a distinguished career at Middlebury College, plus responsibilities for family philanthropy; he is best known for his fine volume on John Dewey and for activities in ecological concerns.

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I received several more fellowships from Columbia University and other foundations, which enabled Joan to return to her studies on a full-time basis. She completed her degree when we returned to Morningside College for summer school, with me teaching and her studying. She received her degree summa cum laude in the summer of 1965, with a major in history. With her studies with Mrs. Niebuhr at Barnard and the history department at City College, it was a very rich degree. My parents came over for her graduation. Their daughter-in-law received her degree with an honor higher than their sons had achieved at Morningside. My first year at Columbia was dominated by requirements and preparation for the general exams and the field exams. We all took John Herman Randall’s “History of Philosophy” course and the large course in world religions. I also took theory of international relations with W. F. Fox, political philosophy with Herbert A. Deane, and a reading course in sociology of religion with Henry Clark. When Daniel D. Williams asked me to tutor the first-year course in systematic theology, I anticipated that I would work with him. As it happened, John Macquarrie taught the first semester and Paul Lehmann the second. The first semester was on method and the concept of God. The second semester was to cover Christology, pneumatology, salvation, and the doctrine of humanity. But their approaches were radically different, and bridging the two required courses was difficult. Thankfully, Lehmann wanted more work in sections, so, on my recommendation, he also engaged Beverly Harrison and George Boyd to assist in the course. Macquarrie taught from a philosophical perspective rooted in existentialism, and Lehmann taught dogmatics from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I felt close to both professors, but methodologically I was much closer to Macquarrie. John Macquarrie shifted from his Church of Scotland to the Anglican Church and was ordained at St. John the Divine in a high ceremony filled with incense and all the Episcopalian ritual. It was between semesters. Paul Lehmann took a seat beside me in the cavernous nave. As the service concluded, he leaned next to me and said, “All I can say, Ron, is thank God for John Calvin.” He jokingly repeated his words to John at the cocktail reception following the ordination. I owe Paul Lehmann the mixed blessing of the cocktail luncheon. Before second semester started he took Beverly Harrison, George Boyd, and me to luncheon and asked if we wanted drinks, and so it began. My first noon martini was followed by his explaining to us his intention to teach John Calvin’s Institutes, and our responsibilities for extensive small-group discussions of the text. Several of us were meeting on South African apartheid during 1964 and developing the ideas of the bank campaign against apartheid. Charles Powers and David Hornbeck were on the planning team, and John Raines and I were the two from Union whom I remember from our meetings in the Inter-Church Center. Learning of a demonstration outside of the South African Embassy to the United Nations to appeal for leniency for Nelson Mandela, I met with representatives of SNCC and local 1199 of the Hospital Workers Union. We agreed to occupy the South African Embassy on that day as long as we could. We prepared a petition to spare the life of Nelson Mandela, whom we feared would be executed. I took the assignment of visiting the embassy and looking over the

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layout. On the day of our occupation, we were visiting the World’s Fair with Sandy and Mel Smith. I borrowed his tie for the trip into Manhattan while they spent a few more hours at the fair. Twelve of us entered the embassy with our petition for the ambassador requesting an answer from his government. At the time John Raines had his leg in a cast, and he pursued the ambassador around the suite while dragging his cast and asking the ambassador to contact his government and get us an answer. My memory is that Austin Ritterspauch and Don Ferrell were the other two Union students joining John and me. The police arrived but were at a loss as to proper action. We were citizens in a mission awaiting an answer. After a few hours the lieutenant phoned the U.S. Embassy to the United Nations in New York City. He told us that Adlai Stevenson had requested that we be arrested and the embassy cleared of the protesters. We were charged with resisting arrest and taken to the Tombs for most of the night. By the time we were arraigned, a charge of disturbing the peace had been added. An understanding judge sought to set an early trial date. We were hoping to lure South Africa into an American courtroom for some long hearings. I demurred and said I had a teaching job in Iowa for which I was already late. He asked me what I was going to teach. I replied, “International relations and an ethics class.” His response was that he wouldn’t want the good citizens of Iowa to miss out on my wisdom. So he set the trial date for the fall. I proceeded to Morningside College for my first teaching assignment. I arrived in Sioux City a day late. Joan had preceded me to begin her classes toward finishing her degree. In the fall, charges were dismissed as South Africa declined to make a court appearance. The representatives of SNCC asked on the courthouse steps if I wanted to go to Baltimore that afternoon with them and tear down a fence dividing the white and black communities there. I declined, making the excuse of needing to get back to my academic work.

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Chapter 13

Oxford Three of our group from Union finished two years of classes at Columbia and our exams. In the process of beginning our dissertations, we went off to Europe for a year. I chose to go to Oxford to study with John Plamenatz, an outstanding political philosopher. Crouter went to Heidelberg, and Harter went off to Hebrew University in Jerusalem and then to Tubingen. Joan and I toured Europe before crossing the Channel to Oxford. As she was pregnant, we flew between cities rather than attempting our previous hitch-hiking. Before flying to Rome, we spent a few days in Paris and visited Chartres, which we had missed the first time through four years before. Again we stayed on the Left Bank and adored the city. Walks along the Seine were particularly beautiful and romantic. From Paris we enjoyed the Swiss Air superior service to Geneva. Sites dear to the memory of John Calvin were investigated there. An acquaintance from Union was spending an intern year there, and he was surprised when we looked him up. He took us around to some of the special places he had found. After a couple of days of enjoying Lake Geneva, we absorbed a little of Switzerland and left for Rome. We now inhaled Rome. Vatican II was about to open. A German monsignor mistook us for Germans in a café run by the church for the poor and students. We quickly disabused him of that notion by responding to him in German. He knew my teacher Robert MacAfee Brown, and he asked if I would help him translate some German phraseology into English for his press releases from the German Church’s reporters’ center. I spent about a day helping him. On stepping out of his office on Vatican Square, he exclaimed, “The popes have tried to outdo Solomon.” His German reaction reminded me of Martin Luther being jolted by the Renaissance Church of Rome. Wandering through the Forum, the Coliseum, and museums, we appreciated how very Roman the Catholic Church was. The Church conquered Rome and Rome absorbed the Church. The kind monsignor got us tickets for the opening of the Council. So on the opening day Joan and I were standing in the midst of nuns until the Swiss guards opened the doors. The pleasant nuns all of a sudden became black-clothed blockers as elbows and knees flew to gain entrance to the conclave. We spent wonderful days touring the Pantheon, churches, and the Sistine Chapel, and enjoying the food, wine, and luscious ice cream. Somehow at the Rome airport we boarded a plane for Cairo, and we got off just in time to catch our intended flight to Athens. The Athens museum was probably the high point of our visit to Athens, though the Plaka and the Agora where Socrates, Plato, and Paul all argued were almost holy to me. I was still stretched between philosophy and religion. The day in the museum reminded me of the outlines of my studies of Greek thought and religion. We had read in Frommer of an archaeological tour for students of the Peloponnesus. The five-day, four-night tour was only $99 apiece, and off we went to explore the rocks and ruins of Greece. I lost a race to a South African in the Olympic Stadium. One day, as Joan and I

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stole away from the group for a walk, a young boy came out of the olive garden playing his flute to lead his sheep. For us he was the deity Pan. Our longest stop was in Athens. We flew on to Zurich, where we were joined by Richard and Barbara Crouter for a delightful weekend exploring the center of Swiss finance, and enjoying the entirely different cuisine. Crouter’s German, already heavily improved from our Union course, was a great help. We agreed to return together to New York City on a German ship when our mutual sojourns in Europe concluded. Our arrival in Oxford had a few more than the usual problems. Housing was not yet secured, my checks from the Danforth Foundation and Columbia University had not arrived, and our trunk of clothes from the States had been returned to the dock at Portsmouth. Trinity College handled the housing issue for us after a little of our own house hunting. St. John’s College had restored some houses on Museum Road for graduate students, and we were soon in 37 Museum Road on the first floor, with the Hobbs family living on the second. We were separated by a wall from the beautiful gardens of St. Johns, and we were only five minutes around the block to Trinity College. The science museums were down the street, and the Ashmolean Museum of Art was only a couple of blocks away in the other direction. We were near the university parks, where we spent many an hour. The college loaned me money to purchase a jacket, shirt, and trousers for their first reception, and the checks soon arrived. The trunk took a little longer, but it was secured in a reasonable period of time, and we settled into our English digs. After coming out of the front door of 37 Museum Road, we could walk to the left or the right to Trinity College. If we chose to go left, we squeezed through the bars that permitted only bikes to pass into the road, under the archway of the tavern into Saint Giles Street. The broad boulevard took one past Saint John’s College walls to the Martyrs of the Reformation Monument honoring divines burned at the stake. It had been dedicated to Cramner, Latimer, and Ridley in 1839 as a counter to the Romantrending Tractarian movement of Newman. Behind the monument the dark structure of Saint Mary Magdalen Church at the corner of Broad Street and Saint Giles Street appeared before you across from the shops and restaurants of Oxford. A man from Trinity would walk quickly past Balliol College to the splendid metal gates of Trinity College, with its circular driveway and welcoming gardens. If we had turned to the right on leaving 37 Museum Road, we passed by other student housing and the Victorian-striped brick buildings of Keble College on the left. (One night, after staying past closing hours in Keble playing Diplomacy, a few of us had scaled the Keble wall to Museum Road. Peter told us that the legend of Lawrence of Arabia was that he could return the whole distance from Keble to the courtyard of Balliol climbing over the college roofs without ever descending to the ground.) Rounding the corner to Parks Road, our walk took us past the University Laboratories and Museum; a quaint, thatched-roofed cottage; the monument to empire of Rhodes House; and the long, stone walls of St. John’s and Trinity to the decorative steel gates of Trinity, revealing through the metal lace work the expansive acreage of Trinity’s Garden Quad with its ancient trees. The scholar would pass the New Bodleian Library across the street from Wadham College onto Broad Street, with the entrance to Trinity

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just past the White Horse Tavern and Blackwell’s Books. The walls and the stone buildings of Oxford seemed foreboding, as originally they were for protection and security of the students. But inside each college entrance delightful walks through gardens opened up. My scholarly pursuits had been determined by a book I found in a bookstore on Broadway in New York City. But even when arriving at Oxford, I could not name my direction. Henry Paolucci’s edition of The Political Writings of St. Augustine introduced me to the world of religiously based political theory, and that would remain my major topic for my lifetime of scholarship. It was not Augustine that would capture me; he just made clear the possibility of connecting ultimate concerns to practical politics. But two modern Augustinian scholars, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, would dominate my imagination. I was clear enough on my direction that after a month of exploring Oxford’s opportunities, I settled on studying for the bachelor of philosophy degree. This decision took me to my first interview with Gilbert Ryle, who was known as a linguistic philosopher. He was impatient with my choices of philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and moral philosophy. I would be out of the mainstream of his interests in the philosophy of language, though it was relevant to all of my chosen areas. His expletives when he tripped on his light cord in his study confirmed that perhaps the study of linguistics was not all it was intended to be. He did not believe Ian T. Ramsey could teach me anything I did not already know. But he could not disapprove of Isaiah Berlin and John Plamenatz, who, though outside the Oxford linguistic studies, were restoring political philosophy to a place in the university. R. M. Hare in moral philosophy was close enough to his own work to receive his approval. These four became my major professors at Oxford, and John Plamenatz was the tutor who read and discussed my essay with me every two weeks. Plamenatz’s reading assignments of several works for each essay took me to many of the libraries of the university. The location of the professors and other lectures took me to Nuffield College, Christ Church, Oriel, and various university lecture rooms. The bachelor of philosophy in politics had its own seminar room in the Bodleian Library. Peter Brown’s seminar in Augustine provided the first opportunity for me to present a paper on Augustine’s political theory. Other writings, reviews, and talks have provided further opportunities, but I am not certain I have ever gotten it correct. The sense that Christianity in its origins and shape is a religion from the Roman Empire has remained with me, and our task remains to find a way to live the best of it with integrity. The new college of Nuffield hosted Professor Plamenatz. His work Man and Society had been the only secondary text recommended for my course in the history of political philosophy with Herbert Deane at Columbia. He was a primary reason for my coming to Oxford. The walk to Nuffield took me by medieval walls, the site of the castle, and by ancient churches and a little of the town’s shopping center. As a boy growing up on the Iowa prairie, no structure of my village was over ninety years old. The walls and the bells of the churches in Oxford awoke the memories of the history books I had read, and I was located in the depths of Western civilization, or so it seemed. Nearby rock art of the horse reached into the ancient past, and Roman ruins were never far away. Nevertheless, Plamenatz’s work was in modern political thought,

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and we used texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nuffield, for a modern college, was very dark. Its interior was dimly lighted, as was Plamenatz’s study. It was as if Oxford, and Nuffield in particular, were on a low power source. Its gray walls and plain quadrangle reinforced the sense of gloom around the subject of political theory. John Plamenatz and I never became close, though we saw each other regularly. He critiqued my concepts and assigned me problems in American political thought to work on as well as the continental and British issues. He worried about my refusal to choose clearly either political philosophy or philosophy of religion. While in Oxford, I received an invitation from John Lankford, then at Manhattanville College, to pursue a position there in political philosophy. He had spoken to the departmental chair, and the president of the college had met and liked me. But I did not pursue it. John had said it would require my choosing to become a political philosopher as distinct from a religionist. The Lankfords and the Stones had become very close friends the previous year. The following year they went off to the University of Missouri to the Department of History. That fall my second essay was published. I had written a paper for Niebuhr’s seminar on the political philosophy of Hans J. Morgenthau, and it was published as “Political Realism and Christian Ethics” in Religion and Life. My life’s direction was becoming focused. I had been surprised when Niebuhr invited me to his apartment one afternoon to discuss the paper with me. He particularly appreciated what I had written in comparing Morgenthau’s thought to his own. The contrast of Morgenthau recommending the consistent pursuit of power as both normal and normative to Niebuhr’s regarding it as only normal sparked his interest. I was startled to learn that Niebuhr knew page numbers of my essay to which he wanted to refer. He had been revising his Man’s Nature and His Communities at the time. Later, in his generous manner, he told me he should have given me a footnote in his reflections on Morgenthau in that book. I was beginning the reading for my dissertation while at Oxford. The Oxford graduate students in politics knew something of Niebuhr, but very little of Morgenthau. Isaiah Berlin, a friend of Mrs. Ursula Niebuhr as well as Reinhold Niebuhr, was well equipped to guide the discussion of my paper for the BPhil seminar on private and public morality. It was being discussed in Oxford at the time in terms of private homosexuality versus public debates over suppressing the behavior. I listened to the same debates in the House of Lords over outlawing homosexuality in the merchant marines. The homosexual issue at the time held no interest for me, though I regarded some of the feared dire consequences of permitting homosexual behavior to be overdrawn. The speaker in the House of Lords who presented a picture of tolerance in the merchant marines sinking the queen’s ships seemed absurd. My one occasion of being asked to join the High Table at Trinity College was the scheduling of a debate between the young Michael Beloff and me over the relationship of morality to politics. I was not prepared for the three-table dinner. I did not understand why Beloff adjourned from the festivities after dinner while I proceeded to the dessert table and then to the cognac and coffee room later. My tight formal trousers borrowed from my German friend Henig Bydekarken had to be loosened. By

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the time of the debate, I had drunk too much and was far from my sharpest self. Fortunately, the evening was entertaining, and I managed not to disgrace myself. I learned after the debate that young Mr. Beloff was the son of the senior political theorist at the university, Max Beloff, and as an undergraduate he was captain of the Oxford debate team on its tour of America. The event made a larger impression on me than it did on Beloff. When I was lecturing at Oxford years later and he was the president of Trinity College, he had no memory of the occasion. I have enjoyed his company in New York and Oxford since. I did not dine regularly at the college. Joan and I usually took our meals at home. We acquired a wire cart to pull the groceries home from the central market or the supermarket. On Wednesday evenings we usually attended the Middle-Common Room dinner for graduate students in the balcony of the Trinity dining hall. The usual dinner there was mushroom soup, followed by salmon, a main course (often beef), and a variety of desserts. We did not often stay for coffee or drinks afterward in our common room, nor did we form our main friendships there. Our closest friends were the German couple from St. John’s College, the Bydekarkens. We grew to like the Hobbs family from upstairs. He and I would discuss theism versus atheism and the question of the religious loyalties of Thomas Hobbes. Marcus Borg, an acquaintance from Union Seminary studying the New Testament, would come over for a game night, and we met a few times for coffee on the High Street. A DPhil candidate from Texas and his wife from Keble College also became friends, and our physical closeness to that college encouraged the friendship. He introduced us to Austin Farer, who was warden of Keble. Dr. Farer was the preacher at the service dedicating the rebuilding of the Trinity College organ. The chaplain of the college invited a few of us over to his apartment before the service. On his leaving for the service, he said, “You are welcome to stay and drink my sherry or you can join me at the service.” We followed him to the small Christopher Wren–inspired chapel situated where the old Durham College Chapel had been located some time in the twelfth century. Only the pipes of the organ were visible in the balcony, and the university organist played the instrument from his bench behind the pipes, invisible to all the worshippers. On the second hymn a note stuck. The undergraduates snickered at the failure. After a pause, the dean slipped unobtrusively out of his pew and left the nave. The hymn resumed and the service proceeded until Austin Farer ascended the pulpit. After a prayer, he announced that the university organist had died. He then proceeded, without missing a beat, to his sermon. After the last hymn, and before the benediction, he announced that the congregation should remain in their seats, until the health officers could remove the body of the organist. Then we solemnly filed out past the ambulance that was parked in the quadrangle.

BOXING Peter, a young Trinity undergraduate studying Persian poetry, asked to visit me. He had learned that I had won a Golden Gloves championship in the States, and he recruited

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me for the boxing team. My routine regularly became running in the Oxford parks before breakfast, spending my days in tutorials or lectures, and finishing the day with boxing practice and training in the old gymnasium then used by the Oxford Boxing Club. Peter had to drop boxing because of a sprained ankle, and my place on the team was soon secured. I was joined in the middle ranks of the team by Alex Hottell, a graduate of West Point and a Rhodes Scholar studying at Magdalen College. We fought much more from crouches and were more aggressive than most of the English boxers from schools where they were taught to stand up straight. Our sparring would usually draw a crowd from the other boxers, who watched the Americans bang away. Alex was a little heavier than I, so we divided the welterweight class between us. I lost a few pounds going down to fight at 140 pounds, and he lost fewer pounds to fight as a welterweight at 147 pounds. The Oxford paper published articles about the two Yanks at Oxford. As a philosopher, I was labeled the “Brain,” and Alex, as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, was called the “Brawn.” Our contests with Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy, and London were warm-up bouts for the university match, and we had a few other exhibition bouts. I was overmatched with the London amateur champion. I managed to knock the wind out of him but failed to seize the advantage when he was crunched over protecting himself. Team members commented later that I did not seem to have the killer instinct at twenty-seven years of age; I concurred. The next day I had to explain to Isaiah Berlin as I read my paper for the seminar in politics why my face was so black and blue. I took the train to London to secure tickets for the Cassius Clay–Henry Cooper fight. While there I spent an afternoon at Saint Paul’s Cathedral. On the audio tour, I listened to a voice echoing Samuel Johnson’s words: “He who is bored with London is bored with life.” I have remembered those words all the days of my life, and they have jarred me out of many slides in the direction of boredom. The words were more memorable than the fight a couple of days later in which Henry Cooper lasted for only six rounds. Christmas in Oxford was splendid. The Christmas tree in Oxford’s public market, Father Christmas in the grotto of the local department store, the performance of the Messiah in the ancient town hall, London’s street decorations switched on by the Marchioness of Blandford, English carols, church services, and mince pies all pointed toward human hopes for a savior. We spent a long weekend on the Isle of Wight during the Christmas holidays. The seascapes were seconded in beauty by the long, forested ravines that fell toward the sea. Long walks provided the major recreation for us and exercise for Joan, who was seven months pregnant. She did most of the work typing and preparing a manuscript for John Macquarrie on selections in Twentieth Century Religious Thought. John would send over his requests for selections, granting me some freedom in expanding or contracting the selections, and he also asked for suggestions to include, but mostly he made the choices. Joan would type them, and we would proofread them together.

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BIRTH OF RANDALL The chaplain of the college was at our apartment for dinner when Joan went into labor. He drove us to the hospital, and we left our dishes in the sink. After several hours of waiting, our son Randall was born on February 21, a week after Joan’s birthday. His birth inspired the greatest gush of joy I can remember. I remained with Joan through the night and the next day until 5 PM. Then I took some cigars down to the boxing team. The coach was not amused by the cigars, but all the men were congratulatory and enjoyed the occasion. The coach had greeted me with the exclamation, “Where were you, Stone? For the first time, we have all the team together and you are away.” Captain Bob Spears, Trevor Faber, and Alex Hotell took me to White House Tavern, and I became drunk. They then took me home, washed the dishes, and put me to bed. Joan remained in the hospital a little longer than was usual, and Randall developed well, though he had been born a little prematurely and a little under the preferred weight. The British members of the boxing team visited Joan and promised Randall a place on a future team when he came back as a student. Randall had only been home a few days when he was placed in the arms of his first babysitter. Annette kept him so Joan could come to the varsity match on March 3 in the old town hall of Oxford. It was a good night for the boxing team, as it won six matches to three for Cambridge. My bout was one of only two to go the full distance. I managed to outpoint the taller Christopher Tracey in a bout sports writer Terry Godwin described as follows: I have not seen a harder or more vigorously contested Varsity fight than that in which Ron Stone, an American Golden Gloves Champion, outpointed Cambridge’s Chris Tracey at light-welter. Both were so exhausted at the end that they could barely stand. Unfortunately, Alex had drawn a match with Alva Anderson, an international boxer from Jamaica, who had defeated his previous two contestants in the first round. His right hand knocked Alex out in the first round as well. I was glad for my victory, but from my perspective the decision could have gone the other way. Another sports writer credited my aggressiveness and my left hand for giving me the advantage. That Oxford victory would be my last official bout, and I returned to scholarship and the joys of fatherhood. Walks with Joan and the pram in the Oxford parks replaced the earlymorning runs, and the remaining months in the beautiful university were not dominated by afternoon practice. Alex took Trevor Faber and me out to dinner at a U.S. Air Force base one evening. We were delighted to go. However, our intentions to pay our own way were foiled, as Alex informed us that our British money was not accepted on base. There only American cash sufficed. I wondered what archaeologists would make of finding American coins at various sites around Britain a thousand years later. Alex and I were on opposite sides of the debate about the Vietnam War, and on two occasions the Oxford boxing team sat and listened while two Americans argued about the nation’s role in the conflict.

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Bob Spears took me out in the late spring and asked me if I would accept the captaincy of the team for the next year. The money situation was uncertain, and we had planned to return after one year. About that time a letter arrived from Dean Roger Shinn asking me to serve as tutor in Christian ethics at the seminary in 1966–1967. Another letter soon followed from him requesting that my duties as tutor also include assisting Reinhold Niebuhr in a seminar that he would conduct from his home apartment on Riverside Drive. I accepted Shinn’s invitation. This acceptance saved me from the responsibilities and the strong ale initiation requirements of leading the boxing team. It also meant I no longer needed to direct my studies toward the rigorous requirements of the BPhil examinations. My tutorials with Plamenatz continued as he tried to shape his requirements toward my peculiar mind and vocational direction. The work with Ian Ramsey in thinking of theology as model building provided new insights, and the working on the readings for Macquarrie in twentieth-century religious thought continued to deepen my background. My study notebooks now revealed more notes on books by Niebuhr read in the Bodleian. They also contained diagrams of possible scenarios for our weekly Diplomacy games. Henig Bydekarken and I were the continuing hosts, and two others were also regular players. Six other players usually furnished the additional three needed for alternative weeks. Philosophers, political scientists, economists, and clergy rounded out the table for our weekly engagements of this game, favored also by Henry Kissinger, as we pursued the tricks, falsehoods, persuasion, diplomacy, and threats of early twentieth-century imperial Europe dominated by seven empires. It was generally an allmale affair, and the testosterone flowed. We found it best to refrain from alcohol until the game was concluded and to take a break in the middle, featuring sandwiches made from thick slices of bread. Later I would bring the game to my family of brothers, their children, and eventually classes in politics at the seminary as well as social evenings. My son, political scientist Randall Stone, would eventually adopt this and one of my other games for his political science courses at the University of Rochester. My younger brother, the Reverend Hugh Stone, also found ways to use it in his college teaching in Iowa. As late as 2012, I was quite pleased when my younger grandson, William, was leading when we had to conclude a game to leave for our Pittsburgh Steeler game. Though the year before coming to Oxford I had studied under a grant as a National and Aeronautics Space Agency fellow at Columbia, my studies at Oxford were all in the humanities, and particularly in philosophy. A letter from Hugh, my thirteen-year-old brother, thanked me for the funds I had sent him and his younger brother. They used it to buy rockets for launching. He was quite satisfied with his two-stage rocket launch, and he asked about British interest in rocketry. I was aware of great science being done at Oxford, and a term paper at Columbia had dealt with improving science education in American schools. But at Oxford my studies almost fell under the critique of Matthew Arnold. He had written, “Beautiful City! So venerable, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, spreading her gardens to the moonlight and whispering from her towers the last enchantment of the Middle Ages.” Arnold’s was a Victorian romantic notion of Oxford. But we absorbed it as we pushed baby Randall in his pram through either the University Park so near or Christ Church

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Meadow on the other end of the college environs. The Cherwell and the Thames both seduced us with their quietness and students resting on their banks. Years later, as I disposed of my library to my son and a couple of students, I reserved the two volumes of Man and Society by John Plamenatz for myself. The interiors of Lincoln College, Christ Church Cathedral and College, and the University Church of St. Mary’s all echoed the presence of John Wesley, who had inspired our Methodist Church. We worshipped some in the city Methodist Church, but as often we found our way to St. Aldgates across from Christ Church. There I met Archbishop Michael Ramsey for the first time and discussed with him his acquaintances, the Niebuhrs. We left Oxford in the early summer of 1966. Our wandering took us to Edinburgh, where in a pub one Scot, on learning that our son was born in Oxford, said, “Oh, he’s a wee Scot then.” Border castles and ruined abbeys filled our minds with the history of the former years of the United Kingdom. We traveled leisurely down through Southern England and visited Cambridge and London before leaving from Dover for the continent. Brussels and the field at Waterloo were our primary site visits in Belgium. We went on to the Netherlands to visit The Hague and Amsterdam. Our old car was British, and therefore its steering wheel was on the right-hand side. It wasn’t appreciated much by Germans, who drove much faster on the left-hand side of the autobahn. We poked along visiting castles and churches on the Rhine. We stayed with the Harters in their village outside of Tubingen, where they had advised us they had a guest room with a crib. Bill insisted on using the term “load shoot” for our late-night discussions, and it was a great one. It was hard to take in all they had seen and learned in Israel and the Middle East. The letters among us had focused more on theology learned than on personal matters, but the hearty friendships were celebrated in the correspondence also. We were in a letter-writing culture, and the letters of the Harters, the Crouters, and the Copes read as if they were written for graduate examinations, as that was the context of our friendships. Both couples, still childless, were impressed with Randall and charmed by him as well. My two strongest memories of him at rest are in the seat of his pram in restaurants and in the courtyard of a castle in his pram while his young parents clambered over one more wall. After Tubingen we moved on to the hospitality of the Crouters in Heidelberg. By early July we reached the Goethe Institute in Rotenburg over the Tauber. Dick and Barb Crouter accompanied us from Heidelberg and helped us to find a house to live in for the weeks at the Institute. We found accommodations in Detwang at the foot of the hill. Our hausfrau Frau Corder was delighted with the baby, and we trusted her to watch over him a few times, but mostly we took him with us. The Tauber was a beautiful river for walks, and the city’s walls were delightful for strolls around the medieval preserved city. The German lessons took up about five hours per day, and the rest we had for study and some play. Bill Cloonan, a French literature graduate student at the University of North Carolina from New York City, became a close companion in the class and the lunch-hour breaks in Rotenburg, and after class I would walk down the hill to join Joan. She had full-time child-care duty during the time I was cramming

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German. After six weeks of classes, we left small Detwang and the magnificent romantic town of Rotenburg. A favorite memory is the long walk we took in the Black Forest with Randall on my back. Then we drove through the Black Forest and back up the Rhine toward the north. Trier was dear to us both for its Roman ruins and as the childhood home of Karl Marx. I had entered pretty deeply into the reading and study of Marx in Oxford. Isaiah Berlin had been particularly helpful on the subject, and the study there laid the foundation for two later essays I would produce on the revolutionary critic of religion and society. Our drives north along the river were interrupted by intense exploration of Romanesque cathedrals in the river cities. The magnificent Gothic cathedral in Cologne was a high point architecturally of the tour. Our three-day detour introduced us to the Mosel River and the wines of the region. I managed to sell our old British car in Bremen at quite a loss before we bordered the Europa for the return voyage with our friends from school, Barb and Dick Crouter. The Europa was a slow ship, making stops in Portsmouth and La Havre. It took ten days to reach New York’s harbor. On the crossing we met the Queen Mary steaming for England. Passing within half a mile of the Europa, it left me feeling lonely on the deck. It was returning to England, and we were leaving tutors, boxers, and friends behind. The Statue of Liberty was a welcome symbol for our homecoming. The Europeans sharing the deck with me were very impressed, and I absorbed it as a metaphor for all that was good about our country. We were met on Pier 88 by my brother Alan, his wife Muriel, and their one-year-old, Kirsten. Bill and Linda Harter and Lamar and Sandy Cope from graduate school also came downtown for the occasion. Alan had finished his master’s thesis for Iowa, and was moving to Chicago to begin his doctor of ministry studies. The customs officer suggested we regard anything we had bought abroad as possessions of the new immigrant, Randall. His generosity saved us a few dollars, of which we were very short at the time. So a few days before graduate school would resume and my new duties with Shinn and Niebuhr would commence, we were safely back in 527 Riverside Drive, known as Van Dusen Hall. It had fine views of the Hudson River and Grant’s tomb. I heard from my college friend Dick Gregory. He took a shorter route to his credentialing, and he was now set up in Vermillion as an ophthalmologist. Jan was very pleased by the move to Vermillion, and their three children were doing very well in their new home. I had served as their best man in 1960. In 1965 I had finished the basic theology degree and advanced toward the PhD, but I had one or more years still to go. I also heard from my colleague Steven Rockefeller, who announced his academic progress was even slower. He took the take-home examination of John Randall very seriously and was postponing finishing it to get by his field exams in philosophy. He concluded, “I must tell you some of us at the Seminary were disappointed you did not call your son Reinhold Ronald or at least Ronald Reinhold Niebuhr Stone, but I guess it is alright the way it is! Best wishes to you both and Randall Warren.”

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Chapter 14

Reinhold Niebuhr When I met him in 1963, he could stand and lecture, but by 1966 he preferred to sit at his desk in his apartment on Riverside Drive. He loved to walk beside Riverside Drive, but he needed to be accompanied by someone. His final revisions had been published in 1965 with a note in the preface crediting Ursula with “the joint authorship,” and the words “I cannot therefore promise that this summary of my life work is strictly my own.” They published at least once under their joint names when they reviewed W. D. Davies’s book on the Sermon on the Mount. Another volume coauthored with Paul Sigmund and edited from their earlier class notes was still to appear, and we would in 1968 bring out an edited volume of his essays. Ursula had intended to write her own biography of Reinhold, and it would have added greatly to our understanding of him and of them. June Bingham’s book was the only biography at the time, though other volumes on his thought had appeared. The generous spirit of Niebuhr is seen in a letter he wrote me about his new book, Man’s Nature and His Communities: “You congratulate me on my new book. I should have sent you a copy. To tell you the truth, the first chapter on ‘Idealist and Realist Political Theories’ which ends with Morgenthau’s and my realism was inspired by your questions in my seminar.” He was weak those last years, but the fire inside him still burned and showed itself to students in his apartment and in his letters to the editors of the New York Times, and in the few essays he managed to push through his typewriter with his one functioning hand. Despite the pain he endured, he could muster sufficient good humor for the class. Both of the courses in which I served that fall were on Christian ethics and social problems. Shinn’s course followed the general outline of a course Niebuhr had taught for years, and it was normally preceded by Bennett’s course in the foundations of Christian ethics. I had taken Bennett’s course as a master of divinity student, but missed Shinn’s, so it was a good opportunity to observe him at work and to help out leading discussions of case studies. I also read and graded half of the term papers. The first part of Niebuhr’s seminar consisted of seven topics he introduced, and the later part of the course consisted of discussions of term papers based on short student presentations of their work. I prepared a syllabus for the course, adding some assignments in reading of Niebuhr’s material and a few things I had picked up at Oxford from political philosophy. The course proceeded from the problem of social ethics in Christian faith through sources of moral and social ethics to norms of social ethics—basically order, justice, equality, and liberty. Then the course turned to the problems of economic justice, racism and tribalism, moral and international politics, and sexuality and family relations. It concluded with the discussion of student papers. Shinn had narrowed the class down to ten students for the convenience of sitting in Niebuhr’s front room at 404 Riverside Drive. Though he had worked on these subjects since coming to Union in 1928, he rethought each seminar presentation and made the material come alive.

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Students were given freedom to choose topics for term papers within the area of Christian social ethics understood broadly. They normally cleared their topics with me, and Niebuhr read most of them. Sometimes the more daring of the students would challenge some well-known position of Niebuhr’s, and he exhibited great humility and patience with dealing with topics on which his own conclusions were widely known. I worked for him for two years, and I found the seminars to be the most challenging and helpful part of my graduate studies. With Roger Shinn’s concurrence, I suggested to him that I write my dissertation on his thought on international politics; he demurred. At first he suggested he was not all that important. Then he said he would agree if I cleared it with Professor William Fox in international relations at Columbia. We would often discuss matters of international relations and political theory in our walks on Riverside Drive each Friday afternoon. His crippled condition meant that he needed an escort for company and protection, but he could get around on his own. I sometimes would arrange for other students to take responsibility for different days, but basically I saw him for Wednesday afternoon seminars and Friday afternoon walks. Ursula would always be present in another room for the seminars, and occasionally she would bring in refreshments after the seminar and join the discussion. She was in charge of care for him, and she protected him very thoroughly from overexertion. On his walks with students, he provided advice when asked for it. He advised students on the sit-in at the South African Embassy and the bank campaign against apartheid. I remember meeting the vice president of the local Chemical Bank on Riverside Drive after Niebuhr’s journal Christianity and Crisis withdrew its small account to support the student-led campaign. Niebuhr seemed a little embarrassed, but the meeting remained purely cordial. As the 1968 presidential campaign heated up, he encouraged some students to follow their inclination to support Governor Rockefeller’s attempt to thwart the Richard Nixon bid for the presidency. In his own correspondence he despaired of President Johnson and feared that he might be driven to vote Republican or to withhold his vote completely. Such uncharacteristic thoughts were abandoned as first McCarthy, then Kennedy, and finally Humphrey rose to replace Johnson. His warmth, humility, and genuineness won him friends among the few students permitted to take the seminars or to visit him about other matters. Sometimes I would arrange questions for him before we met, but usually we just talked, starting with the news of the day or developments at Union and Columbia. His mind was a torrent of how the world could be improved. Bad news did not discourage him as much as it inspired him to plot how things could be acted upon politically for the world’s improvement. It was those conversations that inspired me to suggest in my first book on his political thought that his mind contained both the stratagems of Machiavelli and the love of Jesus. June Bingham’s biography had been titled The Courage to Change. He had little interest in defending positions he had taken earlier. The history of thought or his own thoughts were ransacked for their present relevance, and his Christian pragmatism would sort out policies for the present without defending previous judgments. From these walks, I learned that my earlier plans to present his perspective structurally were doomed to inadequacy. After almost a year’s systematizing of this

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thought, I gave up and presented it chronologically. This change, as well as my other work, kept me from finishing my dissertation in the year I had allotted to it.

VASSAR COLLEGE James A. Martin, who taught religion in higher education and philosophy of religion, recommended me for a teaching position at Vassar, so for two semesters I commuted there. I drove my old Ford Falcon at first, and then I tried the train. We concluded that we needed a new car, and we purchased our first new car near Poughkeepsie. It was a 1967 Mustang. My best memory of the purchase was Randy crawling around it in the showroom in his pajamas, inspecting the car and its undercarriage. Vassar’s payment for two courses split between two years was generous, but it took the full income from Vassar to pay for the car. The students at Vassar were outstanding, and occasionally they would invite me to dine with them and hold a session with some of their friends. They particularly appreciated H. Richard Niebuhr’s book The Responsible Self and his model of discussion for gathering moral wisdom. Reinhold Niebuhr’s taped lecture on Augustine was much more persuasive than anything I could say about the possibilities of utilizing Augustine for ethics and political wisdom. In July 1967, Niebuhr wrote me saying that they intended to stay at Stockbridge for the fall term. It assisted in his therapy and with Ursula’s teaching at a nearby college for a short term: Negotiations have now been completed for our fall tenure. President Bennett is in Europe, so I will count on you to pass the word along. I hope one semester for the old man will not seriously disarray the program of the Seminary. Braziller Inc. has asked for a book of my occasional writings. I told them it would be better to wait for a year because a book by Paul Sigmund and me on democracy in world affairs is scheduled for 1968. But I told them that you might consider an offer to select these writings. I thought I would trust your judgment implicitly. He wrote again from Stockbridge three months later: I have a new problem. I fell and broke the tail of my spine, it’s very painful and I have been unable to do any work. The Publisher, Braziller is charmed by the prospect of your editing my occasional writings, and will get in touch with you after January. Affectionately yours, Rienbuhr. In 1967, I was elevated to the rank of instructor at Union. Roger Shinn treated me like a colleague. John Bennett and I co-taught Niebuhr’s course on “Moral Issues in International Politics.” I developed my own tutorials on political philosophy and Christian ethics on the Oxford model of teaching, and I read several of the Union master of divinity theses. I continued assisting Niebuhr in his seminar, and we

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continued our walks. The mentor-student friendship turned into a more collegial friendship.

SOCIAL ACTION I had written an essay on power that was requested by Social Action, and that led to my being asked to edit the monthly journal, so now I was being pulled into the New York world of academic social ethics. I had an office on Park Avenue South and part-time teaching responsibilities at Vassar, and a little less than a full-time position at Union. I was being pulled away from my gentle, good wife and my fabulous young son. Bob Evans, from the apartment next to mine, told me years later of their remembering me going back to the office in the evening and on Sunday afternoons after lunch to write my dissertation. Senior professors were offering me opportunities for which I was insufficiently grateful, thinking that I won them on my own deserts. If I had understood then deeply how fortunate I was, I could have avoided some mistakes that lay ahead. Editing Social Action put me on the staff of the Council for Christian Social Action. Most of the executives were followers of Niebuhr and knew him personally. The years 1967–1968 were tumultuous, with two major assassinations and American cities burning with the rage of the oppressed race acting out anger in destructive riots. I followed the issue on power with issues on politics, racism in South Africa, humanity in the environment, school integration, priorities in the 1968 election, the Marxist/ Christian dialogue, dissent in democracy, and racism and the police, forecasting issues I would deal with in my teaching. It was exhilarating to have a journal to lead on social issues. The issue for the election, with essays written by Roger Shinn and Reinhold Niebuhr, had a cover with a simulated American flag burning over the capitol building in D.C. We had a good, faithful readership, and I had total editorial freedom. I think I should have held on to the editorship. I did not fully realize either the heritage of Christian social journalism or its importance. I found the workload to be too much, and at the end of 1968 I resigned the post. I was proud of publishing articles by Robert Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson on the environment when their relationship was full of acrimony. The most important piece was probably Reinhold’s essay on race relations. It was his major late piece on the subject and showed his passion for utilizing power to change the situation. Out of the issues I shepherded through publication, a third were on racism in education, with the police, or in South Africa. The war dragged on, and I was teaching a small group of Union students about the powers of the presidency in foreign policy and they were preparing for the presidential election in the winter of 1967–1968. Reinhold was writing for Christianity and Crisis, the New Leader, the New Republic, War/Peace Report, the New York Times, and letters to the New York Times criticizing the war; John Bennett and I organized a seminar on a weekend for alumni on the moral issues of the war. Reinhold accepted a position on the board of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam and provided advice to this most powerful of the antiwar lobbies sponsored by Christians. His inability to travel and the pain he suffered prevented him from actively being present at the meetings of the

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board or its activities. The students in Niebuhr’s seminars often drew him off the topic of the seminar into reflections on his opposition to the war.

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Chapter 15

Faith and Politics The choosing of essays for the volume of occasional writings by Niebuhr for Braziller was easy, as I already had ideas of my favorite pieces. I chose the title Faith and Politics, and Reinhold added the subtitle “A Commentary on Religious, Social and Political Thought in a Technological Age.” Ursula made a few suggestions for inclusion. The first part of the volume dealt with themes of the formation of his thought with two essays on symbolism in religion and pieces on the thought of Walter Rauschenbusch and Karl Marx. It also included essays on the relationships of theology to political thought in the West and on the spiritual condition of modernism. The middle part collected his essays on the relationship of Christian social ethics to the state, civilization, social action, economic life, and the ecumenical movement. The final part dealt with writings in political philosophy and politics, ending with reflections on the war in Vietnam. My introduction focused on my understanding of his method and its relevance to the political dramas of the late 1960s. His preface thanked me for editing the volume and emphasized the relevance of the symbols of the religious traditions to the ongoing work of politics in an increasingly secular age. The longest and best reviews were by the rationalist Brand Blanshard in the New York Times and the Christian realist Theodore Weber in World View. Blanshard complimented Niebuhr’s contributions to social and political discourse but personally wished for less obfuscation of social and political and religious discourse by religious symbolism. He concluded the philosopher was more liberated than the theologian. The debate between reason without theology and a reasoned theology was the old debate engaged in by Niebuhr throughout his career. Weber’s review was very insightful. He balanced the optimistic critics of the 1960s against the anthropology and theology of history of Niebuhr. Generally he appreciated Niebuhr’s use of ambiguity and had reservations about those who would bring heaven down to earth by their social reforms. Still, in his conclusion he wanted “substantially more development in their constructive aspects” and a “more open estimate of historical perspectives” in Niebuhr’s ethics and politics. Stanley Hauerwas’s reference to it in his Gifford Lectures as the best anthology of Niebuhr’s writings was a warm endorsement of my early project, and I suspect it was in part because of the degree to which the essays chosen showed Niebuhr’s pragmatism and debt to William James. The tension between Brand Blanshard and Reinhold Niebuhr is akin to the tension between William James’s profound treatment of the importance of religion and its downplaying by John Dewey. Though I undertook the project out of respect and gratitude to Niebuhr, its publication was relevant to my appointment as assistant professor at Columbia and to following events.

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Chapter 16

Teaching and Leaving Columbia I began searching for a teaching position in 1967 as I projected defending the dissertation in the spring of 1968. The defense would be among the best teaching moments at Columbia. I walked over to the defense with Roger Shinn. We had to be permitted on to the campus, as the police had only driven the occupiers of campus buildings out a week earlier and the campus was still under security status. Roger had read the dissertation chapter by chapter. John Bennett chaired the meeting. Roger Shinn and William Fox, from international relations, were the main questioners. Two younger sociologists did not raise many questions, but Amitai Etzioni had already sent his comments to the committee, as he had been called off campus. Two hours of intense discussion were followed by approving a motion for “Distinction” and a recommendation of the dissertation for the Bancroft Prize. The interview trip to the Claremont School of Theology was a pleasant experience. I was not asked to present a paper, but rather to interview each of the faculty. These were all conducted in good spirit, and I spent some time with my friend from Union, Robert Hammerton-Kelly. No commitments were made. On returning, I took the subway to 116th Street and Broadway. On emerging, Joseph Blau, the chair of the Columbia department, seeing me with my suitcase, asked where I had been. I mentioned I was interviewing at Claremont. He replied, “Don’t think about it; we are working on a position here for you.” As negotiations developed it was announced that my supporter at Union, James Martin, was to become the next chair of the Columbia Department of Religious Studies. John Bennett, now serving as president of Union, sweetened the offer by suggesting I could also teach ethics at Union and receive an apartment as compensation. So now I was set up as assistant professor of religion at Columbia, lecturer in ethics at Union, and editor of Social Action. The actual teaching at Columbia consisted of two four-hour courses per semester. The first was the standard world religions course with a set syllabus modeled on the graduate course I had taken in 1963, and the second was a course in Western civilization, which was primarily political theory. The extra pressure from editing the journal and the teaching at Union made it difficult for me to achieve the quality of teaching I desired that first year. I was very tired. I ran through the department’s slides too quickly on a lecture in Egyptian religion and had to dismiss the class early, as that was about all I knew of Egyptian religion. By the time the class met in two days I had read three more books on Egyptian religion and could discuss it intelligently. That experience may have been the most extreme example of my pushing beyond material I had mastered. There were other cases when I was only a book or two ahead of the students. After supporting the campaign of Robert Kennedy on campus until after his assassination, I was asked by Stephen Rockefeller to help his father defeat Richard Nixon for the nomination for president. Expecting a Republican victory, I was glad to put some time in writing background papers for the Rockefeller campaign. Some of my

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students had worked for a short time for the nomination of George Romney before he dropped out. Steve promised that if his father got the nomination, I could advise him on withdrawing the Rockefeller financial resources from South Africa. Nelson Rockefeller had been embarrassed once on that issue by black students. Steve knew that I had already talked to David Rockefeller, advocating disinvestment from American corporations and banks supporting South Africa. I had published an issue of Social Action on the subject. I also had been arrested in the South African Embassy to the United Nations demanding leniency for Nelson Mandela before his sentencing. I heard Nelson Rockefeller use some of my words on education and on youth culture. The position paper on withdrawal from Vietnam disappeared into the Henry Kissinger–advised campaign. The work strengthened the friendship between Stephen and me. In the fall I asked him to comment on the political analysis of Roger Shinn in the pages of Social Action, which he accomplished very well. Niebuhr gave silent support to my work and even wrote to Will Scarlett that if the governor could present a plan to end the war, he might vote Republican. The governor could not, and Niebuhr did not. Eventually we held our noses and voted for Humphrey. Niebuhr endorsed him with enthusiasm despite his too-late disavowal of Johnson’s war. The dean of the Yale Divinity School, on the advice of James Gustafson, asked me to interview for a position at Yale in social ethics. The interview took place on the rainy day after the election of Richard Nixon. It was a dreary day, and after the interview with the faculty, David Little and I enjoyed our private hour. David was teaching the kinds of courses I would want to teach if I joined a divinity school, and so we privately agreed that as long as he was at Yale it was not a good match for me. I was never informed as to the Yale deliberations, and I never inquired. The dean at Yale, Robert Johnson, had been on the faculty of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. A couple of months later I got a call from President Miller of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, inviting me to a position at Pittsburgh. Key faculty had already discussed the recommendation of Dean Robert Johnson, and I needed only to come out, look around, and have an interview session with the senior faculty. I knew nothing about Pittsburgh, though I had been there in a racial justice demonstration for the Methodist Church. The position was at the associate professor level. It would in due time, on mutual agreement, lead to tenure as my edited book of Niebuhr’s essays was published, and I had a contract for my book on Niebuhr’s thought. Joan and I discussed it and realized it would be good for our family to work under less pressure. I was discontented with the teaching at Columbia, under set syllabi. The school situation was expected to be better for Randy. Of course, in Pittsburgh we would purchase a house and get out of apartment living and the other inner-city pressures of New York. Columbia had been very generous to me as a graduate student, but the salary of assistant professors was inadequate for life in New York. Discussions with James Martin gave me hope for eventual tenure at Columbia, and Bennett and Shinn told me I could teach as much ethics at Union as I wished. The Religion Department’s tradition had been to keep young professors for their first six years, and

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then expect them to find other opportunities for their careers. President Bennett, under pressure from his wife, Anne, and others, thought the next appointment in ethics at Union would need to be a woman. The Columbia department offered another twosemester course at the graduate level on church and state. The Yale trip had disconnected me emotionally from Columbia, and I went out to discuss Pittsburgh seriously. There I learned that Pittsburgh had invited Joseph Hough from Claremont to accept the ethics position. It had been Joe Hough’s position that Claremont was hoping to fill, as he was leaving for Yale. My interview at Yale had taken place because Joseph Hough had decided to remain at Claremont after accepting an offer from Yale. So I had been chasing Hough’s indecision around the country. The dean at Pittsburgh was a University of Chicago PhD, and the professor with whom I would be working was a Princeton and Columbia graduate. There were another two Union graduates teaching the Bible. Marcus Barth and Dietrich Ritschl brought distinction from Europe to the faculty. I would be working closely with David Buttrick in the Church and Ministry division. These were all positive factors. A young professor from Wesleyan University, Robert Ezell, was being interviewed the same day, and he had taught homiletics at Yale Divinity School. It was a large faculty of thirty-two, with some imbalance, as thirteen were in the Biblical Studies division. The other large division was Church and Ministry, with several appointments in homiletics. Social ethics would be located in Church and Ministry, partially to bring some substantive reflection on society into that division. I went back to New York impressed, and I looked forward to lecturing that spring in Walter Wiest’s course with Duquesne University on the ethics of revolution. Aside from the required ethics course, I was free to choose my own courses in social ethics. After three years, a fully paid half-year sabbatical was offered. It was a tempting offer, and the prospects of teaching within a required curriculum at Columbia looked foreboding. The chance to specialize and relate my teaching to my research and writing was very appealing. I discussed the offer with Ursula and Reinhold Niebuhr. Reinhold had been negative regarding my consideration of Claremont and positive about my visit to Yale. He was mildly negative about my considering Pittsburgh. Ursula was adamant that I should not move to Pittsburgh. She feared the ethos of Pittsburgh would not be helpful for me. Also, by this time I was close to both of them, and she had doubts about Reinhold continuing his seminar if I left. Reinhold later wrote me to this effect. One time when I was visiting them in Stockbridge a phone call came for me. Ursula, thinking it was Pittsburgh Seminary, called me to the phone, saying, “It’s Mammon calling.” She, despite her biting comments on a possible move, was very wise. Though I would eventually write a book on the Presbyterian ethos of Pittsburgh, I never could accept the conservative aspects of the Presbyterian Church culture of the region. By February 1969, I had decided, and I wrote Reinhold: Thank you for your reactions to Pittsburgh. I decided after investigating Yale that I was ready to leave this unhappy religion department. Union would not provide what we considered adequate housing, nor would they

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offer anything except the option of teaching courses at UTS on top of the already heavy course load at Columbia. So in a very important sense, it isn’t moving to P.T.S. as much as it is fleeing Columbia. Please do not share this, as most people here assume that I am moving simply because the Pittsburgh offer is so attractive. That is just as well because my emotional attachments to UTS-Columbia are very deep, and the current malaise here is so great that everyone’s defenses are up preventing thorough discussion of the role of junior faculty. One way to escape the junior faculty blues is to become part of the senior faculty elsewhere—in a sense that is what I have done. The academic year 1968–1969 was a recovery year for both of the institutions, which had seen their students try to force concessions on the powers of the institutions by occupying campus buildings. A second year teaching those heavy required courses would have been much easier and better. I often wished later that I had followed Ursula’s advice and stuck it out, but I was very tired and torn between the critics of the institutions and my own love for them. I did not share with the Niebuhrs or others my own sense that the salvation of our family depended upon a move. Ursula and I were at the peak of our relationship in 1969, but I could not determine how much of her warning about Pittsburgh was for me or for her husband. She learned only after Joan and I separated about the troubled marriage, and she wrote me then that she knew Joan was unhappy at Union, but that she had not realized the storm inside me. In April she was recommending that people who wanted information on Niebuhr or advice as to their research should write me. In her letter of April 12, she wrote, “I am awfully glad you are going to do this thing on Reinhold. Good luck.” In the same letter she later wrote, “I rather wish you were more leisured—and would serve as a literary executor!” She complained about the long, involved letters she was receiving from people he did not know requesting to do something on him or to edit early manuscripts for anthologies. She mentioned that Reinhold found such requests “wearing and very tiring.” By November 1969, I regretted my move, and Reinhold responded to my letter: Thank you for your letter. I am sorry that you do not find the intellectual climate stimulating in Pittsburgh. It would be a boon if you would return to Columbia and Union. Let me know whether a word from me to John Bennett would be of help. Affectionately yours, Reinie

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Chapter 17

Associate Professor in Pittsburgh Joan and I house-hunted together in Pittsburgh on our first visit. We located some possibilities in our price range both in the city and in the suburbs. On the second visit, I had almost settled on a house in Shaler Township where we were certain of an adequate school for Randall. Over dinner with Dean Gordon Jackson, I asked about the racial integration of the Township. He said it was subject to “redlining,” and that consequently it was all white. The next day, I resumed the search in the city and agreed to buy a house we had both seen on Stanton Avenue, a few blocks from the seminary and close to Highland Park. Reinhold Niebuhr responded to my news of finding a house: Your acquisition of a house in Pittsburgh means the finality of separation from UTS. So we will both be separated from our original habitat. I thank God for our partnership. My health is not too good. The last stroke did me much damage. Even writing a letter exhausts me. I wonder whether I will ever write another article, but I had a good run for my money before the Nunc dimitis sets in. Love from us both to you both. Affectionately yours, Reinie The neighborhood was integrated. After Columbia’s summer school we moved to Pittsburgh. As we unloaded the furniture, Randy disappeared. We found him quickly on the sidewalk. He had started out to meet his “new friends.” This positive attitude would stand him well in life, even though he, too, would go through a short dark period in high school. We had a few weeks before classes began. The first weekend we began searching for a church. The Methodist churches were dominated by older generations, and they were almost totally white. Presbyterian churches we visited were similar in composition. Finally, we reached the entrance to the Community of Reconciliation, where an African American usher greeted us warmly and asked about Randall’s age. On hearing that he was three, the usher said, “Oh, then he’ll be in Mr. Fred Rogers’s Sunday school class.” The sermon was progressive, the congregation was integrated, and Randy had Mr. Rogers as a teacher. We could not have found a better fit. It would be our church home for the next six years. Though it was an interdenominational church, we retained our Methodist Church membership from our home church in Iowa as well as membership in this ecumenical body in Pittsburgh. As an organ of the university and city ministry, it had three and soon four ministers. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. it was founded to celebrate King’s action for integrating church and society. Grace Memorial Church on the Hill furnished the core African American membership led by their former minister, the Reverend Harold Tolliver. Paul Schrading, a Methodist, was the executive minister, and James Ray was the university and city minister, and soon Gail Buchwalter joined the staff to help lead the congregation. They attempted to carry

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out a model for university and city ministry proposed by a Danforth study on ministry to higher education. A few weeks before classes were to begin I phoned Walter Wiest to consult about our jointly taught Introduction to Ethics Class. His wife, Betty, told me Walt was downtown picketing the Mellon Bank Building as part of an effort to integrate the construction guilds of the city. I made one of my first trips downtown and joined him on Grant Street in the picket line surrounding Mellon Bank. It was only a few blocks from the Civic Arena, where I had picketed the Methodist Church for integration five years earlier. In the line we agreed to emphasize the theme of power in our ethics course, with particular reference given to the new book on Black Power by James Cone and ethical studies on power by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Other African American books were agreed upon for the course. Black and Presbyterian by my predecessor at the seminary, Gay Wilmore, was a new book for me. Thirty-two years later Professor Wiest told me that he knew that day that he had “found a colleague.” I heard from friends in New York City that we made the CBS news that day. Tensions escalated the next day. I marched near the Reverend Jimmy Joe Robinson, one of the leaders of the effort to integrate the unions, crossing the Manchester Bridge in a snake line that disrupted traffic. The police pulled up in trucks to arrest the marchers. Some were put in the paddy wagons, while others of us resisted going into the trucks. Soon Jimmy Joe, a former professional football player, had a policeman over his shoulder as the policeman futilely hit his backside with his club. I dodged a club and considered the situation briefly. Looking over the side of the bridge, the drop to the ground near the stone pillar on the Manchester end of the bridge seemed the better part of valor. So I went over the side, and from there retrieved our car and returned home. This police riot, provoked by the demonstrators, made the news. The next day the president of the Student Council, Bill Rumsey, asked me to talk to the council about the incident. That consultation between the council and their unknown new professor produced about one hundred members of the seminary joining the demonstrations to picket the U.S. Steel building’s construction site. The city was unprepared for these events. But city leaders were certain they did not want to repeat the battle of the Manchester Bridge. The city safety director, James A. Cortese, ritualistically denied any police brutality on the same TV broadcasts that documented it. The next day he joined with the marchers, who crossed the bridge into downtown Pittsburgh with a police escort. The city hurried to settle, as three days of work had been lost on construction projects. Leaders began to confess the essential justice of the black demands for more membership in the unions of the Building Trades Council, which had only 2 percent black members. Over two hundred arrests, the resulting confusion in the administration of the courts, the violence of the police, possible mass violence between construction workers and blacks, and the disruption of the city center inclined the mayor to close down temporarily over $200 million of construction. In following days union members invaded the mayor’s office, blocked traffic, and tied up downtown. They were not arrested. Still, hopeful negotiations followed. Black leadership tried to resist leaders being bought off, and finally a settlement was reached, after some national pressure by the NAACP.

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During the protracted negotiations the seminary became involved. The leadership of the Black Coalition had received quite a bit of support from religiously allied organizations. The coalition reached out to the seminary to show its support for black demands by cancelling its construction. Follow-up meetings after school were under way that fall. They led to debates and resolutions from the students and faculty to suspend temporarily the construction of the new chapel on the seminary grounds in support of integrating the construction industry. Unfortunately, this meant that before I had completed my first class, I had to debate the business manager representing the president about suspending construction before winter arrived. My relations with the administration were soured before I had proven myself academically. The business manager argued the need to complete the construction because the heating plant of the seminary was a united system and failing to finish the job would leave the plant without heat in the winter. I thought the debate went well for action toward integration, but the board of directors failed to support the faculty, and construction went forward. A resultant boycott of the new building left the worship space unused for months, but then chapel service was held in two different sites depending upon the convictions of the chapel leader that day. The large chapel space was stark, as it was modeled after the chapel in Williamsburg. For years it failed to live down the stigma of its construction and its ill design. Gradually it became the major site for worship on campus, and the conflicts over its construction were of little relevance to new students and faculty. Recent planning of the seminary campus has called for its removal by a new administration. The Manchester Bridge is gone, but the stone pier by the PNC ballpark still stands. Now it contains a monument to one of the seminary’s graduates, Mr. Fred Rogers. I submitted an essay titled “Blacks Win Negotiations” to Christianity and Crisis describing our skirmish on the Manchester Bridge and the following developments, stressing the ongoing power of militant nonviolent demonstrations to force reluctant city leaders and antagonistic unions to negotiate over just employment practices. The symbolism of fights on the bridge near the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny evoked memories of labor fights between the beginnings of unionization and the Pinkertons and National Guard in 1892 to Pittsburghers, and the fight on the Mon and on the shore of the steelworks. As the struggle unfolded it became a national issue, as the NAACP and the Labor Department became involved. The essay was never published, remaining one of my few attempts at writing that failed to clear the editor’s desk. President Miller and Dean Jackson requested that I relate personally to the more radical students. President Miller recognized my empathy for the students but feared they might disrupt the campus. It was a natural constituency for me, and it required no particular exertions or any reporting to the administration. The progressive or left-ofcenter students were often guests in our home, and I was received more fully by them.

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Chapter 18

“The King’s Chapel and the King’s Court” The second major struggle before I started teaching was caused by Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay “The King’s Chapel and the King’s Court.” Niebuhr had withheld criticism of the Nixon administration for a few months. But by the summer of 1969 it was clear that the Nixon-Kissinger administration was expanding the war beyond President Johnson’s efforts. Niebuhr published only five pieces that year, compared to the fifty to one hundred pieces he would have published in earlier years. In this one he criticized the Nixon administration on religious-ethical grounds, but he also criticized the chapel in the White House. Any attacks on religious centers supporting politics is particularly dangerous ground, as Niebuhr knew very well. He reached back to his longtime favorite prophet, Amos. He had loved Amos at least since his seminary days. Samuel Press had taught a course on Amos in which the students were required to attach Amos’s prophetic religion to a social problem in St. Louis, which they investigated empirically. Niebuhr had appreciated the course a great deal. His other subject, Nixon’s politics, was also a favorite target. So in old age, pain, and suffering he took on the new president with his one-handed typing. Amos at Bethel, preaching judgment against the king, had been told by the court priest Amaziah to stop criticizing the king and to go away, for “this was the King’s Court and the King’s Chapel.” Niebuhr compared J. Edgar Hoover to Amaziah, and Nixon to the corrupt king looking to cover his evil policies with court religion. Israel’s king was soon overthrown after Amos was sent away. The preachers in the White House chapel, including Billy Graham, were praising a misguided president overly much. Niebuhr raised the criticism from the misuse of religion and on arguments of separation of church and state. Previously he had criticized the overuse of prayer at inaugural ceremonies. I think from reading the correspondence between him and Justice Frankfurter, collected and presented by Daniel Rice, that he knew it was not a legal challenge but a challenge from popular culture that he was raising. Ursula and he had a delightful time together discussing the themes pursued in the essay. Underlying the whole article was his critique of Nixon’s war policies when he had hoped that Nixon, like Eisenhower in Korea, would have been able to lead us out of the quagmire. Reinhold sent me an original copy of his essay. It showed the regular marks of Ursula’s minor editing. Reinhold had written me about the essay, “President Bennett called up with Wayne Cowan [the editor of Christianity and Crisis], about the Nixon ed. ‘The King’s Chapel and the King’s Court.’ Both seemed pleased with it. Ursula did her usual editing job, clarifying my obscure phrases.” Ursula wrote on the margin of this letter to me, as she often did, “No—I hardly did anything—The piece is absolutely his & Wayne hardly changed a thing. I was very pleased.” The response to Niebuhr’s polemic was furious. He laughed when he told me he had received a basket full of critical mail, some of it hateful. Ehrlichman reviewed Niebuhr’s

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Federal Bureau of Investigation file provided him by J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had led the FBI hounding of Niebuhr for decades since the Roosevelt administration. Republicans were in an uproar over having their new brave president criticized for bringing piety to the White House. Nixon defended it as setting an example for the nation’s youth. Lots of ink was spilled attacking Niebuhr on behalf of the president. The Pittsburgh Press attacked Niebuhr for criticizing presidential piety and politics. I responded to the Press in a letter it published: The Pittsburgh Press’ editorial (Aug. 16) defending President Nixon’s practice of using the East Room of the White House as a chapel and attacking the most prominent critic of the practice, Reinhold Niebuhr, seemed particularly naive. I hesitate to believe that the editor is serious who wrote, “It’s hard to see any politics in those Sunday morning worship services.” The prestige of religion is a cloak that almost any politician will seek and President Nixon is no exception. Direct political benefits accrue to the politician who is seen as a friend and benefactor of prestigious figures in religion. There may not be a violation of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights in the practice of creating a court chapel in the presidential mansion, but it violates the sensibilities of Americans who do not want our religious leaders to become court priests. Dr. Niebuhr’s major thesis was that religion suffers when it is captured in the embrace of the state. Does the Press really dispute Dr. Niebuhr’s claim that when a rabbi speaks of, “the finger of God pointed to Richard Milhous Nixon giving him the vision and wisdom to save the world and civilization” in a White House sermon, he is being extravagantly appreciative of official policy? The statement in the editorial that “there must be other problems to which Mr. Niebuhr could more usefully apply his scholarly attention” misses the significance of the dangers to both religion and politics in the President’s action and also implies that Professor Niebuhr has ignored other more significant problems. The editors would do well to consult a list of the topics Dr. Niebuhr has dealt with before making such a snide remark. Of course, by dealing with Dr. Niebuhr’s article on their editorial page, the editors of the Press reveal that they do regard the issues as substantive. Ronald H. Stone, Pittsburgh

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I received several critical letters responding to my letter to the editor. There were a few positive comments delivered to me in person. The critics thought the chapel appropriate, and that pastors would fawn over the president even if he attended church services in Washington, D.C. Some appreciated the president relating his faith to politics. Others thought there was nothing political about the president having his own worship service for government leaders in the East Wing of the White House. A couple of business leaders with connections to the seminary objected to my advising the local newspaper just after I had arrived in the city. Two letter writers identified themselves as Presbyterians with ties to the seminary. One anonymous critic objected to liberals at the seminary and suggested I should be machine gunned against a wall. Niebuhr, however, appreciated the support.

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Chapter 19

Early Days at Pittsburgh Seminary Walter Wiest had been teaching the “Introduction to Ethics” class, and Dr. John Bald had been teaching the course on Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethics. They both generously moved aside, and I assumed the responsibility for those two classes. The first year (1969–1970) Professor Wiest joined me in the “Introduction to Ethics” class to introduce me to the seminary. Though a much more experienced professor, he had completed his Columbia PhD the same year I completed my master of divinity in 1963. We thought about class content and requirements in about the same terms, reflecting our New York educations. I was on my own in the second year (1970–1971), and the courses I offered that year reflected the core of my approach for the next thirty-three years. I gradually added other electives and dropped some. As the curriculum and degree structure changed I would design a few graduate courses for the University of Pittsburgh or add courses for the seminary doctorate of ministry degree. Gradually we would shift some faculty positions toward an emphasis on church and society, and I would share those courses with a woman, a black American, and a Latin American. I was active or chaired all of those search committees to diversify the faculty. The other two divisions, Bible and History and Theology, retained their basically white male status, though the seminary would recruit another woman for a position in Theology and eventually a couple of women in Bible and History. There were twenty-nine fulltime faculty members in 1969 when I arrived, which was reduced to twenty by 1979–1980, and it remained about twenty until I retired. After the first year I taught: • A 411 Introduction to Ethics: An introduction to the study of social ethics through the analysis of contemporary political problems. Issues of the methodology of social ethics will be examined in the light of current struggles for power and justice. • B 421 The Social Teachings of the Christian Church: Study of selected positions in the history of the churches’ social teaching from the New Testament to the end of the nineteenth century. Focus on the issues of Christ and culture, church and state, the Christians and war. • B 422 Moral Issues in International Relations: The perennial problems of Christian ethics and international politics: the theory of international politics; the moral issues raised by nuclear armaments; particular case studies in United States foreign policy. • B 423 The Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr: A detailed examination of The Nature and Destiny of Man and the study of Reinhold Niebuhr’s political and social writings. In those first years, several members of the faculty were young, though, at thirty, I was the youngest. The younger faculty could play their annual football and baseball games with the students, and social relations or social action relations were common.

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I waited until November for my next attempt at a letter to the editor. This time I praised the Press for the article by Roy Loving, “Our Churches Tested by War Crimes.” I concurred with him that the silences of the churches indicated a dangerous complicity with the crimes and the war. I pointed out that Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam had published a book documenting war crimes. I concluded, “The press deserves the thanks of members of the religious community for its sophisticated reporting on this issue.” This support of the newspaper brought me a lot of critics. Some of them complained about the National Council of Churches and Christianity and Crisis being run by Communists. So this began an avalanche of mail sent to me from the right wing attacking Judaism, ecumenical churches, and dangerous liberals. I still have two pamphlets on the infamous Protocols of Zion sent to me by anonymous persons who thought them relevant to the issue. This was all before home delivery of the New York Times was possible in Pittsburgh, but I transferred my home reading to the more liberal Post-Gazette. I regularly could secure the Times at a local shop whose side business was the numbers game only a few blocks from the seminary. A Union Seminary professor, Searle Bates, had a mission to ask me about Asian news whenever I met him in the quadrangle at Union Seminary, and that had forced upon me a sense of unpreparedness for the day if I had not read the Times. That sense of unpreparedness followed me to Pittsburgh, even if there was no regular interlocutor. So the Times became my regular companion and major source of news (and even of opinion). In addition to my classes, most of my academic energy of my first appointment from 1969 to 1972 went into rewriting my dissertation as a book. I started with a contract with Braziller Press. They wanted a more personal story on Niebuhr, which I was reluctant to undertake. I wanted my book to be an intellectual biography and not a focus on Reinhold’s personal life. Niebuhr offered to share personal stories with me, but instead I canceled the contract and sought another publisher. I was fortunate to arrange a contract with Abingdon, which would publish a few of my subsequent books. I added a chapter introducing Niebuhr’s formation and education to my dissertation, subtracted a little of the international relations theory, and added a final chapter on the relationship of his faith to his politics. As I rewrote the dissertation, I found time to respond to a few other invitations to write. Alan Geyer asked me to write on international relations and theological education for the Christian Century. I was happy to accept, and I wrote a case study on the decisionmaking process for the Cuban Missile Crisis, and suggested that which ministers would need as a minimum in study if they wished to preach or teach on the international crises of their day as the prophets had. I followed this in the Century with reflections on the newer radical political theologies that I was teaching to a small group of students at their request. “The Politics of the Kingdom of God” argued that a paradigm shift was taking place in theology toward the thought of Moltmann, Alves, Cox, and James Cone, supported by biblical scholarship and historical research. It criticized right-wing Christian influence like that of Billy Graham. I defined the Kingdom as “the model of what human life is meant to be, and the living of its ethic in a world not ready for it is the strange joy and responsibility of Christians.” The article was my form of liberation

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theology, and not social gospel optimism, but it was not the Niebuhrian theology that I was generally associated with in academic circles. Yet a career was taking shape writing on Niebuhr and social issues. Niebuhr supported my writing a book on his thought and wrote on February 10, 1969: I am thanking you for your letter. I am delighted that Braziller asked you to write a book on me. Of course I trust you to give a full account of my thought without distortion. I had a very favorite professor at Yale, Douglas Clyde Macintosh. I disagreed with him on important points, but I prided myself that I did not distort his rationalism on a Festschrift devoted to his thoughts. Both my brother and I refuted to his dismay the idea that theology could be an empirical science.

CONTINUING PROTEST AGAINST THE VIETNAM WAR The writing of the book and the other occasional essays and reviews was frequently interrupted by direct social action. A friend from Union Seminary, David Hawk, visited me in Pittsburgh as he was organizing seminarians to protest the war in Vietnam at the White House. I agreed to support the combined seminary witness and recruited fifteen others connected to the seminary to join with me for a Holy Week demonstration and probable arrest in Washington, D.C. The trip through the sunlit Pennsylvania and Maryland mountains was particularly beautiful as we rode toward Washington, D.C., on Palm Sunday following church. The seminary had not united on the wisdom of our move. A group influenced by Marcus Barth, who also opposed the war but resisted seminary student distraction from their studies, held a worship service for the vigil, but most of the protesting group declined to attend. Our son, Randall, seemed to be distracted in Sunday school that morning. His teacher, Mr. Fred Rogers, asked him what was bothering him. He told Mr. Rogers his father was going to be arrested and put in jail. Mr. Rogers, assuming it to be a boyhood, infantile fantasy, arranged a lesson for Randy to comfort him. He had Randy dig a hole in the sandbox and explained that no matter how hard he wished, the hole would not fill with water. Randy, on the trip home from church, told us about the lesson. He understood quite well about the hole and the difference between wishes and reality. But he was not sure that Mr. Rogers believed I was going to jail. (Later he wrote an essay on the event for his admission application to Harvard.) A follow-up was that families were doing some fasting in support of the fasting we undertook during the week in jail, but he broke his fast under the influence of Mr. Rogers’s offer of Oreo cookies with an explanation in Sunday school that refusing to eat would not help his father. Joan took a bottle of wine to the potluck supper held in the seminary in support of the demonstration. That was the first time in my knowledge that wine was served at a seminary supper. We slept in a church basement. Some of the group wanted to carry a cross to the White House. Some others thought it would be a bad precedent. I closed the argument by

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saying, “Let’s take it and figure out what it means for it to be present.” The next morning there were about a hundred demonstrators picketing the White House, carrying signs protesting the escalation of the war. By noon we were arrested. While we were in a holding pen in the police station in a banana-peel-filled holding pen in the police station, an acquaintance walked by. I believe it was Peter Steinfels of Commonweal. He asked what I was doing in such a place. In a fair imitation of Thoreau, I asked him to join us. By late evening we were processed and entering the Washington jail. Several of the protesters were released on bail, and about seventy-seven entered the jail to catcalls from the police to other jail inmates: “Here’s white meat for you black bastards.” I was the last one processed shortly before midnight. I was stripped, sprayed with a disinfectant hose standing over a drain, and given prison garb. Jack O’Malley, two young Catholic seminarians, and I were marched through dark halls. I did not have much fear for myself, but I was glad of Jack’s presence as a strongly built ex-football player for the young seminarians. But then in the dark hall Jack was ordered into a different wing. I and the two adolescents were told to find beds in a dark dormitory. It was mostly feel your way forward among the snoring inmates and their low chatter and murmuring. I found an empty upper bunk and crawled into it without putting my foot in the lower bunk sleeper’s mouth. As I lay there I realized most of the talk was from fellow seminarians. We were, as morning proved, the majority in that room. During the following days we organized seminars and worship services for ourselves and the fellow prisoners. Many of the prisoners were veterans of the war incarcerated for drug charges. One of the jailers threatened me with placement in the hole for converting one of the guards. The charge was repeated when my elbow accidentally broke a window in the jail. We were on a liquid fast. The Catholic priests and seminarians found more meaning in it than the Protestants, I think. But it was an appropriate discipline for Holy Week. A visit by my colleague Professor Walter Wiest was very welcome, as the jail exuded a certain terror. He had been arrested but released on his own recognizance awaiting trial. He reported that most at the seminary were honoring the peace vigil with prayers and good wishes. I found his connection from the outside to be quite encouraging. On Thursday we requested wine or grape juice from the chaplain of the jail, but none could be provided for our foot-washing service with communion. Father Redman had a dream or a vision late in the week of nonviolently kidnapping the warden and transporting him to Danbury prison to free Father Daniel Berrigan. His dream ended with all of us exiled to Cuba, where we were happily cutting sugarcane for the revolution. Others had dreams with different political content, partially induced, I suppose, by hunger. The last day of our imprisonment a Jesuit told me as we walked through the cafeteria line, which we were required to do, that I could drop a scoop of ice cream into my coffee if I let it melt. He assured me the Dominicans there would not approve of that casuistry, but that it was within the best ethics of Jesuits. As I recall, I took the Jesuit’s advice. The press release from supporters reported:

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Fifteen men and women from Pittsburgh spent Holy Week in the Washington D.C. Jail fasting and praying in an attempt to show the churches that Christian faith requires opposition to the continuation of the American war in Southeast Asia. The fifteen acted self-consciously as Christians during Holy Week to unite their theory about ethics and faith with their practice. The Pittsburghers were regarded by the other inmates of the D.C. jail as political prisoners. The young men and women learned a great deal about the horror of the prison which overcrowds, depersonalizes, educates in crime, promotes homosexuality, and fails to rehabilitate. In jail they experienced some terror and part of the pain of being prisoners. They soon realized that their situation was quite artificial when compared to the real suffering of other prisoners. They chose temporary imprisonment because of their faith; they were neither helpless victims of the system nor criminals. The group declared by its action and its statement that: “In this second decade of war in Vietnam we are convinced that the American church has been too patient—not too polemical—toward national leaders. We Christians have been too tolerant of American men of power, and too forgetful of foreign victims of such power. Too often we have been manipulated into ineffectiveness by a sophisticated political machine.” The group by demonstrating near the White House registered its conviction that the Nixon administration is too complacent about the slaughter in Vietnam and that its announced schedule for withdrawal is coldly calculated in terms of political interest for the careers of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Thieu. The government is ruining Southeast Asia and the United States and the churches ought not tolerate such policies. Those being arrested in Washington D.C. are not part of any conspiring political group, they are united by their action against the Nixon war policy and for American withdrawal from a Vietnamese war. Their unity is in their arrest and in Christ. On Good Friday our trial ended anticlimactically. The White House wanted us prosecuted, but the lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union convinced the judge that the photos of our demonstration by the police established that the police, not the demonstrators, were blocking the entrance to the White House. We proceeded down to the demonstration before the Justice Department where others from the seminary joined us. I remember in particular Dr. and Mrs. George Kehm from Pittsburgh Seminary. I was given a bullhorn to continue the protest against the Nixon policies, and to relate some of our Holy Week experience. My fellow organizer of seminarians against the war, Dr. Bill Weber from New York Seminary, was chained temporarily to the doors of the Justice Department at the time.

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Niebuhr responded generously to my note to him mailed from the jail. It was the last message I received from him, as he died on June 1. Yale Hill Stockbridge Massachusetts 01262 April 27, 1971 Dear Ron, Thank you so much for your letter about your prison experience, and your lobbying in Washington against this futile war. I am proud of the editorial in the four papers, Protestant and Catholic. And even more proud of your non-violent demonstration, even though a minor law ordained your jailing. I am glad you found my End of an Era relevant. We are indeed at the end of a national innocence. Let me hope we arrived at an age of maturity. My book, incidentally, was too much influenced by the Marxist apocalypse. In my illness and weakness, I can only take part in the day’s events through friends like you. My affectionate regards to you. God bless you. Reinie The third piece for the Century during this period was a joint essay with John Raines arguing for a general amnesty for the war criminals and for the draft resisters to the Vietnam War. We wrote it while we were spending Christmas together in Philadelphia. Some of our friends sympathized with forgiving one or the other group, and still were uneasy about our proposal. We wanted a pardon for our nation and for our warriors as well as those who resisted the war. We hoped the political processes of 1972 might provide a chance for a general amnesty as Lincoln had proclaimed even in the midst of the Civil War. When I received a little budget from the Presbyterian Church for the seminary regarding the war, I had the faculty ask John to commute to Pittsburgh from Temple University to teach a popular course on war and conscience in the ethics area. I also did a piece for the Fund for the Reinhold Niebuhr award surveying the writing on Niebuhr from 1972 to 1973 immediately following his death. Another bibliographical piece was undertaken by Joan and me on “The Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr 1953–1971” for the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, as the D. B. Robertson bibliography had at that time not included these post-stroke writings. As I became involved with the Harrisburg trial of Philip Berrigan and other war resisters, Commonweal asked me to write on the Berrigans and to review James Childress’s book, Civil Disobedience and Political Obligation: A Study in Christian Social Ethics. My visitation to the Harrisburg trial of mostly Catholic war resisters was on behalf of the Society of Christian Ethics. It was investigating the trial as the result of a motion directing the investigation organized by John Raines and me. Edward Long Jr. would

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write the report, which I reviewed in Commonweal. An article in the newspaper about my trip also aroused interest in the case, and some of the more antiwar students from the seminary came over to view the trial and to talk with me. Late at night we discussed possible antiwar actions. I remember mentioning that in France protesting groups often painted the words of their cause on government buildings, and that there was a beautiful, broad wall on the new Federal Building downtown. I was careful not to advocate an explicit connection between the two. Other strategies were considered as well. The disgraceful trial of Philip Berrigan and the others had the students incensed, and many of them were naïve regarding dissenting actions from war and the consequences. A couple of them were very sophisticated in their far-left positions. The next week a quotation from Daniel Berrigan pledging honor and resistance to the Vietnam War was painted in bold, black letters on the large bare wall of the controversial chapel. The seminary was shocked. The Board of Directors met. The faculty met. I moved that since we did not know who had painted the slogan, it might be a word from God, as Daniel had experienced in Persia. I argued it was best not to remove it until this immoral war had concluded and the Americans had come home. It received a second by Professor Gordon Chamberlin, my friend from Iowa, Riverside Church, and Union. A Marine chaplain and associate professor of the New Testament muttered that my action was childish. I complained to the faculty, and he apologized. I doubt if there were more than two votes for my motion. A community meeting was called. The student body president asked a board member from a wealthy contributing family from the board’s property committee to await his turn to speak. The offended board member stalked out of the room, and no resolution was achieved. The president of the seminary requested a meeting with the students who it was assumed had painted the wall. The meeting was set for the living room in our home near the seminary. On his arrival, the president met about fifteen students who assumed responsibility for the painting. I presided over the meeting as host, and the president shared his disappointment at the attack on the seminary. The students replied the cause of the war had to come home to the churches and their seminary. It was a polite discussion. The president doubted that all of the students were responsible for the action. Still, there was no agreement over punishment or action to remove the painting. Eventually the board accepted the president’s suggestion that the words would be put on a banner for use in chapel by those so committed and the painting would be removed. That was the decision in spring of 1971. My own directions were unclear. The previous year, I had commuted to Union on Mondays to teach a class on “Moral Issues and International Politics.” The University of North Carolina was inquiring whether I could chair the religion department there. Colgate was interested in me or another candidate for their position in peace studies. James Cone had advised me that Dr. Marcus Barth had told him I would not be reappointed at Pittsburgh. I was gradually appreciating Pittsburgh Seminary more, and so I organized to stay there. The senior faculty, after discussions to which I was never privy, recommended my promotion to full professor, and the board concurred. Tenure was still a decision for the future, but it was a vote of real confidence by a workable majority.

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The seminary began to change with more women students attending. President Kadel and Dean Shannon requested that I serve as an ad hoc advisor to the women students. Eventually I would join with one board member to advise the board on adjustments needed in seminary life to accommodate the new women students. As we asked more women faculty to lecture in special lectures, I would preside over these events until a committee I chaired succeeded in bringing the first regular full-time woman faculty to the seminary. These responsibilities decreased as the number of women among the students and faculty grew. My support for women’s causes remained a constant in the school, as some faculty even opposed their ordination and call to the ministry.

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Chapter 20

The Death of Reinhold That summer we took a family camping trip. After visiting the Iowa family, we journeyed down the Mississippi River to Nauvoo—the Mormon capital in Illinois—Hannibal, St. Louis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans. There we camped across the lake in a moss-covered state park. We took in the blues, keeping Randy up later than ever. Strangers treated us to mint juleps at The Plantation. Randy loved chasing the pigeons in front of the cathedral as we toured the historic sites. We moved across the Gulf Coast to Florida, and down to the Everglades. Camping there, Randy discovered a raccoon trying to wash his Oreo cookies in the swamp. A couple of decades later he would inform me that the German word for raccoon meant “washing bear.” We swam off the Key beaches and followed the beaches toward the north. We stayed with the Clarks in North Carolina. From their second-story home, I learned the beauty of experiencing the trees from a house elevated like a treehouse from the ground. Camping on the beaches in state parks in North Carolina and viewing the wild horses completed the beautiful May trip. We stopped briefly for a couple of nights with John and Bonnie Raines in Philadelphia, and then began the last leg home across Pennsylvania. We heard of Reinhold Niebuhr’s death on the radio, and Randy saw me cry for the first time. Later we learned that the Niebuhr family had tried to reach me in Pittsburgh and then at the Raines’. I flew to LaGuardia, and traveled to Stockbridge with a Union friend and Abraham and Susanna Heschel. The funeral service used hymns from the Niebuhrs’ marriage almost four decades earlier in Winchester Cathedral. Eventually his remains were buried across from the Congregational church. After brief visits with the Niebuhrs, I returned to New York City. Abraham, who participated in the service, had left earlier by plane to be home before the Sabbath fell. Having dinner with a New York friend, I missed my plane home and spent the night in the city. Ursula wrote me a couple of months later: Dear Ronald, Your warm and sympathetic letter has been sitting on my desk for many, too many weeks. Thank you so much for it. I have been reading it often. Your column in American Report was a splendid summary, I thought. I found myself regretting that Reinhold, himself, could not read some of these pieces about him. None that I have seen have been sentimental or conventional . . . this in itself seems to be a tribute. Christopher and I are grateful that you are doing what you are—with your book in your general studies—to carry on the “tradition.” Reinhold, as I, welcomed your independence of thought and outlook, and I find myself, perhaps sinfully, proud that Reinhold did not collect disciples, but had friends such as you, who sympathized with and understood his work, and developed their thought independently.

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Meanwhile, I hope you have a good summer and some chance for rest and recreation. Do you carry on a double assignment next year at Pittsburgh and at Union. Let me know some time. Love to you both, Yours sincerely, Ursula M. Niebuhr I hear you are in Russia—splendid, & shall expect to see some report you write up. P.S.S. Is there another copy available of your column that we could send to the Library of Congress with other papers of Reinhold’s or should we have a Xerox copy made? Bishop Mosley, president of Union Seminary, asked me to speak at the memorial service for Reinhold in Riverside Church. The other speaker, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., mentioned the old tale of the scholars who claimed to be atheists for Niebuhr. I amended my talk to include mention of my secular friend who said he had to make a reverse leap of faith to escape Reinhold’s analysis and not become a Christian. Otherwise, we reinforced each other, though Arthur Schlesinger was more eloquent than I. As I had shared Reinhold’s agitation about the war, I concluded with policy recommendations for the seminary, the churches, and the nation. I learned later that Mrs. Niebuhr regarded this as too political. I suspect that, as a seminary professor, my expected role was to bring theological analysis to bear, but my role with Reinhold had been more about political philosophy than theology, and so I emphasized the politics. She thought I could have done better or that “Reinhold deserved better.” Later she wrote me and told me her disappointment was that I commented too much on the political issues around the war in Vietnam. She found my recommendation for a dialogue between Daniel Berrigan and Reinhold Niebuhr unsettling. She wrote how far Reinhold was from the romanticism of Irish Catholicism, but she indicated that in March and April she had been reading to him from the Robert Coles and Daniel Berrigan book. Later Daniel Berrigan was asked to offer courses at Union meeting the sense of my suggestion. I believe she was unsure why I was asked to speak, as there were more important theologians present, including his friends John Bennett and Roger Shinn. I think I was asked to represent the younger, present generation of his students. Other comments on my talk were positive, even though commentators like Bennett knew of Ursula’s and others’ reservations. An example of a contrary opinion came from Donald Jones, a former minister to Hillary Clinton and then a professor of religion at Drew University: This is an overdue note of gratitude for the magnificent homily in memorial to Reinhold Niebuhr at the Riverside Church last November. I couldn’t agree with you more regarding the ongoing relevance of Niebuhr’s thought for social and political ethics. I have taught Niebuhr to

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college undergraduates here at Drew for four years now and have found responses similar to your students. More reports on Schlesinger’s address were printed than on mine. Mine was published later in 1973 in The Christian Century as “The Responsibility of the Saints.” For me he was memorialized in the service by the final singing of “For All the Saints.”

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Chapter 21

Cambridge University The fall term of 1971, I taught the large required course “Introduction to Ethics” and my seminar on “Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr,” and we prepared for our sabbatical in the winter and spring at Cambridge University. The plan was to study with Peter Laslett in contemporary political philosophy. I attended a few of his lectures, but he was now working on demographic studies. My interests were better served with lectures by Shills on Max Weber, D. Forbes on Hegel, and Christianity and Communism with Donald MacKinnon, and with readings on the Church and more, particularly the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Days were spent reading in the libraries and making notes for future publications, most of which were never written. On this visit to England I was definitely more of a churchman than while studying at Oxford six years earlier. We arrived in the winter after Christmas, and we found a ground-floor large apartment at 8 St. Paul’s Road. Randy began the second semester of kindergarten at St. Paul’s School. (Coincidentally, his kindergarten teacher in Pittsburgh was Mrs. Paul.) As a visiting scholar of the Divinity School I had no special university responsibilities. The Divinity faculty had been formed in about 1250, and the first university building was the Divinity School in 1350. But now Cambridge was famous for its excellence in science, and the great resources went primarily for the pure sciences rather than the humanities. Funds were being invested increasingly in the applied sciences, and new science and technology buildings were being built. I used the Divinity School reading room some and attended a few lectures there. One Sunday we found our way to the United Reformed Church, a merger of Presbyterian and Congregational efforts. Randy was excited as Joan read the church announcement board to him of “Lord of the Dance.” We often danced in our Community of Reconciliation to the song to conclude the service. In Cambridge we did not dance, but we sang the hymn and the sermon followed the theme. We met the Ian Barbours there and became friends, visiting in our respective homes. Later I often used his studies of science and religion in my classes. The dean of Westminster Theological College asked us to join the College. The College provided another library for me, with a delightful reading room and also weekly dinners if we wished to join the company. Usually my days were spent across the Cam River from our part of town in the university library. We found the university swimming pool, and that became a favorite place for the family after Randy’s school days. Joan became passionate about brass rubbing, and she did some fine work from the brass plates on church tombs around Cambridge. A very distant ancestor of mine had died on a crusade, and in my imagination the one of Sir Roger, a crusader, on which we worked together represents the ancient ancestor. She did several fine pieces on her own or with another friend as they visited Cambridge and nearby village churches. I took up sparring with the boxing team for exercise, and I would spar with various weights. The captain of the team, a London policeman up to Cambridge for a special program, asked me to join the team and represent Cambridge against Oxford, but I

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wasn’t certain that it would be appropriate for a faculty member from an American seminary to participate, so I declined. I traveled with the team to Oxford for the Blues match and met my old coach and trainer. They permitted me, during an intermission, to announce from the ring the death of Alex Hottell in Vietnam the previous year. He had been my American boxing partner from Oxford. I had learned of his death while on a retreat for peace activists from Pittsburgh. Someone there spotted a letter to the editor in the New York Times protesting the pre-death farewell that had been reprinted from an army publication in the New York Times as an op-ed piece. The critic objected to Alex’s self-portrayal as a warrior, even to the extent of his adopting the name Alexander over his given name of John. His love and devotion for the army came through the piece as he announced how good the army had been to him, mentioning his Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and his love and marriage there. He referred to his West Point swimming records and the Oxford boxing team. He regarded the army as his family even as he became unsure about the Vietnam War in which he did his duty. Our international relations passions were focused on the Vietnam War. In contrast, the political concerns around the university focused more on the troubles in Northern Ireland. The family was glad to leave rainy, cold England for Spain during the short vacation. The French food after the Channel crossing was a little foreign to Randy. I think he survived on fruit and crème caramel. We visited Chartres Cathedral, again particularly thrilled by the English-speaking guide to the magnificent house of worship and formerly of power. The day was clear and the ancient stained glass windows glowed in all their beauty under the bright sun. In Bayeux we took in the tapestry of William the Conqueror’s victory, which I had longed to see since childhood. The arrow in the eye of Harold was exactly where my father had told me it would be. One of the most enchanting sights was the Mont-Saint-Michel with the abbey shrouded in mist. The tides were washing against the causeway. What a perfect island fortress for a six-year-old to gaze upon. We made the connection for him of St. Michael guarding the roof of Riverside Church and this monument to the same saint in a different language. Before we crossed into Spain, we spent a night in Carcassonne, the most perfect of walled cities. Again our imaginations could soar, and we looked forward to buying more toy knights when we returned to Cambridge. We spent a couple of nights in Barcelona and made the pilgrimage out to see the Black Madonna in the Benedictine Abbey high on Montserrat. The new cathedral, Sagrada Familia, soared beyond its scaffolding and reaffirmed the power of Catholicism in Catalonia still. The family walks along the tree-lined Las Ramblas, and the beaches were fine introductions to the beauty of the city. We drove slowly down the coast admiring white windmills and whiter villages. Usually we stayed in the state-run paradors in historical sites with beautiful accommodations. We encountered one religious procession with towering religious figures, music, and enchanted crowds. Torremolinos was our vacation spot, with a hotel high on the cliffs over the Mediterranean. Randy’s disappointment was great, as the hotel pool was too cold to swim in, and the sea was even colder. I foolishly had promised him we could swim in the sea in Spain. From there we could venture out to Toledo and Granada. We spent

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hours in the sun building rock castles on the beach. A trip to the fence dividing Spain from Gibraltar almost fulfilled another childhood dream to explore the rock. The bull fight was a little rough for the six-year-old when his favorite bull, the brown one, was killed and a matador whose picture was on the posters was gored to death. It was my last bull fight, and, as far as I know, the last one Randy saw as well. When we started north for Bilbao, we rushed along, stopping in Madrid and Burgos only one night each, as we had been away from home long enough. The ferry crossing the winter Bay of Biscay was rough and we all experienced some seasickness, reminding Joan and me of our previous rough crossing of the Irish Sea eleven years earlier. Spring came to Cambridge, and the flowers came out. The sun warmed us, and the walks along the backs by the river Cam were ideal. We now took dinners sometimes at the faculty dining club by the river. The park near our street featured a duck pond where Randy often fed bread to the fowl after church. Book reviews of my Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians started to arrive in journals and also from the publisher. My own teachers, John Bennett and Roger Shinn, sent me copies of their reviews. Jane Sellen from Morningside wrote excitedly of finding the long review in the New Yorker by Robert Coles, and my secretary sent me copies as others sent them to her. Mrs. Ursula Niebuhr was very pleased with Coles’s review, and she wrote to tell me so. She bought a few copies for distribution to her friends. Several reviews claimed it was the best book on Niebuhr to date, and several appreciated my delineation of four periods of his thought that evolved out of each other. Various criticisms were offered. Perhaps I had mellowed his voice by stressing the last mature period where he became closer to the government and more pragmatic than he had been earlier. Maybe he was louder and more strongly polemical than I had interpreted him. Later it would be chosen as one of the New York Times’s significant books of 1972. John Bennett indicated it was probably the excellent review by Michael Novak in the Times that won it the honor. I was sailing high; both of my first two books had been positively reviewed by the New York Times. Little did I know that the one I was revising, Realism and Hope, would receive only minor notice. It was a book arguing that Christianity had revolutionary potential that sometimes contributed to radical political change. We went into London occasionally to share the great historical sites with Randy. We purchased a paper model of the Tower of London and built it in the apartment. Meanwhile, Randy was content with the few toys we could buy at the neighborhood store. They were mostly animals, soldiers, and knights. He would play by himself in the small piece of yard in front of the house or by the back door. The upstairs tenants had the right to access the back garden. They had turned it into a Japanese garden and defended their exclusive right to its use fiercely. We toured East Anglia. It had been the origin of some of my Puritan ancestors. Ely Cathedral, rising from the fens, was a site we returned to twice. Ursula wrote that a distant relative had been bishop there. One of my ancient ancestors was arrested for poaching deer in the forest of the manor, sort of like Robin Hood. Another yeoman

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ancestor was disciplined for refusing to kneel for Communion; as a Puritan he would only observe it standing or seated. A trip to Oxford permitted us to visit our old friends the John Macquarries. John, a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, and Lady Margaret, professor of theology, thrilled Randy with stories of the children’s white rabbit that hopped around the wooden floors of the ancient manse connected to the cathedral. Mrs. Macquarrie explained to Randy that the tree with the hole in the backyard was the one the white rabbit of Alice in Wonderland hopped down while Lewis Carroll was writing the tale by their window. We discussed Union, our leaving there, and its present misfortunes under Bishop Mosley’s leadership. On May 31, my parents, Hubert and Bernice, arrived at Gatwick Airport. I met them in the central meeting hall about half an hour after their plane arrived. The lady at the traveler’s information booth had told Bernice that you could not drive from Cambridge to Gatwick. At the time such confusion was understandable, as there was no good way through or around London from Cambridge. They were easy guests. I took them on a tour of London and a two-day trip to Stonehenge, Winchester Cathedral, and Portsmouth for Dad to board the Victory, Nelson’s flagship. We revisited Oxford, strolled along my old college grounds, and enjoyed tea in the Randolph Hotel. One day we traveled over to Stratford on Avon for Julius Caesar. Bernice was amazed at Randy’s comprehension of the historical drama, which Joan had read to him before we went. Dad wanted to experience an old English pub. Perhaps my introduction to one around the corner from our house disappointed him a little. Mother was still pestering me in her letters about drinking every once in a while. She was a great letter writer and kept us informed about the goings on in Dakota City. My drinking was a great sorrow to her, but my solution to Dad’s problem was not abstinence. By this time we were concerned about the pregnancy. The doctor assured us we were all right to return home by airplane. With the doctor’s permission, we left Cambridge for Pittsburgh in late June. Our house had been burglarized while we were away. Friends, particularly Doug and Nancy Mitchell, had overseen some repairs, but we could not be sure what to expect. We overnighted in New York with our close friends the Stivers family, and the next day we went on to Pittsburgh. Christopher Alan was born prematurely on June 22, the day after our return, and died on July 4 of hyaline membrane disease. Standing with him in the Intensive Care Unit as he fought for life tore us both up. I do not remember our clergy finding us during that period. One said I should have requested clergy help if we needed it. Christopher was baptized in the hospital without our requesting it. Joan would mourn for many years, while I, like my father at the loss of babies, pushed it down inside myself. We incorporated a memorial for him within our morning church service, and his small ashes were scattered in Allegheny Cemetery. I dedicated a book to his memory, and a clergyman, Jim Ray, close to Joan, wrote a beautiful poem in his memory. I suspect this loss—and our failure to get help with our grief at the time—contributed toward our depression and separation years later.

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I returned to work. After arranging for a friend to stay with Joan, I flew off on July 19 to Singapore for a month-long session with Charles West of Princeton and the younger theologians from Asia. I had prepared a long paper on The Limits to Growth, and I was anxious to share it with Asians for their responses. For me it was an excellent break, and Joan came through it well enough, according to her. In a stopover at Hong Kong I visited with my brothers Alan and Hugh, as well as Alan’s wife, Muriel. Hugh had joined Alan for a work camp in Kowloon. We had a meaningful family reunion, including a dinner in a barge restaurant in Hong Kong Harbor. At the time, the Queen Elizabeth was partially sunk in the harbor. After I left, Hugh fell in love with a young woman from Hong Kong. It was hard to persuade him to return to Iowa. Later she followed him to Iowa City as a student at the University of Iowa, but by that time he was engaged to Ruth. Singapore was exotic, and I experienced this atypical part of Asia for the first and last time. Kosuke Koyama became a friend, and I later used his Water Buffalo Theology in a course. I have often sought out Chinese restaurants to reexperience the sauces the Chinese cooks served with whole fish, but I never repeated the cuisine. Kosuke and I would often have dinner together when I visited New York City in later years. The dean of the theological faculty of the University of Basel, Jan Lochmann, sought me out in Singapore when he was on his way to a meeting of the Reformed churches in Indonesia. He told me that he supposed I would not be sorry to learn that Markus Barth was leaving Pittsburgh to return to Basel. I assured him that was good news. Barth had challenged the authority of the curriculum committee and then of President Kadel. I had been in England, but both the president and a former dean informed me that his remarks were so intemperate that he needed to leave. I think he found more fulfillment in Basel. I traveled with Asian friends to Bangkok. The exotic iconography of Buddhism was new to me. I had learned a little of its philosophy at Columbia. The practices of worship and its integration within Southeast Asian culture were new to me. After that experience of observing the religion/philosophy in Thai society, I had little patience for Western scholars who, having never smelled or tasted Buddhism, were lecturing on it as an exotic philosophy. From Guam to Oahu I flew with an American soldier who taught me about soldiers fragging their officers in Vietnam. My years of study of world religions had prepared me for neither Buddhist society nor the American war in a Buddhist culture. How could our uneducated, young soldiers be expected to understand their enemies or the environment in which they were asked to kill people they did not know or understand?

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Chapter 22

Professor of Social Ethics My new title of professor changed very little at the seminary. President Kadel persuaded me that the seminary finances would not permit any great enlargement of my salary, but over the years he did as well as he could. In the 1970s the financial strength of the institution declined. Offers from other institutions were usually to create a new department of religion or to help revamp an established department as chairperson. I was not interested enough in administration to pursue them very far, though I did go out to Indianapolis to discuss a new department with faculty from Indiana University in Indianapolis. Though sometimes tempted by administrative duties, refraining from them allowed my own life as an intellectual to develop. Likewise, I declined the offer to interview for the presidency of my alma mater Morningside College. Three different times the search committee for a president of Union Theological Seminary contacted me, but those explorative conversations never made it to the interview stage. The seminary contacted me to replace Bennett and Shinn in their teaching positions as well. Friends at the seminary informed me I was too closely associated with Reinhold Niebuhr or that my political ethics were not far left enough to be acceptable at the time. Chances to teach in the Caribbean were exciting, and Joan went with me to the Dominican Republic in 1973 and Jamaica in 1974. In the Dominican Republic a small revolutionary force had been defeated in the hills, and the shattered body of the rebel leader was displayed on the front page of the newspaper. It was deemed wise to leave San Jose for a vacation home on the beach where we continued our course in liberation theology for pastors of Union churches from the area. Our host believed our topic might be too threatening in that political context for Santo Domingo. As I left the bathing house, I noticed a small, mounted shark over my head on the doorway jamb. I inquired about sharks in the area, and I was informed that the sharks would stay on their side of the reef and we could safely swim on the shore side of the reef. In the Pittsburgh aquarium, sharks swam around and around the reef. Though not completely reassured, we enjoyed the ocean during breaks. David Shannon, the seminary dean, asked me to help him teach the course in Jamaica in 1974. It was primarily on religion and social change, and I published an article on “Black Liberation Theology in Jamaica” in the Christian Century out of readings for the course. Randy, now a mature eight-year-old, got into conversations with workers on their income and hopes for the future, which sometimes involved migration to the United States. We established a relationship with the seminary in Kingston, and for years it enriched Pittsburgh Seminary with fine Jamaican students while Dr. Shannon was with us. He and I planned together how we could forge a seminary that would serve black students better. These hopes came to naught with his departure, and only decades later Dr. Ronald Peters joined us to provide the needed leadership. Shannon joined my close friends of Wiest, Jackson, and Ezzell, and then Gonzalo Castillo joined the faculty. He was a genuine radical from Colombia who had taken

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degrees from the seminary in Cuba and at Union Theological Seminary. He was finishing his PhD at Columbia University after losing his position as an activist-researcher in ROSCA in Bogotá. Gordon Chamberlin, professor of education, also from Union, arranged for Gonzalo to spend a term with us. When Samuel Roberts left Pittsburgh to return to Union, there was an opening in our curriculum for a sociologist of religion. Previous to his leaving, Roberts and I had taught sociology of world religions together. I led the campaign to secure the position for Gonzalo, President Kadel was sympathetic, and we succeeded; I think I was chair of the search committee. Wiest, Jackson, Chamberlin, and others all supported the idea. At first Gonzalo taught the required course “Urban Church and Society,” and his own selection of courses in sociology of religion and church and society with a special course in Latin American and Native American issues. After a couple of years it seemed appropriate for me to undertake the “Urban Church and Society” course and to surrender my “International Relations” required course in church and society to him. The urban class was my course with the most readings by black authors, except for my various courses focusing on Martin Luther King Jr. I taught the required course in “Urban Church and Society” happily for a decade until Dr. Ronald Peters arrived, and then we transferred the course to him to support his developments in urban ministry. My social concerns activities were at the Community of Reconciliation as often as at the seminary. One Sunday morning in the concerns period of our worship, an African American woman deplored the graffiti reading, “Niggers stay out,” which had appeared by a tunnel connecting the New Reizeinstein Junior High School with a black community neighborhood. I announced that we would paint over it that afternoon at 1:00 PM and invited those concerned to join me. I also brashly announced that I expected that the owner of a paint store would furnish paint and ladders if mine were insufficient. The African American gentleman, who was the store owner, confirmed after the service that he could furnish paint and equipment. The editorial page editor of the newspaper sent out a photographer, and that afternoon about a dozen of us repainted the wall. Though the wall has been altered, I still enjoy seeing a little of our green handiwork showing on that tunnel wall. Years later Randy would attend that school as a student and help some of the slower students with their math development. It fell to me to chair the search committee for a second position in religious education. After a national search Dr. Harjie Likens was found. She was a Union BD, Columbia PhD who had served as a United Church of Christ minister and conference chairperson in California. She came to us from Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, where she was serving as an interim professor of education. I think she was the first full-time woman appointment to the faculty. It was a natural outgrowth of a committee that Dr. Peter Hanna from the board of directors and I cochaired on improving the role of women in the seminary. The next year I chaired the New Testament search committee, and we interviewed several outstanding New Testament scholars. The one closest to my own interest was Professor Walter Wink, whom I knew from Union. He was developing an interest in the “powers” of the New Testament and was very much in touch with the social implications of research. Unfortunately, the search was canceled due to the difficult

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financial situation of the seminary. President Kadel and I developed a close working relationship, and he was unusually supportive. We had our disagreements, and I became unusually stern with him over his worries about the sexual orientation of a faculty person. On the other hand, he would ask my advice over retaining faculty members, and other crucial questions. I chaired the Church and Ministry division of the faculty for a few years, and that role involved me deeply in all of the politics of the school. There were three divisions with Church and Ministry, including four faculty in preaching, two-and-a-half ethicists, two in pastoral care and psychology of religion, two in education, one in speech, and one in sociology of religion, making it the equal to the overstaffed biblical division. The History and Theology division was smaller. The politics became very heavy, particularly regarding the distribution of required courses and attempted curriculum revisions. Gradually, as the faculty became smaller due to finances, it could be worked out that each faculty member would be expected to teach at least one required course; a few of us had more. Eventually the board of directors, recognizing the independent power positions of the divisions, eliminated the divisions and centered more power in the hands of the new president, Sam Calian. But that lay ahead. Other than the church and society courses, my major course was “Introduction to Ethics,” which I taught almost every year. I also enjoyed teaching the history of Christian ethics every other year. I regularly featured two courses focusing on international relations, which I taught on alternate years. For several years the class would attend seminars at the United Nations and in the church offices for the United Nations. One was named after the course I taught at Union titled “Moral Issues in International Politics,” and the second was the “Ethics of Peacemaking.” I taught business ethics regularly until President Calian taught in that area, and I reduced my course offerings there. I sometimes taught a course in “Reformed Political Ethics.” Until Dr. Peters wanted to teach courses on Martin Luther King Jr., I would teach King along with Gandhi, or with Walter Wiest I offered a course on Niebuhr and King. I also taught a course on ethics and revolution with Professor Wiest. For three years I taught a required course with Gordon Jackson on “Introduction to Church Ministry.” For doctoral candidates in the joint cooperative program with the University of Pittsburgh, I offered a seminar in Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. Once we instituted the doctor of ministry degree program I taught courses in reformed urban ethics with a former student of mine, James Simms, and also seminars on the church and social problems. Dr. Simms became chair of the Allegheny County Council. The course I taught as often as one of the two courses in international relations was my seminar in “The Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr.” Occasionally I taught a seminar on the works of H. Richard Niebuhr. Seminars on the social thought of Paul Tillich followed my 1975 research on him, and later I added a seminar on John Wesley. Books came out of or produced most of these classes. So my move out of Columbia University allowed me to focus my work of teaching in areas in which I wanted to write. This focus increased my powers of thought and production. The joint PhD program with the University of Pittsburgh never worked as well as I had hoped it could. But for six years I chaired the program and administered it with the help

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of a seminary secretary and administrative help from the university. For a few years we sponsored a PhD colloquium for the professors and students in the program. It was the most successful intellectual event in the seminary’s life, with students and faculty discussing carefully written papers together. In those years it was primarily a Protestant studies program drawing upon university resources. This Protestant emphasis should not be construed narrowly, as the colloquium would sponsor Islam-Christian dialogues in addition to Jewish-Christian interchanges. After my tenure the program became a broader program in religious studies as the Pittsburgh Department of Religion grew and asserted its authority over the program. I stayed in the program a few years after I retired from the seminary to oversee a couple of excellent dissertations by James Rowell and Lon Weaver in religion and political ethics. A few years later the University of Pittsburgh dropped the graduate study of religion after most of the seminary faculty had withdrawn from it. My course offerings evolved over the years. I had a lot of flexibility in the two or three electives I would offer each year. The introduction themes of love, justice, and power appeared in other courses as well. For a while I offered a course titled “Love and Justice.” I offered courses in politics in various forms. For a while I tutored students in political philosophy and ethics. I would offer a course on religious ethical issues during presidential campaign years. I taught a course on political ethics on the apartheid situation with a South African for a couple of years. The historical study of Christian ethics appeared at various levels both for the master’s students and for the PhD degree students, and it also showed up in the PhD seminar in Weber and Troeltsch. The courses for doctor of ministry candidates were usually the themes of the “Introduction to Ethics” course inserted into case studies of practical ministerial social issues. In the specialized tracks of the doctor of ministry program I taught “Reformed Social Ethics” and “Urban Ethics,” using Pittsburgh as a case study of reformed ethos. In the thirtyfour years of teaching at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary I taught over 130 courses in about 25 different formats.

WATERGATE After the Watergate burglary of Democratic offices, including the office of a former congressman who had been a former dean of students from Morningside, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I urged that as the University of Oklahoma football program was being forced to surrender its victories due to an academic cheating scandal, the Republican Party should forfeit the election. I argued that more sanctions should follow those rendered to Attorney General Mitchell and the FBI chief, Gray. Mr. Kleindienst had recused himself from the case. Ron Zeigler had contradicted himself. A forfeiture of the election seemed in order. Actually, it took many months for the conclusion of the case with Nixon’s resignation.

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TEACHING IN PITTSBURGH CHURCHES I received the usual criticism from Republican Presbyterians mentioning their baptisms, church memberships, and connections to the seminary. I was still being asked to speak in churches, particularly my own Community of Reconciliation, and the few progressive Presbyterian churches in the Presbytery. Sometimes I could give four classes in a series, and sometimes I would speak or preach only once. The larger conservative Presbyterian churches did not invite me, but the neighboring Shadyside asked me for a series in business ethics, and years later for a six-week seminar on Isaiah and peacemaking. The larger Presbyterian churches that considered themselves moderate had me teach in a series of classes. I taught business ethics for four or five sessions twice at Westminster Church in the South Hills. I often taught at Wallace Memorial Church, Highland Presbyterian Church, and Third Presbyterian Church. Lutheran churches asked me to teach or preach a surprising number of times. A few African American churches asked me to preach, and their receptions were always warm. The Lutheran Church on Grant Street had me down a couple of times to teach business ethics to their Lenten Luncheon series across from the U.S. Steel building. Two of the three Unitarian churches in the city asked me to speak. Carlow College usually asked me to address the students or the sisters each time the United States went to war. Ordinarily the seasons of electoral politics would produce invitations to address adult groups in a variety of churches. Smaller Presbyterian churches in the region often asked me out to speak on Christian peacemaking. Though understanding myself as a moderate who was witnessing a country acting bizarrely, a growing reputation in the suburbs as a radical at the seminary decreased my invitations to speak. Under the leadership of Mrs. Sally Childs, I undertook to develop a retreat/seminar for Calvary Episcopal Church on the Protestant work ethic, supplementing it with a leisure ethic. I served as an advisor or consultant to the social witness programs of both the Presbytery and the Episcopal dioceses.

SOCIAL ACTION IN PITTSBURGH We engaged as a family in antiwar demonstrations, and I would write leaders in politics of our concerns. The seminary students and a few faculty members formed a committee criticizing and educating on the Vietnam War. I related to the committee, but it was primarily the work of John Nelson and Robert Ezzel who taught a course together on American culture and religion. Part of their educational work was to show and discuss the film on Daniel Berrigan’s resistance titled The Holy Outlaw to interested churches. Students asked me to form a “Peace Committee” following a sermon I preached criticizing nuclear weapons. The committee still continues. After Gonzalo Castillo joined it, the committee became the Peace and Justice Committee, and eventually he coached it more than I. With my help, the consistory of the Community of Reconciliation used the “just war ethic” to criticize the Vietnam War. The church developed an antiwar service with the leadership of the Reverend Mr. Jim Ray. Part of it was a religious demonstration outside of the Federal Building downtown, but the service was concluded in Mellon Park, where the postal workers who were members of

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the congregation could legally participate. Some returning veterans participated. In those years of student-faculty demonstrations, issues beyond Vietnam also called for support. In pre-kindergarten Randy demonstrated against the B-1 bomber, and it was years before he ever got to taste a grape. The farmworkers’ demonstrations against grapes and lettuce were supported both at the unloading docks in the “Strip district” and at local grocery stores. Union grievances against employers often found a small audience at the seminary and some support for their picket lines. In retrospect, some of these efforts failed to produce mass support and were consequently ineffective. None of us had the charisma or organizing genius of Martin Luther King Jr. The chairman of the board of directors of the seminary, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, warned me gently that lowering my voice at the seminary and the community would be looked upon favorably. The inclusion of criminal justice in the urban ethics course led the class to visit Western Penitentiary. One nun said she could not go but would pray for the prisoners. I insisted she visit. Following that course and other experiences, she took the interim course at Wesley Seminary on Washington, D.C., and ethics, and she became a Christian activist. We also visited alternative prisons in the region. Eventually I became a community sponsor for the East Liberty Community Treatment Center, and we held meetings in the seminary to support the project. Later a few students would take jobs working the desk at the center. I taught courses a few times at Western Penn, and the chaplain there eventually became my student and wrote a dissertation on a project to get more pastors to visit their prisoners. All the stimulus of activism probably slowed down my academic research, but I was still trying to publish the book I had written in Cambridge. It had another consequence, in that I was losing interest in my marriage. Joan was supportive of the activism and engaged herself when she could. I neglected nourishing the marriage, and she was depressed from our loss in 1972. Furthermore, she had completed her master’s degree in library science and was having difficulty finding employment. She explained to our friend that, due to the library school being located in Pittsburgh, it was hard to secure a position when so many were looking for starting positions. I interpreted, perhaps incorrectly, that my career in Pittsburgh was blamed for her unemployment. Patricia’s birth on September 24, 1974, and my love for Randy should have kept the marriage together. It had been a very difficult pregnancy, with Joan confined mostly to bed for several weeks. Patricia was born prematurely, but she pulled through in fine shape. She has always exhibited an exceptional degree of resilience. She was a happy, untroubled child. Very early she exhibited quiet brilliance like her mother.

THE NORTHWEST I taught summer school at Pacific Lutheran University for several summers, beginning in 1975. The beautiful campus and fine students made it a joyful experience. The man I thought of as my best friend, Bob Stivers, arranged the summer schools. The first summer, I drove out and stayed with him, Sylvia, and his two children, Laurie and Mark.

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Sylvia and Patricia hit it off, and Patricia learned to make jelly from her gentle teaching. Bob and I, sometimes with other family members, would climb on the glaciers of Mt. Rainier or walk in its forests. I came to love the mountain and regarded it as my special peak. I discussed climbing to the summit with the mountain guides, but I never attempted it. Though I had camped out in the snow in Yellowstone Park, the thought of trying to sleep in the snow of the mountain discouraged me. I settled for staying in the Lodge and dining on their fresh salmon with wine. Perhaps it was better to love the mountain on its slopes than to attempt to conquer its heights. Trips to Olympic Park became regular features of those summer school trips. Bob taught me to explore the life of the tidal pools. Both Bob and I appreciated the temperate rain forest and the lonely beaches often filled with timber washed ashore. One summer we hiked back into the Quinault Valley and camped for two nights, seeing a bear and many deer. The famed Roosevelt elk were seen much less often, but occasionally these magnificent animals would be spotted on the slopes of the mountains. I came to regard the Olympics (with side trips to Mt. Rainier) as one of my two favorite places in the world. Bob had a cabin on the Puget Sound from which we could take boat trips on futile fishing expeditions or over to the seal rookery with its denizens. Evening discussions by the fire or on the deck in the summer produced treasured dialogue on many subjects, but mostly on politics and religion. One summer John Bennett came up for a weekend to discuss my first book on foreign policy and ethics with us. Anne, his wife, said she understood why people worshipped mountains after seeing Mt. Rainier in the clear skies above the low-lying clouds. Both Randy and Patricia were introduced to the Northwest and camping there. The clearest memory I have of Patricia there is our ordering trout at the Quinault Lodge overlooking the lake. The waiter replied he would have to see whether the Indian had brought in a fish that afternoon. Luckily for us, a member of the Quinault tribe with the fishing rights to the stream had brought in a beautiful trout, and we thoroughly enjoyed our dinner.

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Chapter 23

Beyond Niebuhr I separated from Joan in the summer of 1975. After the summer school at Pacific Lutheran University, I returned to Pittsburgh briefly and left for Goethe Institute in Berlin. The hurt of the separation set in. By the time I got to Berlin, I was as close to despair as I had ever been. I stayed in Berlin only a week, abandoning the study of German. I returned to Pittsburgh for a short time, and then I went off to Harvard to begin to work on the social thought of Paul Tillich. John Stumme had persuaded me years earlier in a private tutorial that Tillich was superior to Niebuhr in some of his thought, particularly regarding Karl Marx and religious socialism. My two books on Niebuhr and other writings had earned me an overly simple reputation as a Niebuhrian that I could not shake. I needed some room for my own individuality to emerge. Obviously I had been more influenced in my Iowa Methodist church by the social gospel than Niebuhr had been. I was more open to radical thought than the mature Niebuhr had been, and I believed more deeply in humanity in the spiritually informed world making more real gains than Niebuhr seemed to allow. These differences would appear in my Realism and Hope (published in 1977) more clearly than in other writings, though the debts to Niebuhr were still there. I was opening up to the liberalism that Niebuhr had so sharply condemned. I was also attracted for a time to the more radical thought of liberation theology, particularly to its political forms in the Latin American context. While steeping myself in the socialist writings of the younger Paul Tillich, I was planning the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s 1976 celebration of the American Revolution with Gustavo Gutierrez and Richard Shaull as the featured speakers. I spent the fall of 1975 living in the Paul Tillich archives. As soon as they would open I would be there, and I would stay until they closed, studying his unpublished writings. The archives were not as well organized in 1975 as they were later, but they were open, and one could sit amid the writings and notes of this great thinker. Most evenings I would be reading Tillich material that was already published. My German was inadequate for the task, but I made some of my own translations, and found other translations in the archives that I would check. Joan and I tried to reconcile that autumn from a distance, broken by my short visits to Pittsburgh. We visited a counselor some, but before Thanksgiving that fall we had given up and decided to divorce. That semester I received divorce papers from Joan, and we proceeded to implement our plans. Family letters and frequent long supportive letters from Bob Stivers were generally approving of my actions. Aunt Mary reminded me that she did not believe in divorce and that it would make the future more difficult. I did not work all the time; my brother Hugh and his wife, Ruth, were studying at Yale Divinity School, and I took a weekend to visit them for the annual Harvard-Yale football game. Randy came to visit, and we walked the bicentennial trail of Boston together and played games of Broadside (a

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British-American naval war game of the nineteenth century) in the lounge in the Harvard dormitory. We toured Lexington and Concord. Each day on our way to the subway through the Zoological Labs we would admire the bas reliefs of the animals on the buildings’ friezes before we crossed Harvard Yard. After Randy returned to Pittsburgh I attended a few lectures, started attending chapel, and met a few Harvard students and faculty. The divorce was hard on both Joan and me. After I returned to Pittsburgh from Harvard I suffered a sore neck that neither braces nor chiropractic therapy could cure. Time and gathering distance from the pain of divorce would eventually heal it. We shared responsibility for the children, but Joan provided much more care than I. They would stay with me two nights per week and also one weekend a month. We split the holidays, which meant each of us was free from childcare every other holiday, and we were also free to take the children with us to our respective families. I helped financially, and they stayed in our first house on Stanton Avenue near Highland Park. She secured positions as a librarian, first at Carnegie Mellon University, and then as a science and technology librarian at the home Carnegie Library. I became incensed at the Austrian Symphony Orchestra playing a new cantata, “To Posterity,” at the United Nations for UN Day, which left off the last verse of Psalm 121: “Behold he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” This, coupled with the UNESCO action labeling Zionism as racism, seemed to be part of the movement to create a pariah state out of Israel, which the UN had founded. The New York Times chose not to publish my letter to the editor. Krister Stendahl, the dean at Harvard Divinity, and I had looked for any textual evidence that justified the omission, but we could not find any. The Austrian composer Gottfried von Einem lamely claimed that the mistake had been made by his working from an 1871 German Bible. The letter was the strongest pro-Zionist position I ever wrote. It claimed Christian dependence upon Judaism out of which it had come, and recognized the need for a strong defense of Israel by Christians. That pro-Zionist position would hold for about three decades, until I had more experience with the Palestinians and other Arabs. The same week I was writing to the Times, my mother was writing me how she wished I could be there to talk to her fifth graders about the United Nations. She had planned special lessons for the celebration of UN Day. She admitted she heard criticism of the United Nations, but wrote, “It is all we have.”

THE MAYA Bedtime reading at Harvard other than Tillich focused on the Maya. I was fascinated by the Mayan displays in the Harvard University History Museum. After Harvard I took a short trip to the Yucatan. The Cancun sun, snorkeling, and resort were relaxing. The purpose of the trip was to explore the sites in the Yucatan of Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Kabah from a base in Merida. The beauty and power of the sites overwhelmed me, particularly as I compared them to my own small town of Dakota City, Iowa. Some of the older texts I had read at Harvard engaged in wild speculation as to who the builders of these pyramids could have been. Were they Egyptians, from outer space, or a

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disappeared race? We enjoyed seeing the Maya children on the beach build step pyramids and cover them with seaweed to resemble the jungle that had overtaken the pyramids. The children knew who had built them and who they were. The origins of Chichen Itza in a Toltec conquest fascinated me, as I had wandered Toltec ruins on my first trip to Mexico in 1957. The extremes of their religion and their sports led me to question aspects of our own religiously drenched society and our extreme investment in violent sports. I never returned to the Yucatan, but issues raised there would take me to other sites of pre-conquest Mexico and to an appreciation of their people. By 1976, I was back at Pittsburgh. The bicentennial celebration of the 1776 Revolution at Pittsburgh with Richard Shaull and Gustavo Gutierrez also involved Dorothee Solle, John Raines, and others to the left of center. We all got together with Richard Ray, the publisher of our lectures for John Knox at the home of my partner for dinner. Someone said if a hand grenade exploded in the room, half of the left of the theological world would be wiped out. The dean insisted Gustavo remain in Pittsburgh until he made the final corrections for Liberation and Change, which I would edit, introduce, and publish with John Knox Press the next year. We furnished Gustavo Coca-Colas until he finally finished his last response of the lectures. He chose to speak English, in which he was very insecure, for the first time in the United States in response to questions. Out of the event we formed a friendship that for the next few years we renewed at various academic meetings until we had him back as a lecturer many years later. I was criticized by various Presbyterians for organizing such an event. One Episcopalian woman appealed to my liturgical sensibilities, suggesting such an event should not have been held the week after Easter. I wondered if she was speaking just for herself or for others at her church. As she served as one of the first women on the board of directors, she was concerned about the event’s effect on fund-raising. She explicitly warned that it could make it harder for her to ask her sister for more support for the seminary. Previous to the event her pastor had published a very favorable review of my book on Reinhold Niebuhr. Generally my relationships with the Presbyterian progressive business community were quite good. Robert Lavelle, the banker and real estate agent on the Hill, and I were friends, and he often spoke to my classes at the seminary or at Grace Memorial Church or in his savings and loan office. William Jackson, owner of Des Moines Steel, often entertained my class well at his works on Neville Island. Likewise, Don Burnham, chairman of Westinghouse, and I got along, and he invited me to speak at the Glassport Iron Foundry’s celebration of its relationship with Westinghouse. Admittedly, the attire and long hair of my students put off the security guards at Glassport. But my intervention prevented things from getting out of hand, and they mingled with the executives in suits. I spent 1976 in my own place in the countryside outside of Pittsburgh. Randy particularly enjoyed the fresher air of the bluffs over Cheswick, and Patricia adapted well to her father’s inadequate cooking. I was into my second year as coordinator of the Cooperative PhD Program with the University of Pittsburgh. I fit that role better probably than I had serving as chairperson of the Church and Ministry division.

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Chapter 24

Realism and Hope My Realism and Hope finally came out in 1977 with the University Press of America. The book interpreted and defended Niebuhr and then opened the realist tradition up to revolutionary possibilities with Christianity. It built up more hope and themes from liberation than were common among the realists. Jed Lyons, the publisher, and I would form a friendship, and that house would reprint books for me over the years and publish study books for the Presbyterian Church, which I would supervise. For a few years I served on the Advisory Board of UPA and read manuscripts for them. My partnership with the press was always cooperative and helpful. In this and Liberation and Change, my second pair of books, I was quite a bit removed from Niebuhr. Between 1975, the sabbatical year at Harvard, and 1980, I published several papers on Tillich in Religion and Life, Tillich Studies, and the Union Seminary Quarterly Review. The University Press of America advertised Realism and Hope as a revision of my earlier thought in my 1972 book on Niebuhr. The chapter on power made the goals more central than the realists. My openness to revolution in the third world and in the Church’s teaching was not common among the realists. John C. Bennett, another mentor and correspondent, later developed similar emphases in his book The Radical Imperative. He, earlier in his speeches, developed the acceptance of revolution in the poor world even if they contained a little Marxism. I was never satisfied with Marxist contributions to theory, but I included a long chapter on Marx and revolution in this volume of religious, political philosophy. I did not accept the positivism of realist theory regarding national interest that Niebuhr and Bennett sometimes suggested. I think the stressing of revolutionary possibilities in papacies and central reformation thinkers was quite different from most Christian realists. John Bennett responded to my book in a letter from March 8, 1977: I am very enthusiastic about your book. Your discussion of Marx is as convincing as anything that I have seen. The part about religion is distinctive and most helpful. It is clear and obviously based on knowledge. The same is true of the Niebuhr-Morgenthau expositions. Your own constructive positions of Christian realism, power and purpose, revolution and our American policy of counter revolution are exactly right from my point of view. I like the way in which you make use of the “Kingdom of God” theme. I have usually avoided it because of misuse in the past and because of ambiguities but your interpretation helps to overcome my inhibitions very much. Did you ever see Dick Neuhaus’s account of the conversation between himself, Pannenberg and Niebuhr about the Kingdom of God? This is in his introduction to Pannenberg’s Theology and the Kingdom of God. Niebuhr dismissed the idea of using the idea of the Kingdom in Christian ethics because it had been spoiled by the Social Gospel. It was an off-the-cuff comment and it should not be taken too seriously.

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I hope that your publishers will push the book. They did send out a promotional letter. In the ground covered and in the precise balance of your argument and in the clarity of some of the interpretations it is a unique book and should have been published by a commercial publisher with a strong interest in promotion. Chapter VII may have seemed too much of a discussion for specialists. Your earlier expositions are full enough to be intelligible to any well informed reader. A number of your conceptual analyses are fresh and important. My critique of liberation theology’s tendency toward utopianism, their suspicion of democracy, and their sometimes over-acceptance of Marxism prevented me from adopting their positions. I welcomed (as did John C. Bennett) their pushing for the overthrow of the feudal order in Latin America. I accepted their hopes that the Church in some Latin American countries could change sides and ally with forces trying to overthrow the oligarchies. This was congruent with my arguments against the United States’ support of counterrevolutionary forces.

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Randy in Nova Scotia Our summer vacation followed my move back into Pittsburgh to a ground-level apartment on King Avenue. Randall and I drove to Rickett’s Glen State Park. There we marveled at the cascading water originating in the mountain lake making its way into the valley. As we camped by the lake, we descended beside several waterfalls and then climbed back up through the other fork of the stream approaching the falls from below. We camped along the Connecticut River and continued on to Orono, Maine. There we visited my brother, Alan, and his wife, Caroline. Kirsten, Alan’s daughter, was also there for the summer. Alan and I and the children went to the shore. Kirsten, at first, would not try lobster despite Randy assuring her it was great. After being coaxed to try it, she consumed most of her dad’s lunch. Randy and I continued our trip and camped in the New Brunswick National Park on the Bay of Fundy. Three years earlier he had scared Joan and me by hiding along the trail overlooking the bay. We panicked over losing him until he finally jumped from the forest to the trail to frighten us. On that trip we had bypassed Nova Scotia and proceeded out to Gaspé Peninsula, returning through Quebec and Montreal. This year, as a mature ten-year-old, he helped with the camping chores. Our very favorite meals were lobster cooked in a bucket over the campfire accompanied by corn on the cob. We acquired a booklet on Nova Scotia at the provincial border. He read about a Rock Hound Festival and a buried treasure of Black Beard at Devil’s Island. So we added both to our agenda, which was originally formed around viewing moose in the wild. The Rock Hound Roundup centered on Parrsboro. After establishing our camp at a town camping site, we went to our first “Roundup.” The merchants were selling all kinds of collecting gear and arranging tours. We arranged for a boat trip across the bay to a good location for finding amethysts contained in the rocky cliffs. One day Randy and I took a trip to Joggin’s Cliffs with our new rock hammer and bucket. Where the cliffs fell away new fossils were constantly being exposed. By searching at different levels, various millennia of fossils were exposed for our discovery. If we had needed proof of evolution or the age of the planet, it was there before us in those piles of sediment and in different fossils. The day also provided Randy with his first memorable example of the usefulness of a foreign language. Some French-speaking Canadians asked us for directions, and I was able to reply and help them in French. He thought it was quite the thing. We collected sufficient amounts of this ancient life and took to the road in our 1975 Volvo wagon. A tractor pulling a hayrack made a sudden left turn as we started to pass. I hit the brakes and the Volvo hit the huge rubber tire of the tractor. A youth jumped up quickly after being knocked from the rack. After checking Randy, I said, “The front end of our wagon must be gone.” But a quick inspection showed only a V-shaped cut in the rubber band on the front bumper. No hurt was inflicted to the two youths on their rig. We proceeded back to the hospitality of Parrsboro, which had moved us from our

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campground into a home. The fossils would move from yard to yard in my various locations, with Randy sometimes planting them. We proceeded to Halifax for the changing of the guard in the fortress. Seaside scenes of small fishing villages and lighthouses were followed by campgrounds and lobsters boiling in our pail. Black Beard’s treasure well and legends of buried treasure were mostly a tourist trap. We went on to the forests and our moose hunt. The only moose we found was a rather battered one in a shed in a municipal park. Westbound, we stopped again at Orono and learned that Kirsten and Alan had seen several moose in a Maine state park. The camping trip was a continuation of trips our family had taken to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the Keys, Cape Cod, the Redwoods, and so on. Randy and I would soon be joined by Patricia on these trips to Yellowstone, Olympic National Park, New Mexico, and more. My vocation as a seminary professor provided summers free for travel, if only enough funds for camping trips on our voyages of discovery.

UTOPIA Dr. John Bald, another ethicist at the seminary, became too ill to teach his course on utopia. As it had fourteen registrants, I took it over for the study of Plato, More, Orwell, Skinner, and a conclusion with Tillich’s four lectures on utopia. Our field trips to the living Bruderhof, south of Pittsburgh, past Uniontown on Highway 40, introduced the class to current Christian utopias. The visit to Old Economy and a group meal featuring their cooking at the seminary focused on the history of Christian utopian groups. In their migration between Harmony, Pennsylvania, and Old Economy they had moved down the Ohio River to a site they named New Harmony, Indiana. There they established a frontier, communal utopia. Jane Owen had saved the village buildings and added to them. Her grandfather, Robert Owen, had established a secular, semicommunist group there after buying out the Harmonists. The Harmonists had then removed to Old Economy, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. There they awaited the return of Jesus Christ. Their realism about economy inspired Father Rapp to collect gold from their agricultural and industrial ventures to save for Jesus’ return. Obviously, to them, he would need financial strength to establish his Kingdom on Earth. Their commitment to chastity eventually led to splits in the cult and to their extinction, as they died childless. Tillich’s conclusions about advocating “the Spirit of Utopia” while refraining from literally pursuing or establishing utopia fit the ambiguity of the course as a conclusion. Tillich’s remains are interred in New Harmony in a small forest of German fir containing some of his words carved into standing boulders. As the number of students choosing graduate study in social ethics or social dimensions of theology increased, I added a seminar in the thought of Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber as a required course for them. It was a particularly satisfying course to teach, and it was the one course in which we sometimes used a little German language. One evening in the second week of the semester, a prominent Pentecostal pastor from the

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neighborhood showed up. I never learned why he was encouraged to register for the course. There were some expressions of German dropped, and he never returned to the course. I still wonder about his enrollment or visit when I drive past his church.

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Urban Ethics Course At the other end of my spectrum of courses was an urban ethics course that visited local industries and institutions. It focused on Christian practice in social change. The most famous student in later years was James Simms. He would arrive on his motorcycle and park it in front of the library where the seminar met. He and other African American students thought the course, which discussed some sexuality issues, needed to hear from a Christian prostitute. Most of the class was surprised to learn of her conservative evangelical beliefs and her severe repudiation of abortion. Not wanting to bill the seminary, class members contributed funds to her honorarium as they wished. The tough textbook for the course was Max Stackhouse, Urban Ethics and Ethos. Aspects of the method later informed my publication of Reformed Urban Ethics: A Case Study of Pittsburgh. Douglas Mitchell’s passions were ignited by the course, and he had a fulfilled vocation as an urban minister in the First Presbyterian Church of Minneapolis. A longtime leader in Presbyterian social action, Vernon Broyles, told several members of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness meeting in the church that Doug’s sermon the previous Sunday morning was the best sermon on justice he had ever heard. Randy renewed his acquaintance with Doug Mitchell years later while the latter was serving as the director of Boston’s venerable city Mission Society. James Simms, already politically active at the time of the course, went on to hold many local government offices. While serving as chair of the County Council, he sponsored my election to the Accountability and Ethics Commission of Allegheny County’s founding class. I served for ten years, four as chairperson. Shortly before my retirement from the seminary I asked Dr. Simms to join me in teaching the doctor of ministry seminar in urban ethics in Pittsburgh. Our association was warm; his contacts in county government and case studies enriched the class. The urban ethos of the poor, black community and white tolerance of armed urban youth cost him the life of his beloved son, for whom I grieved also. He purchased a closed Presbyterian Church building on the corner of Fifth and Penn Avenue, which he converted into a Baptist church. I smile several times a week as I drive by that corner and see his sign: “A church with a word for the city.” I would meet several African American students from my courses later as they led social-service organizations, demonstrated for racial justice, or served in county government. One that I met a couple of decades later told the group at a small political meeting in Pittsburgh, “Dr. Stone made us read until our eyes bugged out.” Then he admitted his difficulty in understanding Max Stackhouse’s volume on the urban ethos. The course analyzed the ethos of the ruling class of Pittsburgh and attempted to demonstrate what a reforming ethic could achieve. I had run in an election earlier for Committee Ward, and during this period I ran as a delegate to the Democratic convention pledged to Morris Udall. In neither case did I win election, though I came very close in the first contest, which was conducted in

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English on my part and by the party, and partially in English and partially in Italian by the machine candidate from the Parks Department. Part of the critique of my side was that my fellow candidate for committee, a woman, was not really an Italian, but she was married to a priest, giving her an Italian-sounding name. I had more success helping in campaigns for a white educator clergyman and a black clergyman for school board. Both David Engel and Jimmy Joe Robinson spoke in my “Church and Society” class about moral issues in the school board elections. After Nixon-Ford and ReaganBush, I wondered whether I would ever see a progressive ticket win a national election.

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Seeking Greek Orthodoxy Convinced that all the histories of Christian social teaching were quite wrong, I spent a short sabbatical in 1978 wandering around Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, wanting to add to my meager knowledge of Orthodox Christianity. I had seen the splendors of the ruins of Orthodox Christianity in Russia earlier, and I knew something of its stubborn policies of valor and discretion against the Communist pressures. As early as my seminary education, I had written on the power of the Orthodox liturgy to sustain populations under persecution, and I had observed babushkas praying where former altars had been in Russian churches turned into atheist museums. We traveled on buses and trains around the Balkans. I preached in a Protestant church in Zagreb, and we interviewed bishops in Belgrade, Athens, and Istanbul. Most of the English-speaking bishops we met had earned PhDs at Harvard, and they were eager to discuss the complexities of church-state relations in their countries of some oppression. The world of the Balkans and Russia changed before I ever developed an adequate understanding of my subject, and so I never published on this research. Isolated stories of our experiences have found their way into some of my speeches and writings, but most of it never developed into serious reflection. We were stuck on the isle of Samos for a few days over Thanksgiving. I wrote to Patricia that we were stuck in Samos on Thanksgiving and could not get to Turkey for Thanksgiving. I assured her that the barbecued chicken on Samos made a fine holiday dinner. I thought it was terribly clever, but Randy had to explain it to her. Eventually we made it to Turkey on an overnight boat that carried a white substance in plastic sacks under the deck’s floorboards. We did not ask the drunken sailors what it was, and we had bashfully refused to join their wild dances on the crossing. We took a bus out to the site of Troy, where it rained. We explored the excavations as well as we could in the rain, before taking shelter in a tourist shop near the site. We bought drinks for those there, and the manager had worked in San Francisco, so he translated for us. The owner of a herd of sheep joined us and added salt and bread to our wine drinking. We were informed no more buses would come out to Troy that day. So we joined the owner of the herd, his shepherd, and his dog for the trek with the sheep into the nearby village. There we were escorted to the mosque. We joined a crowd in a coffee shop, where we were the guests of our host. A teacher translated for an hour-and-a-half salon. We visited his home for more coffee and to meet his family. Eventually, after declining his requests for dinner and to stay overnight, we were put on the bus with school teachers returning to Chankale. He put his younger brother on the bus with us as an escort. We had explained that we had a dinner appointment with an English lady we had met in the city, and that sufficed as an excuse for declining his genuine Muslim hospitality. Throughout our trip from Zagreb to Istanbul we were treated with utmost courtesy and hospitality by strangers. Hostility of Greeks to Turks and Turks to Greeks was obvious; both people regarded the other as unclean. But as Americans we were warmly welcomed.

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An example of later use of the experience relates to East Liberty Presbyterian Church, which I joined in the 1970s. The Session was considering a proposal to place a columbarium under the Trinity Chapel that contained the sarcophagi of two of the Mellon family who had paid for the construction of the replica of a Spanish Gothic cathedral for the congregation. I objected on Presbyterian egalitarian grounds, and I told them the story of Diocletian’s palace. Emperor Diocletian, married to a Christian wife, became in the third century one of the worst of the persecuting emperors. Eventually the Church owned his palace in Split on the Yugoslavian coast. They moved his tomb from the palace, which became the nave of the cathedral, outside to a tower, which became the baptistery for the church. There, as a non-baptized persecutor, the Church preserved his remains but denied him a place within the sanctuary. Even if we would not move the Mellons, we did not need to bury members underneath their Trinity Chapel. The visits to Orthodox centers did not stanch my continued reading in Reinhold Niebuhr. My respect for Orthodoxy’s survival under Communist and Islamic pressures increased.

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Response to Liberation Theology Some other progressive Niebuhrians were being moved by the Latin American liberation theology. Robert McAfee Brown had signed a call for dialogue originated by Frederick Herzog of Duke titled “Theological Education and Liberation Theology: An Invitation to Respond.” The Association of Theological Schools published the call and asked eighteen of us teaching in member schools to respond. John C. Bennett responded graciously to the call, seeing it as a challenge to theological education rather than a new agenda for it. He recognized that most Christians in the world were poor and that liberation theology awakened him and the Church to this reality. He was not sure that liberation theology would succeed in the United States, though he saw it most powerfully in the women’s movement. The Church was inclusive, not partisan, and the partisanship of liberation theology would make it difficult for the movement in the United States. Charles West and Donald Bloesch rejected the politicization of liberation theology. Katie Canon, then teaching mostly mature black pastors at New York Theological Seminary, accepted liberation theology as a transforming call to theological education. Harvey Cox did not expect the call to produce much change in North American theological education, but he thought his experience at the Seminario Bautista de Mexico provided a new institutional setting in which theological education informed by liberation theology could take place. He was very realistic about the whole support system of American theological education denying any wholesale movement by liberation theology into North American institutions. My own experience by 1979 made me very sympathetic to liberation theology for Latin America. My college-level class in Mexico City, my return visits to that country, seeing starving children in the Dominican Republic, and my knowledge of life in Kingston, Jamaica, contributed to my acceptance of Latin American liberation theology for Latin America. My own political fights at the seminary to secure and then to promote Gonzalo Castillo informed my paper about the realities of the struggle to hear liberation theology. About the same time, I secured the acquiescence of a Presbyterian peacemaking committee to listen to a liberation theologian. The role of American blacks in theological education and the promotion of women in theological education had always been a goal, and so the black liberation theology and women’s liberation theology were already dialogue partners and part of my agenda. An appreciation and long-distance friendship with Gustavo Gutierrez also informed my response. In my response I admitted being influenced by James Cone, Rosemary Ruether, and Gustavo Gutierrez. I also insisted that in my work I transformed their perspectives. My work was in tension with their perspectives. As Gutierrez’s theology was reflection upon action, my actions had been informed by the social gospel and Reinhold Niebuhr. Already I had helped in bringing women’s, Latin American, and black voices to the seminary. But their voices were not my voice. I had five points of critique of the statement submitted and a dozen points at which I thought theological education could be reformed. I thought the document was too Church-oriented. The document did not take account of the religious reservation about politics. Theology should not be diluted

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into politics. I would not seek a canon within a canon. The document overemphasized the left wing of the Church; there were also resources in the center for revolution. I wished that the document had contained more praxis. My suggestions for reforming theological education ranged from recruitment of faculty and students to administration and boards of directors, and to curriculum. There was a need for greater clarity about the politics of liberation theology and the politics of our own seminaries. The theology and the statement were both pretty vague about actual politics. Gustavo Gutierrez had said at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, when pushed by students regarding the goal of liberation theology, “To seize power.” I mentioned in my response that a representative of a Pittsburgh transnational corporation told me once in his Jamaican operation, “We do not have to worry about the social radicalness of our government because our poor people are so religious.” I had responded, “Religion is changing!” None of our gains of women faculty, black faculty, and Latin American faculty were made without fights. I chaired two of three committees and served on the third. Liberation theology was one of the supporting movements for the struggle in the seminary. It was simply a lifetime vocation to continue the struggle in the seminary for relevance and the promotion of social justice.

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Paul Tillich In 1980, my Paul Tillich’s Radical Social Thought was published by John Knox Press under the same editor, Richard Ray, who had boldly published Liberation and Change. Richard informed me that John Knox did not normally publish books quite this far to the left of the Presbyterian Church. The book incorporated the chapters I had been publishing separately since my sabbatical in the Andover-Harvard Theological Library archives. It traced Tillich’s life from birth to death, discussing his German dissertations and his German religious socialism from his World War I experience to his midlife crisis with Hitler and immigration. This early work of Tillich was not well known in the United States, though there had been a dissertation on the German socialist writings. My work was unique in focusing on the discussion of his politics and social thought through his American years. The lifetime work of Marian Pauck and a longtime friend of Tillich, Wilhelm Pauck, came out after I had completed my work in the Andover-Harvard archives. Their first volume was published in 1976. I wish I had possessed it while making my way (with only a little guidance) through Tillich’s papers. Even though my book was nearly complete, I could consult the Pauck volume from time to time and profit from its completeness. Their volume differed by focusing on his life, while mine was much more concentrated upon his political thought. I sensed I gave a more favorable interpretation to his far-left orientation than the Paucks could muster. The year after the Paucks’ book, Hannah Tillich published her memoirs, From Time to Time, which detailed in history and fantasy her husband’s romantic life of eros. It was a revelation of her internal life more than it was a biography of Paul Tillich. I responded only meagerly to this volume in my book on his social thought. The major contribution of my book, I thought, was to bring together the American politically active Tillich with the more political focus of the socialist Tillich in Germany. The book was favorably reviewed, and it was the last of my books to date to make a major review in the New York Times. I did not know Hannah well, having met her only three times, but I appreciated her statement to her daughter, Dr. Mutie Tillich Farris: “He has it all.” The book led to increasing interest in Tillich’s politics and social thought in the North American Paul Tillich Society, and I would contribute a paper to the annual meeting of the society about every three years. I served on the board of directors and eventually as president. During my vice presidential year, I had James Luther Adams show his films of prewar Germany from 1932 to 1933 to the society in a reception sponsored by the University Press of America. Jurgen Moltmann attended, and we had our one discussion on Tillich’s politics. He found them less useful than I. We also disagreed on the creativity of John Calvin’s political thought. Our only other discussion was years later at Pittsburgh Seminary. He seemed to regard the wolf as a solitary animal, synonymous with individualistic, cruel men. Maybe this was drawn from German mythology. I argued he was too hard on the wolf, which was really a very social animal that lived in small packs. My church Session

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gasped a little when in prayers for the beginning of Session I prayed for the successful reintegration of the wolf into the environmental context of the Western mountains.

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Peacemaking and the Presbyterians Soon after coming to the seminary I was asked to join a national task force drafting policy for the Presbyterian Church on political prisoners in Vietnam and their confinement in “tiger cages.” That was the beginning of lifetime work regarding policy making for the Presbyterian Church. I received the next invitation in 1975 from William Thompson. He asked me to join a task force on foreign policy to rethink the Church’s international relations positions as the Vietnam War ran down. As I thought it over, he told me he had already cleared the invitation with the seminary president. So I accepted. Later I learned Robert Smylie, the staff person for international relations, had recommended me because of my books on Reinhold Niebuhr. Through the process, which would extend over five years, I became a confidante and friend of Dean Lewis, who directed the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy for the denomination. Other important friendships were developed. A partnership with Edward Leroy Long Jr., then of Oberlin College, evolved that would prove to be important for future work. Gradually, most of the committee pulled away from the chair’s plan to produce a routine short policy on the immediate pressures on U.S. foreign policy. A visit by Ed Long and Bob Smylie to the chair persuaded him to resign. Dean Lewis thought the committee needed to be reorganized, and some new members were added to replace a few of the former committee. Ed and I made the transition with others to the new committee. A reconciling California pastor, William P. Creevey, was elected chairperson. I think another pastor, Bob Brashear, was added at this time along with Dorothy Dodge, a political scientist from Macalister College, and from Pittsburgh Mary Pardee, a former president of the national Presbyterian Women, joined the committee. The committee met three times a year; about the fourth year I proposed, as our thought was progressing toward a new policy, that we should create changes in the Church. I suggested the creation of a permanent peacemaking body within the Church. Dean Lewis suggested I bring in a paper on the subject, and at the next meeting I laid out a proposal for a program with staff. The question of finances was raised, and the argument led to finding a way to finance it. Dean Lewis thought through the possibility of a special offering, and at the next meeting he brought in a proposal. Our last meeting during advent of 1979 was frantic, as we had to bring all of our work together. Ed Long was drafting the background document from his earlier draft incorporating some paragraphs from me. Bob Brashear, I believe, was chairing the wording of the resolution in another room, and I was working with a small group on the recommendations for policy. Bob approached me about the title with questions about my remarks on Presbyterian vocation. I explained the Reformation concept of Beruf, which in the document became “Calling.” I insisted on “Peacemaking,” not peace, for the title to be consistent with Calvinist doctrines of sin and realist conceptions of a warring world. Still, the document was visionary, utilizing a broad conception of peace from Shalom, which called for a reorganization of human and American life. Ed Long

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often has said it was a harmony of pacifist and realist conceptions. It had a little too much optimism for me as a realist, but it represented the best of realist hunger for whatever peace could be achieved. One of my conceptions that I have regretted including was the Tillichian term of kairos. I was writing my book on Tillich at the time, and I produced a short paper on kairos for the discussion. It means several things in the New Testament, but we focused on the intersection of eternity and the temporal as Tillich had used it. It refers to a particularly significant time. We were thinking of the ending of the Vietnam War and the possibility of real peace breaking through. It was the Advent season, and kairos refers to the time for the birth of Jesus. Our committee was full of radical hopes for peace, the war was ending, and there were new possibilities. But of course 1980 was not a time of kairos. It wouldn’t be until 2012 that I had a formal opportunity to explain to a Presbyterian peacemaking group how the previous document had been mistaken in its use of kairos, a term pregnant with dangers of romanticism. Dorothy Dodge and I were appointed to the Roman Catholic– Reformed theological dialogue after our service on the Peacemaking Committee. It turned out to be a project of several years before we concluded our work with a small publication on church-state issues. The experience together resulted in Professor Dodge asking me to lecture in some of her political science courses in Macalister College. For a while we discussed a book on urban ethics focusing on the possible Lutheran influence in Minneapolis and Minnesota and the Presbyterian ethos of Pittsburgh, but other projects prevented us from developing this project. The peacemaking policy was adopted by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy and approved at the 1980 General Assembly, and the Peacemaking Program was created. The Church had expertise in international relations among its faculty and in some of its staff, but the decision was made to find an executive for the program who could relate well to congregations. The executive chosen had great interpersonal skills and a winsome warmth, but he had too much to learn about international relations and the program never lived up to its potential. It did publish significant biblical studies on peacemaking, and it nurtured an expensive program of itinerating international peacemakers among American churches. It lacked theological depth in its staff, and never quite managed a Calvinist perspective on international reality. Lay participation in the program by the more knowledgeable people in the Church was not encouraged. The output of many seminars and the advisory committee was mediocre. The director’s personal indiscretions were talked about in the Church, and despite the success of his winning almost three thousand congregations to adopt the commitment to peacemaking, he was dismissed and later tried by a Presbytery and disciplined. His successor knew about international relations as a former military officer. Under Ed Long’s tutoring, he learned about Christian ethics. He had to spend too much effort in pastoral counseling among his shaken staff to put his own imprint upon the program. We shared a program at Wooster College in which his military experience was very helpful. However, the program never recovered from the tenure of its first director.

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East Liberty Presbyterian Church During the period of working on peacemaking for the Church, I joined the East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. It was integrated and intellectual. The pastor, Charles Robshaw, preached literate sermons and used books from which I profited when I followed up his references. It was also a neighborhood church for me. Soon I became an elder and would serve on the Session for about sixteen years. I also served first on the educational commission and later on the various committees handling justice or peace issues, chairing them for a few years. As I became more involved serving the national Church and speaking out of town, it became harder to chair committees, and I fell back into participating in the justice and peace work locally as I could. As I had drafted an antiwar policy for the Community of Reconciliation on Vietnam (discussed above), I drafted a just-war argument against the invasion of Iraq in 1991, which became our local church policy for the East Liberty Church. Early in my first term on Session, the matter of sanctuary for refugees from the Central American wars was put to the Session by our committee on peacemaking. The debate at the Session was a little contentious. Tom Todd, a distinguished Pittsburgh lawyer, asked, “Elder Stone, are you recommending East Liberty Church support illegal actions?” I replied that since the issue had not yet been adjudicated before the courts, we were uncertain as to its legality. After more discussion Elder Todd voted to support the Church in establishing a sanctuary position. The Session supported the policy to provide funds and, if needed, sanctuary housing for fleeing refugees. A couple of elders resigned from the Session, and they were replaced, I believe, by the first women on Session. As the women elected had deep background in the Women’s Federation theological and biblical study, they were a great boon to the Session. Gradually the Session evolved toward a fair percentage of women serving as elders. Another controversial issue from the Peace and Justice Committee involved early micro-lending. The World Council of Churches had created an agency for micro-loans in the third world. After listening to the speaker of that agency, “Oikos,” speak at Shadyside Presbyterian Church, I polled the four members of the committee present whether they thought a half-million-dollar investment was appropriate for East Liberty. They agreed, and over a several-month period we developed an educational program and consulted with the local officers, particularly Mary Pardee, about a loan to the agency. Mary served on the national board of the agency. Arrangements were made for a joint Session and trustee meeting, though the Session had the authority. Only two trustees could not support the initiative, and so the loan was made from the endowment. The Centennial Fund Trustees had been very good about administering the loan. I had negotiated a very low interest return to the church from the agency over a breakfast meeting with officers of the corporation. After a few years the church decided to forgo the interest. At the time it was the largest loan or gift to the corporation, and “Oikos” provided publicity for the grant. The church had a longstanding commitment to justice ministry, and under successive pastors with lay leadership that tradition developed further. The Centennial Trustees, for example,

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regularly as a matter of course, support all of the decisions of the national church’s Mission Through Responsible Investment recommendations passed by the General Assembly of the church. We have made progress in race relations, and blacks are well represented in all the decision-making bodies of the church. The church’s reputation for ministry to the surrounding community protected the church building, a block-size Spanish Gothic architectural marvel, from being subject to the graffiti that has characterized other buildings in this urban shopping center. The gymnasium is used by the community. Programs for the poor included a men’s shelter, a food pantry, and the provisions of meals to those in need, in a kitchen and dining hall near the shelter. Peter Murray and I were responsible for introducing the Session action, which turned the Session room over to the homeless shelter, and its program expanded beyond the chapel converted to a dormitory. In the early 1970s, when I taught a five-week course on Martin Luther King Jr., I was surprised at the number of black members and visitors who showed up for the course. I wanted to conclude the course with a presentation by my friend Preston Williams, dean of the Harvard Divinity School. My request for him to be invited to preach was rebuffed by the layman heading up the worship committee. He said we had one of those earlier in the year. He meant we had a black speaker from the mission field earlier. Being new to the church, I accepted the gentler route of persuasion rather than confrontation. Preston had grown up near the church, but his Presbyterian membership, as that of his family, was in the Grace Memorial Presbyterian Church. It was a predominantly African American church on the Hill, which played a leadership role in humanizing race relations in the city. Grace had provided the African American members for the Community of Reconciliation, the integrated church to which I had earlier belonged. The recent membership of African Americans at East Liberty has climbed to over 150 of our 800 members. For several years an organization named Zipporah’s Daughters led by Joyce Durden and Harjie Likins enriched the congregation with a large constituency of African American mothers from the poorer part of the city. The number of Presbyterian blacks in the city of Pittsburgh is not high, and the church still is a long way from representing proportionately the racial community living and shopping around the church. The church has provided leadership for the East Liberty Development Corporation. The Reverend Ms. Patrice Searcy, an associate minister at East Liberty, and I have served as chairs of this organization. Several church members, including me, have also worked for, served on the board of, and volunteered for the local ecumenical welfare organization, the East End Cooperative Ministry (EECM). Several of the EECM’s ministries have been located in the church, and the church annually provides financial support for the ministry. I served on the strategy committee when we created the East End Cooperative Ministry. The Jesuit director’s presentation of the need for a “Souper Bowl” feeding program was persuasive, and that has up to today been located in East

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Liberty Presbyterian Church. Seminarians, particularly Burt Campbell, became involved, and for years the students played a formative role in the organization. Burt, I believe, was the inspiration for establishing the breakfast program for high school students in the seminary cafeteria. At one time, my daughter, Patricia, was working in the youth department between returning from the Peace Corps and going to graduate school in California. One of the more moving scenes in our church was the couple of hundred kids joining in modern worship services in the social hall of the church during the summer camp. It would bring tears to the eyes of all but the most hardened cynics.

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Between Jerusalem and Bethlehem International flights to Israel land in the impressive gateway airport of Tel Aviv. Americans visiting Israel lately are awed by the beautiful hallways, lounges, and security arrangements. It was less spectacular in 1980, but even then it outshone our American airports. Exiting the airport in the dark, one is directed to the bank of Jerusalem-bound taxis. Usually they fill up with a variety of passengers before departing for the dark journey up the hills to Jerusalem. After ascending the hills past a few monuments to war, we stopped at a small hotel in Jerusalem to deliver some passengers. A suitcase standing outside the hotel caught my attention. Why was it unattended? Was it a bomb? My taxi proceeded beyond Jerusalem to the walled enclosures of Tantur midway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. I arrived about the time of breakfast. The walls housed the Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Study administered by Notre Dame University. I knew David Burrell of the Theology Department was serving as rector, but I did not know which other scholars would be in residence. Four of us became close friends. Bob Morgan, a professor of New Testament from Oxford; Calvin Roetzel, also New Testament, from Macalester College; and Magdalena Bydekarken, a German pastor working on Jewish-Christian relations, spent a lot of time together. Our shared Protestantism bound us together in a Roman Catholic institution. My time there was a little shorter than the others, as I had a one-term sabbatical from our three-term curriculum. The Institute enlisted us in a short seminar on the Ten Commandments led by a German scholar from Munich, and we each contributed a paper to an interdisciplinary seminar as well. Additionally, the institute organized significant archaeological tours for us led by outstanding biblical scholars in residence in Jerusalem. I also spent hours in the library working on biblical scholarship relearning my rusty Hebrew and Greek from seminary. Immediately outside Tantur’s walls were the ruins of a Roman road, and just beyond the road were fields of olive trees. The dusty half-hour walk to Bethlehem took me by the Israeli checkpoint at Rachel’s tomb. Western visitors and cars with Israeli license plates were not hassled. Erratically, it would become a difficult crossing for residents of the West Bank. The market in Bethlehem became the regular shopping place for the few needs not supplied by the Ecumenical Institute. Rachel’s tomb was usually closed and opened only to organized tours from Jerusalem. In the 1980s the tourist trade supported the wood-carving industry beside the road ascending into Bethlehem. The Church of the Nativity was the goal of my first walk into Bethlehem. Later the institute would organize a tour of the site. But first I saw it on my own. Constantine’s Christian mother, Helena, chose caves traditionally associated with the birth of Jesus for the construction of the first Church of the Nativity. The floors of her church are still visible through huge trapdoors in the floor of the contemporary church. Some of the interior masonry pillars also preserve the original pillars of the basilica.

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After the original basilica was destroyed in 529, it was rebuilt on a grander scale by the Emperor Justinian. Later it was restored by the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their kings were crowned in the basilica carrying the hoped-for authority of Jesus. The original crusaders had come at the bequest of the Byzantine heir to the Roman throne to counter the Muslim invasions of the Christian empire. Their Jerusalem Kingdom survived until the Europeans no longer sufficiently reinforced it and the Kurdish leader Saladin united the Arab forces against it. Sometimes in faith I could pray well at the Silver Star in the cave grotto of the birth site of Jesus. Other times my Protestant modernistic sense snuffed any devotion amid the tourism and denied me any inspiration. The caves were not on the summit of the Bethlehem hill. But they and their covering basilica were high. From the roof of the church one could look a few miles across the valley to the hill known as the Herodian. Arabs I knew from Tantur had played on the slopes of the mound as children. Recent excavations had begun to reveal the buried palace of Herod on the mound’s summit. To the west were fields of scattered rocks that my host priest assured me were the fields of the shepherds spoken to by the angels. Other sites called “The Milk Grotto” or “King David’s Well” aroused my interest not at all. My colleague Calvin Roetzel, in the spirit of Rudolf Bultmann, reinforced my skeptical attitudes to various other caves marked as holy spots. To a Protestant it seemed that Franciscans had built a church or a monastery on every site they could. Jerusalem was more open in 1980 than in the twenty-first century. I regularly read a morning paper and smoked a water pipe over coffee in the Arab Quarter. Conversations were frequent, and I had no fear. A favorite exercise was to walk around the city on the walls from the Ottoman Empire. Occasionally there was an official at an entrance collecting tolls. Other times the access was free. Arabs worked relatively freely in Jerusalem and beyond in Israel. The Temple Mount’s many gates were open to visitors. My love for Jerusalem is grounded in these earlier, freer experiences. If one got lost in the narrow warren of old streets, someone would direct you to your destination. It was quite fun to have the time to wander, even if lost, and eventually find your way to a landmark. I usually jumped off the bus and entered the Old City by way of the Jaffa Gate. The pedestrian entrance has a dogleg to slow down any hostile entry. The road now passes through a breach in the wall caused by Wilhelm II’s need for a formal entry in 1898. Tillich’s father made the trip with the emperor to dedicate German institutions in the city. This gate by Suleyman the Magnificent contains the graves of his architects, who were executed for excluding a monastery from within the city’s walls. The Damascus Gate is the more magnificent gate, and representatives of all of Jerusalem can be found scurrying through it. The origins of the gate date to at least the Romans, whose inscription is found there in the foundation.

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Entry through the Jaffa Gate brought me to the Christian Quarter. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built by Constantine on the site his mother determined to be the location of Golgotha and the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. That church was destroyed in 1009 after being preserved by Muslims for over three centuries. Decades later it was rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor and then remodeled again by the Crusaders. Further fires and earthquakes resulted in further remodeling. All of the rebuilding and competing ecclesiastical claims have left the church unattractive and difficult to navigate. Experience, a guide, or a book can make it mostly decipherable. For over seventeen centuries it has been a place of Christian pilgrimage and acts of reverence. The eleventh through the fourteenth Stations of the Cross are here, as well as the traditional slab of rock on which the body of Jesus was laid. The grave of Jesus and the site of Golgotha can awaken awesome feelings among Christians, particularly when the church is not overcrowded with the faithful and the tourists. For me the Garden Tomb’s quiet near the rock overlooking the bus terminal and appearing as the face of a skull is a more reverential spot. The Garden is maintained by English Protestants, and it exhibits their cleanliness and orderliness in their disputed holy site. The crush of the Holy Sepulcher Church has its history, but for Protestants it may be easier to pray in the Garden. The museums, churches, archaeological sites, and people of Jerusalem would require a lifetime to understand. The horror recorded in Yad Vashem of the Holocaust explains part of the present. Jewish longing for a homeland and for Jerusalem required the backing of the colonial powers and the United States for fulfillment. Beyond earlier dreams of a return, Jewish fear of persecution in Europe, Africa, and Asia impelled their migration here. The guilt of European powers and the United States encouraged it. The determination of the Jews in 1948 occasioned it. The Holocaust and the 1948 war founded Israel in war. Fear and the overcoming of it require human virtue too little in evidence. In 1980 I would meet four-person Israeli patrols in Bethlehem and greet them with “Shalom,” and they would reply in kind. There were conflicts and Israel was in control, but there was a spirit of tolerance. The patience extended to overlooking University of Bethlehem protests, organizations, and displays against the occupation. Rock throwing would bring quick Israeli retaliation. The conflicts of the two Intifadas were in the future, along with the military oppression of daily life in the West Bank. In my context of a mild pro-Zionist Christian persuasion, I presented a paper on the pro-Zionism of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich in the Ecumenical Seminar of the Institute. An Arab Christian found it too negligent of the claims of the Arabs to their ancestral lands. The colonization of Palestine by persecuted Jews was still colonialism. When the essay was published first in the Tantur Yearbook of 1980–1981, Ursula Niebuhr reminded me of some of Niebuhr’s early pro-Zionism, of which I was unaware. I think Ursula’s experience at Tantur and her friendship with the mayor of Jerusalem, and other connections with the new Israel, encouraged her in a stronger Zionism than Reinhold held. She wrote me she would like to live in Jerusalem a few years later. Randy, as a young boy, asked me why Mrs. Niebuhr and I argued so much. Our disagreements were over the degree of U.S. support for Israel.

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David Burell, the rector, was engaged in his own research on the commonalities of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The staff of the Institute was Christian Arabs from Bethlehem. The political power was Israeli, and we were in a Christian institution on the border between Jews and Arabs, and firing could sometimes be heard in times of tension. My own sense of the three faiths’ common heritage of a trust in a universal dynamic order that is beneficent to humanity could underlay emerging consensus. The three have all evolved from pre-Jewish traditions regarding Abraham in the conflicted Middle East. Christianity outgrew its Hebrew culture in a Hellenistic world, and Islam grew out of the monotheism of both Jewish and Christian origins. Our histories have commonalities and differences. Christianity grew toward maturity in Hellenistic culture, whereas Islam absorbed and destroyed Hellenistic culture. All three religions have violent and peaceful trajectories. Religions have all evolved. The conscious development of the religious trajectories for peace is needed for coexistence. Historical details can be relatively appreciated, but they do not need to be disputed. Throughout the Holy Land, sites are of significance to multiple religions. In the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount is a rock that was available for all to see in 1980. The rock is said to be the site of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, prefiguring the sacrifice of God in Christ. It is also the rock of ascent to Heaven by Mohammed in Muslim tradition. The Mount itself has also held the Jewish Temple, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque was converted from a Christian church with crusader additions. The holy sites of three faiths mingle on the Temple Mount and throughout Jerusalem. I slept on the ground near St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, thankful for Muslim protection. The guardianship, according to inscriptions in the museum, goes back to Mohammed’s promise of protection to the monks. The monastery, perhaps the oldest in the world, sits in the shadow of Mt. Sinai, traditional origin of the Ten Commandments. Delivered by Moses, they are still memorized by Christian youth for confirmation. Traditionally the mountain also sheltered Elijah and Mohammed. Here Elijah heard a still, small voice instructing him to overthrow two northern kingdoms. After my early morning descent from Mount Sinai, I learned Ronald Reagan had won the presidency and Republicans had taken the Senate majority. Later, a few friends at Tantur told me they had expected me to remain on the mountain, given the news. The land tour of the Sinai for sixteen Europeans and me, run by a kibbutz, drove through the desert in an army half-track. The young Israeli guides provided sophisticated interpretations of ancient huts, cemeteries, copper mines, and the natural surroundings. Bedouin girls would cover their mouths with their hands as we passed by, and an occasional Bedouin boy on a camel would join our party around mealtime. A passing camel caravan in the desert turned out to be tourists like ourselves. Sleeping in the open desert sky reminded me of sleeping outside in New Mexico as a youth at the work camp with the Navajo. The stars in the desert sky are an awesome, moving scene underlying all three of these Middle Eastern religions. We spent the last afternoon swimming in the Gulf of Aqaba’s Blue Lagoon. After snorkeling around the shallows of the reef, I dived for depth. There behind the Volkswagen-size opening of a cave was the huge side of a beast with black spots on

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gray rising and falling with its breath. Neither the head nor the tail was visible. In panic and fluttering, I struggled to the surface. The guide’s book proved the monstrosity to be a whale shark. It is the largest of the shark family, and the book explained there is no record of attacks on humans by the whale shark in the Gulf. Other day trips would take the group to Dan, the ruins of Samaria, Jericho, Megiddo, Masada, Beersheba, the caves of Qumran, Nazareth, and the Sea of Galilee. The guides provided by the Institute were famous scholars, and our own professors of Bible were helpful as well. For me the biblical place names became memories that I could visualize. Bible study moved from the analytic to a very personal history. However, by the end of my months in Israel and the occupied territories the places were more vivid in my mind than the people who dwelt there. The biblical characters of myth and history were more real than the Palestinians or the contemporary Israelis. I still had much to learn. I left as the winter winds and rain commenced, much as I had left Istanbul two years previously as the season turned cool. Several of the friendships from Tantur would endure. Bob Morgan and I remained in touch the longest, as we would visit in Oxford and he would invite me over to a university lectureship. Calvin Roetzel loaned my family his cabin on Lake Superior for a family stopover on our canoe trip to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Canada. We would meet for a drink or breakfast at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature meetings. Other meetings in England would keep us four in contact over the years.

RETURN TO OXFORD Bob Morgan invited me to visit Oxford as university lecturer in 1981. The seminary rearranged my teaching schedule in minor ways so that I could be in England on November 5–23. I gave Bob a rather extensive list of topics on which I was speaking outside the seminary: issues relating to peacemaking, nuclear weapons, energy ethics, Martin Luther King Jr. as theologian and social theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr’s social thought, human rights, economic issues, Paul Tillich’s social thought, Nicaragua and liberation theology, or any topic in the general area of American Christian social thought. He asked me to speak on Paul Tillich’s social thought, as my new book on the subject had just been published. He also made arrangements for a lectureship in the University of Lancaster as a guest of John Powell. The schedule was arranged so that I preached in Trinity Chapel on November 8, traveled to Lancaster by train on the 9th, lectured in Lancaster on the 10th, and returned to Trinity the next day. I spoke to Trevor Williams’s Tillich class on the 12th, the university lecture with John Macquarrie presiding was on the 13th, and the next day concluded with a lecture at St. John’s College. All of my teaching was on the subjects of Tillich on society in light of my new book. The hospitality of Trinity’s guest room and the Lancaster Gate Hotel were superb. It happened that Archbishop Michael Ramsey had been preaching in Oxford on the same day as my sermon. The next day, Monday, I thought I saw him board the train north from Oxford at the same time I did. Seeing him clearly in the Manchester train station

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cafeteria, I asked to join him for tea. We had a delightful conversation recalling our past conversation fifteen years before in Oxford and sharing memories of Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr. The second unexpected pleasure was being able to take in the boxing match between Oxford University and a combined team from Kent University and the H. S. S. Collingwood. The matches were held in the new Ifley Road gymnasium, but the fine facilities could not outshine the former matches in the old Town Hall of Oxford, where the noise of the crowd and the bouts rang around the rafters of the old building and the stomping of the crowd boomed through the dressing rooms of the fighters below the stage. I spent a couple more days in Oxford reading in the libraries and dining. Then I spent a week walking the cliffs and moors in Devon and Cornwall before returning to Pittsburgh. I wrote up the visit for the seminary’s Panorama: “Oxford Revisited” Young undergraduates at Trinity College, Oxford, ask the visiting American professor, who was a student there a decade and a half ago, if the college has changed. He replies that by American standards it has changed very little: “Change in Oxford is noted by centuries and not by decades.” The swans still swim with the mallard ducks in the beautiful streams that meander through the University parks. Young lovers still walk hand in hand as do older couples as they have for centuries. The rituals of sociality and distance that govern university life are still in force. In the guest room of Trinity College, the picture of William Pitt reminds one from Pittsburgh that the battles fought at Three Rivers two centuries ago were prefigured in the games on the University fields. The prayer book used in the Trinity Chapel still has prayers for King George in print, though in one copy his name has been scratched out and Queen Victoria penciled in its place. A major change has occurred at the University, though it is not perceptible to undergraduates for whom it is now normal. Women students are present in all the colleges except one. They recognized feminist theology as distinctively receiving its major expression in America, and they ask searchingly about it. However, change has come to the country. The oil from the North Sea permits the country from feeling fully the consequences of its loss of empire and markets. The economy, however, holds little immediate promise of recovery. The politics is thrown into disarray by the economic malaise which few of the politicians are intellectually or emotionally prepared to understand. The new party the liberal-socialist alliance called the Social Democratic party runs ahead in the pools of the rapidly deteriorating Labour Party, while the ineffective Conservative Party continues to govern. Not only economy, but questions of defense plague the decision makers as a much needed inquiry into a role for Britain in the modern world remains unsolved. The Social Democratic party may be able

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to articulate such a role, but so far its efforts are spent recruiting dissident Labour members of Parliament rather than in announcing a program. In Oxford and London’s Soho the pubs are filled, but in my brief observations of worship and athletics around Oxford, I found less enthusiasm than before. In response to lectures on North American Christian social thought, the British were amazed to perceive the continuing or over-growing strength in religion as a social force in the United States. A sense of defeatism pervades their religious world and basically their academics do not work on its social connections. There is a general repugnance, however, with the perceived alliance in the United States between evangelical religion and the militaristic stand of the Reagan administration. Having lived with Prime Minister Thatcher’s “supply side” economics as the economy declined, they expect little dynamism from the Stockman-Reagan experiments with the American economy. Oxford, however, is an hour away from London and its quiet is only slightly disturbed by the problems of racism, immigration, nuclear weapons, and economic malaise that divide their body politic. The North Ireland issue threatens to explode into more violent conflict. It was an issue when I was in Oxford as a student in 1965–66 more important than Vietnam. More and more British are saying that to answer that issue, they’ll have to pull out the British army and permit the struggle to find a solution locally. Probably, though, the present Conservative government will just continue to muddle on with the struggle ebbing and waning. Meanwhile, Britain continues to decline, but still there could be no pleasanter place to study or to lecture in the English-speaking world. Its graciousness and wit, high respect for verbal competence, tolerance of the eccentric and high standards incarnated in its teachers and scholars, guarantees: “There’ll always be an Oxford.” The phrase was originally overheard when a grandmother pointing out the ravens at the Tower of London told her grandson: “As long as the ravens are at the Tower, there’ll always be an England.” My walks around the city reminded me that it, too, was a city that had been bordered by two rivers. I had changed since my student days; service in the seminary had deepened the religious and Christian churchmanship of my personality, and in several ways I was less torn by the two rivers of philosophy and theology. My philosophy was being used to deepen the Church’s relevance to the social issues of the contemporary world.

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Church and Society The General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (GA) in 1980 elected me to membership in its class of 1983 for the Advisory Council for Church and Society. I had no idea at the time as to the importance this role would have for my vocation. Other members of the class of 1983 were Bob Brashear from Tulsa, Pat Roach from Dayton, and Dick Symes from Palo Alto. Bill Raby, an accountant, served as the chair of the council. He was joined on the executive committee by Charles White, Bobbi Wells Hargleroad, Braxton Epps, and Dana Wilbanks. The twelve elected members were half clergy and half laity representing geographic diversity. They were advised in meetings by GA staff, particularly Dean Lewis, the coordinator of the council, and Robert Smylie, advisor in international relations. The council was responsible for developing polices on social relations to present to the General Assembly. GA policies governed the internal Church life, and they were recommended to the membership of the Church for study and advice. The council met three times a year and worked through large committees or task forces during the year. The subgroups would enlist other experts or persons representative of affected groups to develop recommendations for the council, which was designed to bring messages of a prophetic quality to the General Assembly. It was not to be restrained by programmatic responsibilities, but it was intended to be free to think independently about the theological implications of social policy. In 1980 the council brought to the GA, in addition to the peacemaking report, work on genetic research, energy, workers’ conflicts in California, and migration. The management of so many tasks was typical of the council and the GA, and often reports were delayed, resources strengthened, and extra time allocated so that conclusive reports could be made to the GA. During my first year the council met at Macalester College, the Seaman’s Institute in Manhattan, and in Krisheim, Philadelphia. The council was committed to economy with relatively cheap lodgings. The Macalester meeting in June of 1980 was remembered for months for its lack of air conditioning and the extreme heat, making sleep hard to come by. Earlier, Dean Lewis had requested my counsel for a writer on energy policy. I recommended Bob Stivers, whose first book was relevant to the subject. Bob and I took the train from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia past Three Mile Island. The news of the nuclear threat from the Island guided the adoption of the background paper and energy recommendations that steered future hopes away from nuclear power. Other major reports to the GA in 1981 were on Mexican immigration and South African apartheid. Minor reports were on issues around plant relocation, genetic research, and continuing work on abortion. The proposed merger with the Presbyterian Church in the United States necessitated consultations on social policy with that denomination. The council’s concern was that the merger not thwart the social witness of the two denominations while all of the

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institutional and financial implications were being thrashed out. Consequently, I started the process of commuting to Atlanta and Columbia Theological Seminary to negotiate the work of the two merging denominations’ social issues. From these meetings, longterm partnerships developed with Belle Miller McMaster and Jorge Lara-Braud in the joint social witness work. Additionally, I was appointed to serve as the liaison with the Peacemaking Advisory Committee. My appointment was not welcomed by the new coordinator of the committee, Richard Kilmer. I was urged not to attend their meeting near Kansas City. At the recommendation of council members and Dean Lewis, I went out to Kansas City anyway. I was prepared to “sit in” if necessary and to spend the night under the stars if accommodations were not available at their rural retreat center. In the end, I was welcomed, regretfully, as an observer.

GHOST RANCH In the summer, the council met at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. The ranch would become a favorite site for summer teaching, and I would visit it almost every other summer for three decades. It became a special place for my children and almost a pilgrimage site for the family. The twenty-one-thousand-acre ranch surrounded by red cliffs in the valley of the “Shining Stones” is as beautiful as any site in New Mexico. The ranch was a gift to the Church by Arthur Pack, who had run a dude ranch there. Its first manager was the country preacher Jim Hall. His cowboy stories at Monday’s orientation and western wisdom around his Thursday-night campfires were worth the drive from Pittsburgh to New Mexico in themselves. The children and I quickly learned to climb the mesas, and we would sometimes lead hikes up nearby Pedernal Mountain. Bob Brashear and David Alger led the young Randy on a different route of ascent of Kitchen Mesa, which I was never able to locate. I led a few guests up the daunting slopes of Orphan Mesa. I taught nine courses there between the years of 1980 and my last visit in 2012. Often I taught with other professors. Various courses were “Reformed Faith and Politics,” “Resistance to Militarism” with Dorothe Soelle, “Justice and Social Action” with Bob Chesnut, “Liberation Theology and Christian Realism” with Gonzalo Castillo, “Fiftieth Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb” with Glen Stassen and Ed Teller, and an “Introduction to Islam” with my brother Alan. There was also a three-year seminar on “Reformed Faith and Economics,” out of which Bob Stivers edited the book Reformed Faith and Economics. Additionally, I took at least six courses there, including two years of “Archaeology of the Southwest.” So various members of our family and I were there about every other year. The ranch sits astride the long highway from Espanola to Farmington, where I had my first mission work at the Methodist Navajo Mission. The land had over the centuries been host to Apaches and other wandering bands of Native Americans. By this time in my tenure at Pittsburgh, my office was becoming something of a consulting service to many different Christian social causes. This often involved speaking at churches or universities that were open to peace-related causes. Some

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settings, like the First Presbyterian Churches of Monongahela, Greensburg, and Puckety, Pennsylvania, were not specialized audiences, and the work was pretty much sermons addressed to the grass roots. I usually emphasized biblical themes of peacemaking and related them to the military buildup of the present. An event like the seminar at Duquesne University was shared with national representatives from the government and academia, and was put into more academic formal language. The speech at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia focused on the vocational, or themes of the Presbyterian call to peacemaking. I would relate my own experiences in the Soviet Union to themes of the Republican administration’s arms buildup and talk about my visits with children in Russia. I was pretty frank about my own neighbors working in the arms industry and the particular role of Pittsburgh in threatening those Russian children. In an editorial in The Presbyterian Outlook, I commented on the naming of an attack submarine “U.S.S. Pittsburgh” a couple of years later: Workers at all of our plants need our sympathy and our action. Great companies like Westinghouse need better opportunities than the building of more weapons in an over-armed world. There is no defense against nuclear war and the offense we are building will destroy us by its destruction of whatever country feels our nuclear wrath. More nuclear-armed submarines make no sense economically or in terms of security. Pittsburgh needs more attention from the church and from the government than it is receiving. The macabre rhetoric of naming a submarine for this suffering city must be rejected and replaced by benign attention by the government and by the church. Some of these concerns were spoken to at the Pittsburgh City Council on meetings on the defense of Pittsburgh. The City Council responded by declaring no nuclear defense of the city was possible and that they would not support proposed plans to prepare the city for a nuclear holocaust. My closest friend at my church was a Westinghouse engineer, our baby sitter’s father fueled aircraft carriers for Westinghouse, and the president of the seminary board of directors had been the CEO of Westinghouse, so these sorts of speeches and writings led to interesting dialogue within the city and my circles. A memo I wrote to Warren Martin, the personnel manager of the seminary, on March 9, 1981, reporting on the events of 1980–1981 reflect in a self-serving manner the events of 1980. The memo was for the purpose of professional review at the seminary. Annual Report on 1980 The glory and danger of being a teacher of Christian Social Ethics in a seminary is that your work forces you to deal with many subjects while the need is for research in depth into the connections between Christian faith and social problems. The year 1980 was a full one which exhibits the joys and danger of spreading yourself thin while trying to plunge into the depths of Christian faith.

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For example, reports on two issues on which I had spent months were adopted. The task force on energy issues for the Christian Associates of Southwestern Pennsylvania finished its work. I had written the theological ethics section of the report which after some amendments was adopted. The task force recommended the creation of a staff position as well as the adoption of its report on policy. . . . I was able to transfer the experience of working locally on these issues to the General Assembly’s task force on energy. This eventually required a trip to Atlanta to negotiate the differences between the UPCUSA and the PCUS into a common document which will go to both General Assemblies in Houston. Hopefully the church will have a policy on the energy crisis which will provide some light on the relationship of faith to social policy regarding energy. This week I’ll be speaking to a Methodist gathering on these issues. So the movement from local to national to local work on this issue is satisfying. More fulfilling than the result on energy was the culmination of five years’ work in the General Assembly’s adoption of the report “Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling.” In this adoption of policy we got not only a statement but a program of education and action for our church, staff and a budget. This report and program reached deep into the concerns of Presbyterians for peace, and I think will have an enriching effect on Presbyterian thinking about issues of peace and war in these crisis-laden times. . . . My teaching at the Seminary was divided among courses in moral issues in international relations, introduction to ethics, and a continuing education course for ministers in contemporary ethical thinking. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan forced the course in moral issues in international politics to shift its focus to the new cold war issues. The introduction to ethics course traced the major moral problems through the history of the church teaching and action. The continuing education course was very enjoyable as ministers raised penetrating questions for the professor from their own practice of ministry. . . . In some ways the highlight of the year was the eight weeks I spent at the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Study in Jerusalem. It is a center for research for scholars from around the world. The international dialogue of the Institute is enriched by weekend trips exploring Israel from Dan to Beersheba; usually they are led by outstanding archaeologists. The center is beautifully situated in modern buildings between the new suburban settlement of Jerusalem, Gilo, and the ancient Arab village of Beit Jala. Jerusalem is visible from one side and Bethlehem from the other side through the olive trees. In my days in the library I engaged in two study projects. I read in the documents of church history and pondered the question whether I should try to write a new history of Christian social ethics. I decided the project, though it needs to be done, is too great for my resources; probably it will have to be done by a team of writers. I also read several books on the

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search for the historical Jesus and tried to determine what we could be sure were the actual historical expressions of Jesus on ethical issues. The methodological problems are overwhelming, and Albert Schweitzer was probably correct. We will know him best as we pick up the task he has asked of us to fulfill in our time. Schweitzer concluded his The Quest for the Historical Jesus with a confession that he comes to us “as of old, by the lake side . . . and speaks to us the same word ‘Follow thou me.’” For me it was by the Sea of Galilee at night that the spirit of Jesus was most real. The churches on various sites where Jesus supposedly acted out his life obscured Jesus for me, but by Galilee in the quiet of the night I could commune with the spirit that walked beside the waters. . . . I learned about the results of our election when I came down from Mt. Sinai. Even though I received no new commandments to add to the ten while I was on Mt. Sinai, it is good for Christian ethicists to climb the granite of that mountain associated with Moses, and to feel the awesome power of that desert place where monks have gathered for centuries. Truly God is there. My kind of year was 1980—teaching, travel, research, publication. I hope God will be so good to me this year.

CHURCH AND REAGAN IN TENSION The thinking of the Council on Social Policy was derived from theological ethics grounded in interpretations of scripture and a reading of the contemporary times by the intellectual community. This often put the council at odds with the administration in power. This was particularly true of the break of the Reagan administration with the policies of the Carter administration. The election of Ronald Reagan steered the country away from the promises of peace raised for the Church in its “Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling.” There was to be no peace dividend as the president sought to build a six-hundred-ship navy and to strengthen the U.S. domination in nuclear arms. The army’s chief of chaplains, Kermit Johnson, a Presbyterian minister, resigned his post, believing that policy was shifting from nuclear deterrence to preparing to fight the last war. But the new peacemaking program remained rather anemic. It provided materials for study, peacemaking mission trips abroad, seminars and programs, and visits of international peace activists to the United States, but it remained rather timid in a time of crisis. The Reagan revolution was opposed by several initiatives of the council. Budget cuts in services to the poor were studied and opposed. The administration’s wars in Central America were criticized. Resolutions for arms limitations and supporting the reduction of nuclear weapons were passed. The studies on genetic research, abortion, and human quality of life produced extended controversy, and the studies were continued. Resolutions for safety in the workplace and for support for the UN Commission on the Law of the Sea were passed in 1984. The 1983 resolution against Israel’s invasion favored curtailing arms aid to Israel. The Church called for a cease fire in Lebanon, aid

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in peace negotiations, and international aid for the relief and reconstruction of Lebanon. The resolution called for recognition of the full sovereignty of Israel according to UN Resolution 242. It urged active seeking of full statehood for the Palestinians.

MILITARY-RELATED INVESTMENT The initiative of 1980 to make peacemaking a priority of the Presbyterian Church bore fruit in 1982 in investment policy. After years of counseling corporations and shareholder resolutions, the Church decided not to invest in corporations that: 1. are among the leading ten military contracts; 2. are dependent on military contracts for more than 25 percent of their sales; 3. make the key nuclear components of nuclear warheads. Dana Wilbanks wrote the theological and ethical reflections undergirding the new policy. The corporations immediately affected were: • McDonnell Douglas • United Technologies • General Dynamics • Boeing • Lockheed Martin • Hughes Aircraft • Raytheon • Northrop Grumman • Chrysler Other corporations were excluded from investment by criterion (b). Additional companies dropped from Church investment for manufacturing key nuclear weapons components were: • Goodyear • DuPont • Union Carbide • Rockwell • Monsanto

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The exclusion-from-investment list would change as corporate policies changed. So the list needed to be revised for each General Assembly by recommendations by the Mission Committee for Responsible Investment. The policy did not reject all military production, but militarization tendencies within the society. It came close to “nuclear pacifism,” but it did not quite say so.

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Reformed Faith and Politics I was asked to head up a small committee of John Mulder, president of Louisville Seminary; James Smylie, professor from Union Presbyterian Seminary; and Melicent Honeycott of the Council of Theology and Culture of the Presbyterian Church U.S. to develop a study book and a process for analyzing the rise of the religious right and our own political responsibilities as Presbyterians U.S. The committee met twice, once in Washington, D.C., to hear testimony from experts like John C. Bennett and Jim Wallis of Sojourners. We planned, and I taught a course at Ghost Ranch on “Reformed Faith and Politics” for two summers. In the second course, class members reviewed possible essays for the book for their appropriateness and helpfulness for church members. The book of essays covered under the title of Reformed Faith and Politics: church and state issues, religious liberty, extreme political movements, right-wing politics, liberation theology, the Bible and politics, and Presbyterians and politics. I wrote a long introduction on religion and political responsibility. About the time the book was edited, Dean Lewis informed me that I needed to write the resolution for the GA in 1983. I drafted the resolution on reformed faith and politics utilizing the book’s introduction and the learning from the two-year project. The council, and later the GA, passed the resolution. The resolution still remains the fundamental Presbyterian policy on the subject. It represents my most significant contribution to Presbyterian theological ethics. This work on faith and politics was guided by a small group without involving the expense and hassle of a large task force. I had recommended this model of work to Dean Lewis after some frustration with the cumbersome work of large-group meetings for a couple of years in various sites. Still, the project listened to experts, checked its work with groups at Ghost Ranch, and answered to two elected bodies. The book, which was distributed to all commissioners at the GA in 1983, reflected the liberal Christian realism that characterized the council at the time. It accomplished another goal when it was adopted as a textbook in seminaries and colleges as a contribution from the council to higher learning in the country. The book and resolution urged political participation on the basis of ones’ ultimate convictions. However, politics was not a matter of salvation. Rather, it regulated or decided “Who gets what?” It was important, but not ultimate. One could experience salvation in a bad political economy. No political economy could be perfect, for all are subject to the conflicts of human egos, which were both beneficent and sinful. Religion has its own role of providing meaning to human life. It should not surrender its essence of encouraging morality, philosophy, ritual, community, and worship to the vagaries of politics. Reformed faith set its trajectory against idolatry, whether in politics or religion. The union of politics and faith could produce enthusiasm, but it is a mistake. Making politics sacred was a common human phenomenon, but it needed to be resisted. Neither the religious enthusiasm of American right-wing politics nor liberation theology was the best approach for Reformed Christians who respected both religion and politics and also distinguished between them and related one to the other. The relationship

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worked through social ethics and the norms grounded in the best values of the society. In America these values were compassionate order and justice expressed in terms of maximum human welfare grounded in liberty and equality. This basic position has remained the policy for the denomination into the present.

SENATE RECEPTION I worked out a contract with Jed Lyons for the book to be published in bulk by the University Press of America. Copies would be sold for years by the Presbyterian Publishing House at $2.50 and by the University Press at market price while the copies for GA commissioners were provided gratis for the work of the Assembly. Lyons worked with Senator David Pryor and me to introduce the book in the Senator Mansfield Room of the Senate. Senator Pryor’s brother was a Presbyterian minister. The senator understood very well the position of the Church as being to engage in moral issues in politics without collapsing Church thinking into politics or allowing politics to dominate the Church. He had over the years been particularly thankful for the Church’s commitment to peacemaking and support for the limitations of armaments. Six senators and a few congressmen attended, and I outlined the position of the book on faith communities seeking political engagement but refusing to overstep the traditional separation of church and state. The Church lobbied, and educational groups from the mainline denominations also attended. My parents and fiancée came, providing a nice occasion. I would work with Jed Lyons and his publishing house over the years, serving for a while as an advisory board member and a reviewer of manuscripts. This led to future publications of Church projects by the house and to my recommendations for publishing some critiques by feminists. At least three important feminist dissertations were published by the house; two of them became standard feminist critiques of the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. Through my recommendation June Bingham’s Courage to Change on Reinhold Niebuhr was reissued. The house also published some of my books through its partner houses and republished works I wanted to keep in print. The joint publishing ventures by the social policy wing of the Church and the University Press of America bore fruit in making Church social thinking available for university use as well as for its previous clientele within the Church. The Presbyterian Church’s social policy statements were usually written for college-educated readers, but this attempt formalized that understanding, and the book was used in some universities.

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Rome and Budapest In 1982, the GA passed a major resolution calling for reexamination of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union in the spirit of the 1967 Confession of Reconciliation. Of personal interest to me was the commendation of the Peacemaking Program for its planned, extended visit of United Presbyterians to the Soviet Union in the fall of 1982. I had not returned to the Soviet Union in a decade. I applied for the trip. Speaking a little Russian, having been a college student of Russian history, research in Russian liturgy in seminary, and a PhD in religion and international relations, I expected to be accepted. But my liaison role from the Advisory Council to the Peacemaking Program was not respected. Richard Kilmer chose my very able teaching assistant at the seminary and excluded me. As Dean Lewis thought the council needed increased expertise on Russia and Eastern Europe, he found funds to subsidize my late-summer, early-fall travels to Eastern Europe and the USSR. I chose to visit Eastern Europe through Rome. The Roman Catholic Church’s interests and contacts in Eastern Europe were superior to our American sources. I also arranged contacts with Reformed Christians in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They invited me to preach in their churches. I also arranged contacts for visits and talks with the Christian Peace Conference headquartered in Prague. My letter of inquiry to the Vatican was answered by a priest who had been a student of mine at Union Theological Seminary in 1971 when I commuted there to teach the course on “Moral Issues in International Politics.” He had been pursuing his degree at Fordham and came to Union under their exchange program. My reception in Rome by the Vatican was very generous. They put me up in the American College overlooking Vatican City and arranged appointments for me with all of the cardinals and officials I wanted to visit. For three days I immersed myself in the international relations of the Vatican with my students’ help. Often they knew so much more than I did about Eastern Europe’s church-state and foreign policy issues that I seemed naïve. A cardinal in his robes, with full appreciation of Italian power politics and foreign policy responsibilities for the Vatican, is very impressive to a young scholar just beginning international diplomacy. The distaste for liberation theology in the Vatican was very obvious. Plans for resistance to Russia in Poland were not discussed. On my final day I interviewed the American representative to the Vatican. As we concluded, he suggested there was a gentleman in the next room who would like to see me. There I met a foreign affairs representative of the U.S. government (I assumed Central Intelligence Agency). He knew in some detail about my plans to visit Eastern Europe and my hosts there. He inquired about my willingness to visit the American embassies in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union to report on conversations I would have in those countries. He was suggesting I do so but implying that I might not want to, given the identity of some of my contacts. I jumped on his hesitation and indicated I would rather not share my knowledge in briefings with the agency. We said goodbye cordially.

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That evening I took the evening train out of Rome for Budapest. It was a shame to pass through so much of Italy in the dark. We stopped and exchanged engines in Venice, but I could not see any of the city. The border crossing into Yugoslavia was uneventful. The train was thoroughly inspected at the crossing into Hungary. The border guards insisted on seizing both of my visas for entry into Hungary. I argued for the return of the second visa, which was for a return trip to a meeting in Hungary later. One of the guards pointed his gun at me while the other shouted in German, “Nehmen sie platz!” (Sit down!). I complied. The train rolled on into Hungary toward Budapest. My hosts of the Reformed Church intended to meet me at the train station, but they went to a different station than the one at which I arrived. I was put up in a guest house of the Hungarian Reformed Church. Their itinerary had me speaking at three Reformed churches and a visit to their seminary in Debrecen. They also took me around the beautiful city. This early visit was a good introduction to the leaders of the Church whom I would meet when I returned in a week for the Christian Peace Conference to be held in Budapest. After a three-day visit, I flew from Budapest to Moscow.

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Siberia In Moscow my plane was met by Intourist, which would stay pretty close to me for my solitary trip into Siberia. The courtesy of the agency of tourism and internal security extended to coming aboard the plane and unloading me before the other passengers. I stayed in their hotel, and at the train station the next morning I was greeted by an attractive woman in the first-class compartment with the words “Look what they brought me.” She claimed to be a German from Munich who was traveling to Irkutsk as I was. We shared the compartment for five days’ travel. My perceptions of the trip through Russia were informed by my Christian realist philosophy and my readings of George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans Morgenthau on Russia, as well as the Russian history course by Albert Sellen at Morningside College. They would also be decisively influenced by conversations with Russians on the train. The American observer-participant can experience the Russian Empire in a limited way on the Trans-Siberian Railroad as it stretches its track across Eurasia. My trip began with the purchase of bread from an aged Russian woman in the Moscow train station. She had lived through the Stalin era into modern Soviet life. The other man purchasing bread from her was a young, wounded veteran carrying his hand-carved cane from Afghanistan. I thought about my own friend, Alex, who had never returned from Vietnam, and I felt the tragedy of European colonization of the Asian populations. At first the train traveled north parallel to the Yaroslav Road. Once the train passed industrial Moscow, the homes became low, wooden structures. Many had ornate carvings decorating their weather-beaten window frames and low-peaked roofs. The train traveled beside the road that czars and their retinues had traveled for centuries on their pilgrimage to Zagorsk, the spiritual center of ancient Muscovy. Along the way, certain towns were graced by large churches, which marked the overnight stopping places of the royal pilgrimages. Zagorsk itself (the monastery and seminary) provided a setting that I found architecturally and spiritually moving. The seminarians from Zagorsk I had been able to have discussions with in Moscow, Berlin, and Pittsburgh impressed me with their brightness, dedication, and ready wits. My Protestantism found their conviction as the church representing the incarnation of Christ to be moving but limited. Of course, they were limited both by their Orthodox heritage, which has since Constantine been directed by Caesar, and by the current reality of the power of an officially atheist party dominating not only the state but also every social institution. In contrast, my Calvinism seemed worldly to them; they suspected that my democratic worldliness had lost much of its spiritual vitality. As the train rolled through the Ural Mountains and the hours stretched into days and nights, I became aware of entering Asia. The Urals reminded me of my native Allegheny Mountains, which were a significant barrier to the European population until the nineteenth century. The Soviet Union, governed now from Moscow and not the European-leaning St. Petersburg, was a huge empire. It stretched over 8.5 million

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square miles; it was 5,500 miles long—the ride from Moscow to the East Coast would take ten days. It was 2,700 miles wide from the Arctic to the Central Asian deserts. It comprised one-sixth of the land mass of the world and had 260 million persons. The official Soviet publications claimed the existence of 130 nationalities living in the USSR. Passengers on the train reflected the diversity of the empire. They invited me to join them in toasting mir (peace) with their cognac and vodka. A fisherman and his wife from the Kamchatka Peninsula shared their smoked salmon, and the conversations about customs, travels, and peace extended into the long evenings of spring. I recall that nowhere in my travels around the world did I meet people more generous with their food and drink than the Russians. Often they spontaneously invited me into their homes. The Russians on the train, of whom many were technocrats, were intoxicated with technology, which was associated with the power of the state and with its modernization wrought by the Communists. They also respected American technology. In the dining car the bill was calculated with an abacus, but the pride of the manager was a solar-powered Texas Instruments calculator. But they, too, knew the ambiguity of the calculating transforming technological culture. Leaning against the train window, a mathematics instructor from Central Asia said softly as he watched the trainloads of timber and coal pass, “Development means exploitation.” The train did not pass through Gorky and the site of Sakharov’s banishment. Maxim Gorky himself, after whom the city is named, had been unable to restrain Stalin’s murderous ways, and the name “Gorky,” his pen name, means “bitter.” Whether this giant of Russian-approved literature under Stalin fell to Stalin’s madness or, as officially proclaimed, was a victim of an anti-Stalin plot, his name reflects the bitter fight of the intellectuals who have striven under the czars and the commissars to defend human dignity in Russia. One hundred fifty miles north of Gorky the German and the American raised a toast to Gorky and to Sakharov. The German cautioned me not to speak much about Sakharov and human rights or of peace dissidents in the train compartment, because some of the compartments, probably those assigned to Westerners, were bugged. The other American on the train was less cautious, and one of his traveling companions, a Russian soldier, was lectured by a man in a trench coat at a railroad stop. When the soldier returned to the compartment, he would only discuss the weather and his children for two days. His discussion of politics with the other American, traveling in second class, was stopped. When the train stopped in Omsk, I reflected upon the bitter fighting here between the Czech divisions, who in 1918 controlled the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Red Army. The anomaly of a British battalion from Middlesex, wintering in Omsk, supporting the regime of Admiral Kolchak as he alienated the Russian peasantry, was typical of this confused period in American-Soviet relations. American forces were in Siberia for a year and a half, thousands of miles away from the scene of significant fighting around Omsk and in the Urals. The British had hoped to overthrow the Reds. The Japanese had their eye on territorial gains in the East; the French saw possible success for white forces under French leadership. The Americans thought that they were intervening to assist the Czechs, who were supposed to be moving across Siberia to embark on

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transport to the western front. The supposed enemy of the Americans was GermanAustrian escaped prisoners. American intelligence was as bad as the facts of the case, but orders were clear that the Americans were not to fight Russians, but to aid the Czechs and protect military stores at Vladivostok. The Allied intervention in the north at Murmansk and Archangel was for purposes for which they were ill equipped. However much one may bewail American naiveté in these incursions, the fact remains that for a year and a half, when the Reds were struggling to solidify their revolution, American troops were in the Soviet Union. George Kennan, who regarded the intervention as folly, quoted from the Literary Digest, “Some . . . might have disliked us less if we had intervened more, but . . . having concluded that we intended to intervene no more and no less than we actually did nobody had any use for us at all.” This confused period from 1918 to 1920 in which the Communists secured control of much of the old Russian Empire must be regarded as the low point in Soviet-American relations. The Russians had not intervened in the American war of independence. Potential conflicts over territory on the western coast of North America were resolved by the czar abandoning any claims and selling Alaska to the United States in 1867. The United States and Russia both expanded in the nineteenth century, the former to the west and the latter to the east until halted by the Russo-Japanese War. The United States replaced Japan as the military force in part of Korea after World War II, but China, not Russia, became the primary challenge to American strength in the region. On their own common frontier of the Bering Strait, relations have been relatively calm. A Russian professor of political science chatted with me as the train picked up speed on the Omsk to Novosibirsk run. We shared the terror of nuclear war as we showed each other pictures of our children in the dim light of the train’s corridors. On the outcome of the world competition to date, we agreed that the United States had gotten the better of it. The Russian spoke of a northern country in which the Europeans were not reproducing as rapidly as their Asian citizens. The northern empire was faced with a hostile China in the southeast, which still had territorial claims against the Soviet Union. In Europe NATO was a formidable military and economic force. The Eastern European countries were basically hostile to Russia. The Russian laughed as I said, “Poor Russia, it is the only country in the world surrounded by hostile Communist nations.” Although Russia was resolute in regarding the Soviet Union as the motherland of Communism, other nations claiming to represent Communism blurred the image of worldwide Communism. I argued that religion and nationalism, although essentially antagonistic to each other, often prove to be more attractive than Communism. Capitalism, through its corporations, is very much alive and often more active in transforming the world than Communism. The idealistic Marxist critique of capitalists’ injustices leveled by the Russians could be agreed to, but I doubted that an international Communism directed from Moscow would be of much interest to the rest of the world. Both of us were sympathetic to the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, but I hoped for a U.S. policy that would accept it and prevent its successors from drawing too close to the Soviet Union. Before the Russian professor left the train in Novosibirsk, we returned to the theme that between us personally there would be peace. We realized that little is

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accomplished by Russian critique of American racism or American critique of Russian failures in democratic virtues. We hoped for wisdom on both sides to let ideological critique recede, competition decline, and real conflicts of real substance remain without being dangerously exploited. We agreed both countries together have to manage the nuclear umbrella. The Russian still expected the triumph of socialism; I expected and hoped for various economic experiments and argued that mixed economies were preferable in the developing countries. Throughout south-central Siberia the train rolled slowly through the steppes. The simple, rural log cabins reminded me of our ancestral log cabin on the great plains of the American Midwest in the previous century. Unfortunately, the climate and rainfall here are not equivalent to the lower latitudes of the American Great Plains. If only 15 percent of the great land mass is suitable for agriculture, the Russians have a geographic problem of great magnitude. The abundance of U.S. agriculture and the paucity of Russian agriculture provide one of the great opportunities for mutual benefit. Of course, trade is political, particularly with the centralized bureaucracy of the Soviet Union, and the arrangements will reflect and affect the political realities. Novosibirsk, one of the major cities of Siberia, was burgeoning and industrial. Here the twentieth century arrived with an explosion of development. The Novosibirsk Theatre of Opera and Ballet confronted the contemporary with the traditional. Here on the River Orb was an industrial city of more than a million persons that had grown from a population of five thousand. The former Russian musical culture spoke to contemporary Siberia in terms that it loved. In Irkutsk, on the shores of Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater lake in the world, travelers from Asia would meet. Except for a new dam and the arrival of technological development, the city was still not modernized. Log houses and nineteenth-century stucco buildings dominated the relaxed city center. Here at the station and in the international hotel on the banks of a beautiful river, Angara, one met travelers headed for Vladivostok, Ulan Bator, Sinkiang, and Tashkent, as well as the cities back up the line—Perm, Omsk, and Novosibirsk. The names are as exotic to the American as Chicago must be to a Russian. There is a whole world out there in Eastern Asia of which Americans know little and in which they can have only marginal influence. Looked on from Irkutsk, Russian policies were not enigmatic. They dominated Mongolia more thoroughly than they did under the czars. Their influence in China had lessened. In the nineteenth century they controlled the railroad through Manchuria. Now they had to go around China and not cut through it. They wanted to maintain their World War II gains over Japan and to start challenging the United States in the Pacific, but not at too great a risk. The price of Russian fighting in Afghanistan was seen in Russian soldiers recovering from their wounds. The history of Russian nineteenth-century expansion in southcentral Asia under the czars was one of willingness to expand at the expense of indigenous populations through sustained campaigns. They were willing to pay an immense price for the Afghanistan war.

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It was time to fly Aeroflot back to Leningrad. The flight took me over the rivers whose names Dr. Sellen made us learn in that Russian history class so long ago. I needed to hurry back to the city for one more visit to the hermitage, and to catch a flight to Budapest for a Christian Peace Conference meeting. As I left Russia, the female security guards at the airport were drinking vodka, and their pleasant invitation—“The nice American guy should stay over and meet pretty Russian girl”—was put off with a resolute statement about needing to get to Budapest. This time in Budapest, I stayed in a hotel. The Presbyterian delegation arrived to observe the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), to which I have been appointed a delegate. I shared a room with a Romanian, and the Presbyterian delegation stayed in the same hotel. I was able to meet many of them. A few were acquaintances from Peace Advisory Committee meetings. Daniel Berrigan was at the meeting, and we struck up a friendship. The Christian Peace Conference invited the two of us to fly with them back to Prague and to speak to Czech churches, and for me to talk to the theological faculty of Charles University. My acquaintance, Lubomir Mirejovsky, the director of the Christian Peace Conference, set up my meetings in Prague and East Berlin. While I was in Budapest one of the staff of the CPC invited me to her parents’ home for dinner. Her father, an economist, possessed the largest theological library I’ve ever seen in a layman’s home. I’m not an economical packer, so my suitcase usually bulges, but on this trip I had taken galoshes for Siberia, plus a heavy coat, scarf, gloves, hat, and so forth. I was embarrassed by my companion priest carrying his belongings in a simple backpack. We enjoyed a boat ride on the Danube together before we flew off to Prague. We were embarrassed, as they put us in first-class seats with free liquor while other delegates returning to Prague traveled in coach. We managed to share the liquid refreshments with them. Our itinerary was pretty full of speaking engagements in Prague. Sometimes I would deliver a major address on peace and Dan would comment. Other times he would be the major speaker and I would take a smaller role. My talk with the seminary faculty was rather informal, as no permission for a speech there had been arranged. But I enjoyed the conversation, and friendships with several of them would continue for decades through various changes in the Czech Republic’s fortunes. At a luncheon in a labor hotel in Prague, Marxist intellectuals complained about the waiter’s service and said, “We pretend to pay them and they pretend to work.” Another Marxist twitted me, commenting on the pictures on television of surplus food lines in the United States and the hunger of the American people. A German economist countered, “Yes, but taking care of its poor is not what America is good at; it is good at making millionaires.”

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East Berlin From Prague I went on to East Berlin. There I was hosted by the theological faculty of Humboldt University, and I stayed in a small hotel. My time there involved a visit to a confirmation class, where we dialogued about the controversy over U.S.-Soviet missile deployment, a Christian-Marxist dialogue in the suburbs, dialogue with the theological faculty, interviews in various government offices, a peace meeting in a village on the border with Poland, and a couple of other peace speeches. I had more discussion in Germany about Central America than in the other countries I visited. The theologians were especially concerned about the role of the churches in the Central American context. They were reading liberation theology, and two of them were studying Spanish. I concluded my trip with a subway ride under the wall and a flight out of the center of Berlin to New York. The visit and connection to Lubomir Mirejovsky led to other returns to Prague for Christian Peace Conference business and the planning of meetings. On one occasion I participated with a member of the Russian Academy of Science in a radio dialogue. A professor friend later told me he learned from that dialogue that the future of the USSR was limited, as the Soviet intellectual gave way at many points of Marxist orthodoxy. Lubomir told me that they welcomed my participation with them in the Christian Peace Conference even though they knew I was not one of them. As much as I could, I spoke at non-Communist meetings and in churches resistant to Communism at this time. Too many people no longer believed in Communism for it to be regarded as a permanent ideology. An economist took me through terribly inadequate grocery stores in East Berlin. An Intourist guide to Zagorsk told me that she could not find good food even in Zagorsk anymore. She thought everything was being shipped to Poland to stave off revolutionary fervor there. Though Lubomir meant to warn me that I was out of step with the CPC, I took it as a compliment. I was able to host Lubomir at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and to publish a paper of his on Tillich and socialism in the North American Tillich Society bulletin. My son Randall, who had met him in Pittsburgh, met him again in Prague after the collapse of the Soviet Union and found him embittered toward Gorbachev, who he felt had betrayed international socialism. I returned to Prague to lecture to a Charles University conference on human rights, but Lubomir had died by this time, and I never had a chance to speak with him personally after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia. From this extraordinary trip, I was able to take back to the Advisory Council several recommendations: • The Church can teach its members to avoid a crusading spirit against the social-sociological system of other nations. God is absolute and tolerates various human experiments. Christians are not called to self-righteously judge others.

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• The militarization of the U.S. economy and society must be reversed. To this end, the development of peace centers, programs, and thought is the work of the Church allied with others. Particular policies that promote U.S. initiatives toward diplomatic reduction of armaments must be supported with tenacity. The movement for a negotiated mutual freeze on nuclear armaments is a good example of policies that deserve Church support. • The development of American society through improved education, improved health, and improved welfare is the concern of the Church. • The essential immorality of most wars, especially nuclear war, and reliance on nuclear deterrence must be a theme of Church teaching and preaching. • The revitalization of Christian commitment to democratic politics of participation, debate, and thought can help the peace movement within the Church to become more political and produce a national consensus and leadership that would make a policy of diplomatic accommodation for peace possible. • The Church, because of its international character, is particularly well placed to help its members and some of the broader public understand social revolution and liberation theology. Domestic revolutions do not have to become fuel for the conflicts of the Cold War. An understanding of social revolution by the Church could deny right-wing Christians support for counterrevolutionary policies. The teachings of the churches about Central America, the sanctuary program, and the border watch in Nicaragua are all appropriate tools for this ministry. • The peace of God is a gift of grace known both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. The peace between the superpowers is precarious, but there are no vital issues threatening peace that cannot be accommodated now or in the future.

RETURN TO MEXICO I took a brief trip to Mexico City as liaison to the Peacemaking Committee in 1983. Combining interviews and conversations I had there with refugees from Central America, I wrote a short piece on the costs of fighting Communism in Central America for The Presbyterian Outlook in February 1984. “Rationalizing Terror” Recently I heard priests, students, peasants, and relief workers describe tortures perpetrated by the United States’ supported governments in El Salvador and Honduras. The military-dominated regimes are exterminating opposition to their policies. Villages are exterminated,

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refugees are killed, women are raped, and children are bayoneted in a brutal nightmare of repression. In a visit to Mexico City a Mexican theological student, hearing a little of my revulsion at our policies, said, “You may be suspected of being a Communist.” Therein lays the source of the murder. A Honduran priest described how seven members of his church were taken by the National Department of Investigation, never to be returned. They had been protecting the priest who had aided refugees from El Salvador. When the local authority who was leading the anticommunism witch hunt was asked, “What is a communist,” he said that “He didn’t know what a Communist was,” and that, “He didn’t care to learn.” Such ignorance is reinforced by official U.S. policy which supplies weapons and training to the murdering regimes. Trade union leaders, church officials, students, teachers in opposition to political interests are regularly and systematically butchered in the name of anti-Communism. A campesino with whom I shared a service in a communidade de base had been hit in the head twice with a machete and thrown over a cliff. His crime was that his sister was a lay Roman Catholic teacher. Several other brothers were killed the same day. The campesino from Central America, the victim of torture, was no more a Communist than I am. The revolt of the poor and the oppressed in Central America is an indigenous revolt for human dignity. The action of the government’s stifling opposition through terror is not democratic. We cannot pretend to be defending democracy in countries that haven’t had it. Only a fanatical anti-communist could lead the United States to support what it supports in Central America. But in practice in Central America, anti-Communism is mostly a myth to rationalize terror of peasants who don’t know what Communism means, of moderate democrats, and of all those who oppose the military governments. According to the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence Research and the Yearbook of International Communist Affairs, 1982, pro-Soviet Communist Party membership in Guatemala and El Salvador decreased from 3,600 to 2,500 from 1962 to 1982. In the same period, many thousands were killed in the anti-Communist campaigns. The allies of the United States in Central America have forfeited our support by their ruthlessness. We cannot continue to defend the rich preying on the poor—even if they reflect our transnational corporate policies or were trained by our military. For me, history is repeating itself, it was the cruel suppression of Buddhist monks by President Diem and Madame Nhu’s contemptuous dismissal of them as only “little preachers’’ that turned me against President Kennedy’s war in Vietnam. I pray that

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we’ll have learned from Vietnam, and that we quit supporting murdering peasants in the name of anti-Communism now.

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Marriage A new student introduced herself to me and reminded me we had met before. She had been at Union Theological Seminary with her husband, James Roberts. She had worked as a Wall Street secretary and then as a broker. Later I remembered seeing her walk her poodle in front of the Van Dusen Residence Hall at 527 Riverside Drive, and I had asked my friend Bob Hammer who she was. She was very sophisticated and attractive. I got to know her through my classes in Pittsburgh, which she appreciated, and then she served as director of continuing education at the seminary for a while before she returned to her class work, as the position did not pay well. She knew of my dating students and others, and as we came to know each other she told me it was not wise of me to date a particular student. Meanwhile, I had tried to restore my relationship with Joan, but it was not working for me. The Roberts and we shared a social group with the Wiests and the Partees once a month. One day she phoned to say that the next gathering could not be at their place, since she and Jim had separated. Bebb and I dated for a few months, and after her divorce was final we had a party and announced to the seminary faculty and friends from the church and around the city that we were engaged. For me at the time, it seemed natural to date mature students who then could not take classes with me. The seminary discounted her tuition after the marriage, as they did for other family members of faculty. Both of my major professors at Union Seminary had married students. She continued to complete her theological studies. Several faculty dated students, and one such couple had previously married. On March 31, 1984, Bebb Wheeler Roberts and I married at East Liberty Presbyterian Church. My brothers and her family all attended. Hugh participated in the service, along with the Reverend Dr. Robert Hewett and the Reverend William Thomas. The children all participated in the service with us, and the cathedral-like church made an excellent place for the service. We enjoyed a champagne reception at the seminary, and then we left for England, Luxembourg, and Prague for a honeymoon. We stayed at the distinguished Russell Square Hotel and enjoyed London for three days before proceeding to Luxembourg for another two days, and then we continued on to Prague. I had been invited to help plan a Christian Peace Conference meeting in Prague, and I thought it would be interesting for Bebb. She contributed to the planning, particularly in recommending suitable feminist voices from the Western Hemisphere. She had noticed the same man shadowing us in London, Luxembourg, and Prague. She was a little nonplussed when I informed her the room in this old Stalinist-era hotel in Prague would be bugged. After Prague we returned to Pittsburgh, and I moved into Bebb’s home. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake. She needed to overcome her student status vis-à-vis me, and her prior ownership and life in the house may have reinforced a struggle over defining ourselves anew that led to tension. John, her son, accepted me easily; the lovely teenage daughter’s reception was more difficult. Soon Bebb and I sought counsel on how to relate to Jessica. The doctor thought the problem was probably with us rather than with Jessica, who had reason to resent me as a replacement for her father

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in her home. We found places for Randy and Patricia to stay for their twice-weekly visits. Randy and Bebb’s relationship was very solid; it was probably the best relationship in the merged families. It was easy for me to love John, and to assist him to mature in the ways that I was used to, though those probably were not always Bebb’s ways. I believe the closeness and affectionate ways between me and Patricia and between Randy and Patricia made Bebb feel uneasy. Any discussion of a marriage is obviously from a one-sided perspective. In retrospect, I think the moving from student to a leading participant in a marriage was a difficult transition, and we did not make it well. Bebb had been attracted to me by my teaching in the seminary and my leadership in social justice issues, but now she needed to mature in ministry and study, and the competition driven by feminism was very difficult for me. Bebb found the conservative provincialism characteristic of Pittsburgh to be a little oppressive; she would often say how she disliked the city. By 1984, I was probably near the height of my personal, professional development, and I was actively engaged in searching for possible positions in San Francisco and New York. Neither position would fall into my grasp. My own relationship with Pittsburgh was complicated; I understood its particular ethos and attributed a lot of it to the Presbyterian-Calvinist domination of its elite ranks. In a few years I would publish a study of that ethos, Reformed Urban Ethos: A Case Study of Pittsburgh. I was developing the book’s arguments in my class on urban ethics, and in public lectures. After one of those public lectures at the seminary, the Pittsburgh Presbytery executive told the audience that such ideas would be dangerous to my position in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, I was becoming more involved in urban life, as I served on the Community Relations Board for the local halfway house of the state correctional system, and I worked on public safety for the Development Corporation. This involved attempting to organize safety procedures within the high-rise public housing in the neighborhood. We also held hearings and investigated the procedures of a plasma collection center that moved into the neighborhood. Through our insistence they established more rigorous screening than they had elsewhere. We also organized a plan in which store owners paid a small fee for increased police protection by off-duty policemen. During the years I served as public safety coordinator. I had taught police ethics with Dick Thornburgh to Pittsburgh police, but this duty in East Liberty involved me more closely than I had been before. Then I served for a short time as president of the East Liberty Development Corporation. We managed to revive and restore a theater in the East Liberty neighborhood, and to start the clearing of the site of the old Sears store for urban renewal. The securing of the site for Home Depot began the renewal of the business community, which in a few years made significant strides to change the blighted area into a successful shopping center. Other practical work was on various local ecumenical boards for urban ministry and social concerns. This work would overlap with the business development and safety concerns. Leadership at the church, which was central to the neighborhood, also involved increasing the church’s involvement in security concerns and increasing the numbers of security personnel.

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Randy graduated from Peabody High School with high honors and worked during the summer to save funds for his matriculation into Harvard in the fall. He was one of the last two students to move from Peabody High to Harvard. We soon began to experience the anxious queries of other parents asking where he was going to college. We would say “Boston.” Only after rigorous questioning did we feel free to say he was going to Harvard. We had not been involved in this competitive pursuit by parents regarding college admission. Nevertheless, it was an excellent opportunity for him, and he made the most of it. He found great friends there. He began his study of political science, and eventually that turned into a profession for him. Randy’s senior year of high school was in this new family arrangement, and he made it work. Despite some dark moods, he resolved to be happy, productive, and well. He brought immense strength to the adjustment, and I think he negotiated it very successfully. Patricia, like her mother, was not strongly assertive. But she was very successful in achieving her goals both at Peabody and in the art world of Pittsburgh. She took advantage of every opportunity to explore the art teachers around the city and take part in exciting programs for young artists at the Carnegie Museum. She was chosen to participate in a city-wide youth project that produced a work for the “Pittsburgh International.” It was more natural for me to relate to Randall’s social science interests, and she understood that, even if it meant a loss for her. I was supportive in a general sort of a way, and she knew how much I loved to explore extensively the great art of the world. She was usually the top student in her high school class. A few years after Randy, she would graduate from Peabody with the second-highest grade average in her class. A student who did not take any honors classes won the speaking role of valedictorian over Patricia, who had taken all the available college honor classes. During the holidays we often played board games. Patricia would compete with John, Randy, and me, all rather “type A” assertive males. She would often win games like Castle Risk, but humbly. I did not help them with homework, and she would quietly come home after school, go to her room, and finish it before supper. I prided myself on not pressuring her academically, but, as she explained it, “As long as I come home with all A’s that’s normal.” Jessica and John were excellent students as well, and as a parent I had it very easy with four splendid children growing into their own futures. Jessica and I were not close, but I would drive her to appointments and prepare meals and such when her mother was absent with church work or other responsibilities. If my choice of a meeting in Prague with pro-Communist churchmen had been a strange honeymoon, I had increased the improbability of our marriage by suggesting we spend most of a year in South India. Bebb eagerly accepted the challenge, and we began to figure out how we could accommodate the children while I taught at the United Theological College in Bangalore. A fellowship from the American Association of Theological Schools made the probability of the trip seem greater. The assassination of the prime minister and the Bhopal industrial tragedy almost inclined me to give up the plans for India, but Bebb was particularly strong about us persisting in our plans. We assumed our own maturity, and we were eager to serve the Church in a poorer part of the world.

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The college planned to house us and for me to teach for two terms over a period of about eight months. Americans teaching at the college recommended the International School at Kodaikanal, some ten hours from Bangalore. After our plans were relatively well settled, I taught at Ghost Ranch, and three of the kids accompanied us in the drive to New Mexico, during which we stopped in Iowa to visit my parents, who were delighted with the new family. After the Ranch, we returned to Pittsburgh, and Bebb and the kids settled into their school responsibilities. The seminary provided a panel discussion on “Politics, Faith, and Power,” joining me with two Republicans in dialogue. William H. Hudnut, a Presbyterian pastor, three-term mayor of Indianapolis, and congressmen from Indiana, and Mrs. Elsie Hillman, the leading Republican national committeewoman and local philanthropist, addressed the theme in their way, and then we raised questions for each other. Both were regarded as moderate Republicans, and the tension between the two parties was not as sharp then as in following years. In the future Mrs. Hillman and I would both support similar causes at the seminary and reach for bipartisan understandings within the religious communities. Despite the Presbyterian Church’s social policy being quite to the left of the Republican Party, I was used to addressing amicably political issues within the majority Republican membership in local churches. Of course, the more conservative churches would not invite me, but I was comfortable in the churches represented by the two Republican speakers. Before leaving for India I had to move some projects along for the Council on Church and Society, plan the Festschrift for Roger Shinn with Robert Stivers and Beverly Harrison, and teach two classes at the seminary for the fall term. Soon after the first of the year we left for Bangalore by way of London, where Bebb’s dear aunt and her English cousin received us. Jessica and John received an introduction to London. The plans were for Randy, now a freshman at Harvard, to bring Patricia over for the summer.

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Chapter 39

Resistance to Militarism During 1983 the Advisory Council initiated work on issues related to tax resistance, just war, and non-cooperation with the military system as requested by that year’s General Assembly (GA). This study on Christian dissent from militarism and related issues would remain my major work for the council for the next three years. The council as a whole was involved with the breadth of social-ethical issues. For example, we brought to the 1984 GA resolutions on: • Feminization of poverty • Domestic hunger • Equal Rights Amendment • United Nations decade for women • The world population situation • Central America • Philippines • Arms control and disarmament • Alcohol issues • The Middle East • Acid rain • Ambassador to the Vatican • Money in politics Additionally, the council provided an interim report on the work of a just political economy for which it had hosted a teleconference. Bill Marcus, Bebb, and I had organized the group for Pittsburgh, and it was held in seven other cities simultaneously. In the same year the Council for Theology and Culture of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. presented its major paper on “Christian Faith and Economic Justice.” I served as chairperson of the nominating committee, and the Advisory Council elected Bob Brashear as chairperson and Lidia Serata Ledesma as vice chair, with Leslie Mallory, Dana Wilbanks, and Robert Stivers as the executive committee. I continued as liaison to the Peacemaking Committee. I was now being well received in that committee, but I had no important role there. The council in 1984 met in San Diego, Atlanta, and Guadalajara, Mexico. We also completed a paper on the social witness bodies of the merging denominations. In the Guadalajara meeting the decision was made to continue

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studying just political economy rather than to proceed to approve the report before us or to proceed to policy recommendations; its diversion from policy resolutions was in part due to my attack on the proposed paper. I found it inadequate because it neglected the influence of the international system on the American economy, and the council concurred. As we were meeting in Mexico, I thought it important to explain the relationship between the beggars in the streets of the city and the homeless men I saw rooting through the garbage bins of the grocery store across from the seminary. An international consultation of Reformed Church leaders was planned for Stony Point on the subject of resistance to militarism. The guarded language of their report reveals how tense the Church was becoming over the subject of considering resistance to militarism as a Church decision. Plans for soliciting responses to the study from Dana Wilbanks and I were announced. Eventually sixteen hundred congregations would order the controversial study materials to consider the issue. It was becoming the most contentious issue in the Church except for issues relating to sexual ethics and homosexuality. As part of the responsibilities for the council to review the implementation in the Church of social policy, a study of the denominational and interdenominational seminaries and Presbyterian social policy was undertaken in 1984 and reported in 1985 to the GA. This study of the seminaries and its implementation would eventually lead to a major area of my church and society work for the rest of my career. The GA of 1985 asked the Advisory Council to convene a meeting of representatives of the seminaries to consult on the study and survey of the seminaries of the Church. The Council’s report on resistance to militarism was not due until the 1987 GA. Dana Wilbanks had the major writing responsibility for the study paper “Presbyterians and Peacemaking: Are We Called to Resistance?” as I had major responsibility for editing the book The Peacemaking Struggle, but we accepted responsibilities for both and reviewed each other’s work. I spent a week editing the papers for the book that had been reviewed by the Ghost Ranch Seminar while Dana was writing. He finished, and when we met outside of Ghost House where he had been writing, there was an outstandingly beautiful double rainbow from horizon to horizon with Orphan Mesa in the center. We accepted it as a good sign for our work. The book The Peacemaking Struggle appeared before our family left for India, and consideration of the study paper’s publication delayed it until the end of 1985. Despite all of our efforts to indicate that it was a paper for study and not a draft of a GA policy, it was seen by some as very threatening. The Peacemaking Program hoped we would not publish it, and we had to make very clear that it was not a product of the Peacemaking Program. We were adamant that it was not even an official paper of the Advisory Council. It also stated that it was not a comprehensive analysis of all of the issues before the nation regarding peacemaking, but Presbyteries were asking for advice on various forms of Presbyterian resistance to militarism. The council saw the paper as part of a process for discernment as to the will of the Church on the issues. It

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appeared under the names of Dana and myself, and, being a product of the council, chair Bob Brashear and coordinator Dean Lewis added their names. Given the reality that the nation continued to disregard most of the Church resolutions concerning peacemaking, the paper raised the question of whether the Church should support resistance to militarism and adopt resistance as its own stance. Many Presbyterians were already engaged in different means of resistance to nuclear arms and militarism. The study was not pacifist. It recognized the need for defense, but it criticized the U.S. stance as its military budget and programs increasingly dominated American culture. The sixty-two-page paper began with a short history of the peacemaking witness of the Church and then devoted a major section to the biblical and theological issues involved in active peacemaking. The second section examined nuclear weapons issues in light of just war theory, as the GA had requested. The longest section dealt with the complexities of the reformed tradition regarding obedience to government and resistance to government when it fails to carry out its responsibilities. The final section analyzed the sanctuary movement regarding Central American refugees, tax resistance, noninvestment and divestment, occupational withdrawal, noncooperation with military service, demonstrations and protests, and involvement in organizations. Churches were provided with a study guide and asked to comment on the paper and the issues of resistance with particular regard to the Church’s stance as an institution. Dana and I were asked to speak to several Presbyteries. He usually handled the western ones, and, except for trips to Texas and Montana, I stayed east of the Mississippi. The president of Union Seminary phoned me to inquire about why friends of Union on Wall Street were so incensed at Dana Wilbanks and me. I explained to him the exploratory study process the Church was going through with our materials, and he was satisfied. Many years later President Donald Shriver would rise to my defense over Jewish concerns that I was being too boldly pro-Palestinian in words I said about the Palestinian crisis, which appeared on CNN after being reported on TV in the Middle East. One church published its own study materials before it decided to withdraw from the denomination. An African American driver from Freedom Presbyterian Church assured me that the problems with this leading church in the Presbytery were much older than our study. Several military personnel published a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal criticizing our approach. The responses from the churches and the Presbyteries were supportive of individual Presbyterians taking stances against the perceived dangers of nuclear policy and militarism, but in general they would not support the Presbyterian Church taking such a stance. However, the international council at Stony Point, made up of Reformed Church members, was supportive of the American Church taking a stance against U.S. militarism.

TASK FORCE ON POLICY Consequently, a task force was chosen to continue the discussion. Led by two of the more prestigious leaders in the Presbyterian Church, its report to the 1987 GA was

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accepted under the title “Christian Obedience in a Nuclear Age” (CONA). Reaffirming the strong tendency of Reformed churches to support active participation in government, it encouraged extraordinary use of ordinary means of challenging U.S. policy. It intended to awaken Presbyterians to the challenging issues and to encourage them in public participation. It agreed with Kermit Johnson and me in The Peacemaking Struggle that relying on nuclear deterrence was inherently immoral, as it targeted citizens not involved in the armed forces. It affirmed just war theory and supported all of the methods of resistance by individuals or groups to governmental policies found to be immoral. It insisted that in democratic states citizens must pursue ordinary means of dissent first and, in a crisis, follow with extraordinary efforts. It supported the idea of individual churches creating defense funds to help allay expenses of lawyers and imprisonment for those Presbyterians who felt called to join in illegal disobedience to the state. As officers of the Council for Church and Society, Dana and I gave the document its final editing and argued for it in the GA committee. Dana encouraged advocacy, Christian social ethics, and the idea that taking these issues before the Church could be understood as such an action. I felt the threat of the destruction of the Eastern European socialist countries particularly deeply, as I had played with children there on my trips, and preaching to congregations and meeting with faculties acquainted me with Christians there. On one occasion, when I left a children’s camp in the Soviet Union, I had the awful sensation that some of their parents were preparing weapons to kill my children in Pittsburgh. A few of my neighbors working in Pittsburgh industry were building weapons and fueling nuclear aircraft carriers that would, under certain conditions, kill those children in the camp with whom I had danced and from whom I had accepted cookies. I also had a deep sense of the awful tragedy for our country, particularly of nuclear war. Our edging closer to that possibility needed to be opposed. The acceptance of CONA marked the last time a major portion of the Presbyterian Church tackled the issue of military policy and nuclear weapons. Intellectually, it was interesting to see the acceptance of just war theory lead to opposition to military policy and the preparation for nuclear war.

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Chapter 40

India In January 1985 Bebb, Jessica, John, and I flew to India. When Randy and Patricia joined us in the summer, he reminded me that we had discussed driving to India from England when were on sabbatical there in 1972. I had forgotten, but the land route through Iran would be practically closed to Americans by the time we went. Jessica encountered her first Indians in full purdah in the Bombay airport. “That’s scary,” she told her mother. Jessica had been the most reluctant to come, but she was the only one to return several times after our sabbatical, until I returned briefly in 2013. We were met at the Bangalore airport by Fred and Mary Downs and Hunter and Esther Maybry. They were the other American faculty at the United Theological College. The Maybrys lived in the next house to ours, and the Downs lived across the street on campus. They were kind and very helpful in orienting us to life in India. We were put up in the visiting faculty house where our friends the Stackhouses and the Copes had previously resided. It had four bedrooms, as well as a dining room, kitchen, living room, and study. It usually had electricity and running water for a few hours each day. The view from the back from the small veranda looked out over an estate full of trees new to us, and the occasional pedestrian or a few animals. After our first day with our new colleagues, we began to explore Bangalore. We were advised regarding the better Indian restaurants and the one western-style steakhouse. “Western style” meant they served steaks and drinks in an outdoor, tree-covered patio. Entertainment might be a man with several cobras in his basket, which he would call up. Or perhaps a magician would swallow nails and offer to sell you a mongoose. We contracted an Indian family recommended by Max Stackhouse to serve as cook, household help, and purchaser of the victuals we needed. Mr. Jaya Paul and Mrs. Jaya Chandran worked with us for eight months with agreeable spirits and faithful work. They were Seventhday Adventists and could not work on Saturday, when we managed our own meals. We paid them pitifully little, but we were criticized for paying above the going rate, thereby threatening the satisfaction of other college servants. We assuaged our consciences with tips, gifts, “baksheesh,” and leaving our household goods with them.

INDIAN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY My first courseload was tutoring three students working toward their master’s degree in sacred theology for their exams, and a small course on Indian social philosophy, using as a secondary source The White Umbrella by D. MacKenzie Brown. We also used the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, texts from the British utilitarians, and texts by and about Gandhi. I had more students the second term in a course on peacemaking ethics, another one on methods in Christian ethics, and I continued tutoring the more advanced students individually.

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Before I could start teaching, we placed the children in the international school in Kodaikanal, which was recommended by the international faculty in Bangalore. The mountains were higher and more rugged than the Alleghenies we were accustomed to, but they were forested, and the artificial lake on the mountaintop near the school looked like the small Donegal Lake off Highway 711 between Ligonier and Donegal near Pittsburgh. Though founded by missionaries, Kodaikanal International School now catered to students seeking the International Baccalaureate Degree, whether from India or abroad. It was located about ten hours from Bangalore by bus and then seventy-five miles by taxi into the Western Ghats. Jessica was assigned a place in a dormitory on campus with girls her age. John had to live off campus in a house with six other boys in rather close quarters. John’s house parents were fundamentalist missionaries, and eventually I had to warn them off proselytizing John. I argued, probably to no avail, that their understandings of scripture were primitive. I also insisted that unless they could read Greek and Hebrew, as I claimed Bebb and I could, they had no business fooling with John’s more liberal beliefs from the Southminster Presbyterian Church in Mount Lebanon. It was hard to leave them on that mountain, but we would visit about every three weeks and have them back to Bangalore for vacations. That first Sunday we met Dr. Tangeraj preaching at the ecumenical chapel. He and his wife, Cecilia, and their two children lived in Madurai, the city nearest to Kodaikanal, and they became friends, teaching us Southern Indian customs. He was a participant in Hindu-Christian dialogue, and through him we would meet Professor Gangadaran, who would introduce us to the Madurai Temple. Years later, when he was a visiting scholar at Harvard, I could introduce him to the battlefields of Lexington and Concord where so many of my ancestors fought the British. We would visit some fields in India where the British also fought, and we learned of the legacy of General Cornwallis in India as well as in America. Bebb took one course with a professor from Pittsburgh as an independent study. I tutored her as well as my Indian students in Paul Tillich’s theology, which she enjoyed. During that first week, I checked out three volumes of Tillich’s Systematic Theology, put them under my arm, and proceeded to leave the college compound for the nearest bank to open up an account. With several volumes of theology under my arm, and several thousand dollars in checks in my pocket, I met my first leper. Needless to say, I was rather generous to the poor, crippled fellow. He became my bank leper. John had also found a leper outside of his school compound to whom he regularly gave some money as he passed out of the gate. We all had to think through beggars and alms. Dr. Tangeraj advised us not to figure it out, but to give as our instincts told us. Our trips to the school were our primary excursions that first term. We usually went by overnight bus to Madurai, and then we finished the journey up the mountain by taxi. Some of the views on the winding road were marvelous out over the Tamil Nadu plains. We would always see some monkeys on the trip up. We heard stories of more vicious animals. John sometimes heard hyenas at night and occasionally along the road to the school. Months later, at the golf course near the school, our neighbors and golf partners were told the bones on the course were from a cow that a tiger had eaten the night before. We never saw the tiger, but the local caddies insisted he had feasted

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there by the third hole only the night before. The regular interference with our golf games was by the monkeys, who would scamper down from the trees to steal balls. Frightening monkeys away from balls fell within the caddies’ duties. Less often we had to wait for cows to move away from our targeted holes, which were surrounded by one strand of barbed wire to keep the animals off the “greens,” which were actually composed of sand. The bus trips to Madurai were dominated by very loud playing of Hindi movies on the bus monitor, but we sometimes managed a little sleep. We stayed in the Carlton Hotel near campus where we would take the kids for better meals than the dorms provided. The dirty aprons of the waiters gave little confidence as to the food, but it was where Westerners stayed, and it was pretty tasty. There were afternoon movies in English, and late in the evening a servant would appear with a few sticks of wood to light a fire in the fireplace in the room. How his few sticks managed to last most of the night defied explanation. But he would always exit saying, “Slowly burning fire, Mesab.”

CHRISTIAN SOCIAL THOUGHT My purpose in coming to India, other than for the adventure and to teach, was to study Indian-Christian social thought. The faculty of the college was helpful. Hunter Maybry was very knowledgeable, and Somen Das and K. C. Abraham were shaping this very thought. M. M. Thomas visited the college and spent an afternoon in our home filling me in from his perspective, partially formed by Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett. The most important center of Indian Christian thought was very close to the college and involved with the college. At the same time, Bebb was engaged in research on the development of Indian women and feminist issues. The library had all of the books and research sources that I needed. With the help of the faculty I was able to find and read most of the then important studies on my subject. This study was directly applied to the course I taught in Pittsburgh for several years on the Church and International Society, in which I featured social thought from around the world. Christianity in 1985 was the third-largest religion in India, claiming 16.1 million adherents in the census of 1980. Of course, it was a minority, with Hindus numbering 549 million and the Muslims claiming a population of 75.5 million. Following the Christians in numbers were the Sikhs (13 million strong). The 1985 reports indicated Christians were growing at the slowest rate of any of the major religions. As a minority of mostly poor people, the Christians contributed to intellectual life within their own circles, but they could not have a very large political impact except in Assam and Kerala, neither of which we visited. Bangalore, a relatively new city for India, is probably the easiest Indian city for a Westerner to live in except for New Delhi. Indians move there for the moderate climate and for opportunities in the aircraft, scientific, and Internet industries. As a British cantonment it succeeded an older fort, and then a stone fort built by Hyder Ali in the eighteenth century. It is relatively well laid out, and in 1985 it could be regarded as a garden city. The technological boom and rapid growth since that time has doubled the

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city’s population to 3 million, and it is still expanding. In 1985, it was still lazy with cows in the downtown shopping area, and most transportation was by three-wheeled, motored rickshaws. Streets were tree shaded, and one could easily walk comfortably throughout the city if one were careful about where one stepped. We avoided the worst of the slums, but movies and cultural events were negotiable in the evenings and the market was delightful. Foods were plentiful in the market, but a large part of the population did not have funds to buy the goods. This was in contrast to the socialist societies of Eastern Europe and Russia, where the food itself was in short supply. Our intuitions about how to live and our prejudices were not appropriate for India, and we had a lot to learn. Indians seldom said no. So someone saying they would come in response to an invitation meant they might come. They would always give directions, regardless of whether they knew where you wanted to go. Distinctions that were natural to us were not assumed to be necessary in India. We came from a monotheistic culture, and they came from a culture of immense pluralism with countless gods. My first day in chapel, I escorted a dog out of the service. Only later did I learn that it was the pet of the professor of systematic theology, and the dog was permitted to come to chapel when it occurred to him. The presence of camels, snakes, and monkeys in various Hindu temples amazed us for a while, but to them they were all representative of life. My Hindu professor friend would prostrate himself on the flagstones behind the idol of the bull Nanda in a temple. Later, by the pool where women were bathing, he would explain that he prayed to the one Brahma through the idol, but that the peasants probably prayed literally to the idol. That was all fine with him. He drifted off into a lecture on the differences between a symbol and a sign. When I said, “It sounds like Tillich,” he replied, “Of course, many of us here in the Christian-Hindu dialogue use Tillich’s thought.” To me it was another sign of the “thin line of Tillich scholars stretching around the globe.” Dr. Johns, the principal of the college, took us to the Lal Bagh Gardens to see the Orchid Show soon after we arrived. The gardens are a 240-acre botanical garden dating back to the era of Muslim rule. The tropical plants and trees and the moderation of the Bangalore climate allow for a far greater profusion of flora than the normal American botanical garden. The glass enclosure often has world-class floral displays. I probably will never again see as great a display of orchids as we did that day. Of course, we needed to move out of our pristine campus and beyond Bangalore to see the older India. The state of Karnataka of which Bangalore is the modern capital is about the size of New England, and its ancient cities are worthy of more time than we had to give them. We made arrangements through a travel agency that had connections to the college. As volunteer teachers, we were given Indian prices rather than tourist prices, and this enabled us to see more than we could have afforded as American tourists. Usually we would hire a car and driver for our safety and for the safety of the animals and Indians on the highways. By the time Randy and Patricia arrived to join John and Jessica, we required a van. The vagaries of travel in India with the responsibilities attached with four young ones led to my developing a degree of anxiety about travel that was unknown to me before. It still persists somewhat to the present day.

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Bebb and I suffered quite a bit with stomach problems, and she also had a dental issue that she was very hesitant to have worked on by Indian doctors. Taking stool samples to the hospital in a rickshaw and caring for each other while sick drained some of the romance out of India. Bebb wondered whether she and the kids should go home. She had also learned of a position in economic ethics in the Washington office of the Presbyterian Church, and she hoped she might be qualified for it. I advised her that they were probably looking for someone with a master of theology degree, plus graduate work, if not a PhD in economics. She persisted in pursuing it, and suggested we could work out a commuter marriage, with me in Pittsburgh and her and the kids in Washington, D.C. This left me deeply disheartened. It was a little less than a year into the marriage, and ambition was threatening our prospects. My memory is of my foreboding thoughts about the health of the marriage as I went on my morning runs. It was as if the jogging awoke those fears in my mind.

KARNATAKA Karnataka, where the language is Kannada, contained about 40 million people at the time. The countryside of plains, forests, and hills, concluding at the Western Ghats, is beautiful. Probably the most beautiful human addition is the beautifully colored sariclad women going about their work. Even where the country is parched the colorful saris add a beauty to the dryness. The more scantly clothed men can be seen following their oxen pulling an ancient plow that probably has not changed in design for centuries. The state was fought over for centuries by Muslims and Hindus until the British took it from the last Muslim ruler, Tipu Sultan. It is graced by some of the best architecture by both the Muslims and the Hindus. Unless Americans have been blessed by travels in Europe, they probably would find it impossible to grasp that some of the temples are one thousand years old. Our first taste of ancient Hindu temples took in three from the medieval Hindu period of about eight hundred years ago. In Belur we were amazed by the Chennakesava Temple. The great religious epics, some of which were set in Karnataka, were represented in stone carvings. Thousands of carved stone gods stood out from every wall and crevice. But the ordinary life of workers, dancers, musicians, and women of that period is also represented. Here one can hardly make a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Outside, holding up the eves, are beautifully carved, heavyhipped statues of women. They stand in a variety of poses, and the guide thought these statues were among the most finely carved in the temple. There are other temples of the same period in Belur, but we went on to Halebid to study the riot of carving in a still incomplete temple from the same period. The Hoysaleswara Temple, according to the guide, represents the best carving in South India. On one wall most of the pantheon of Hindu deities is presented. Again the epics mingle with common life, integrating life and religious mythology more completely than we are accustomed to in the west. Ganesh, the elephant god, is particularly prominent here in one section. We finished a numbing day with a shorter visit to the Kedareswara Temple. The priest anointing the lingam, and the scurrying of the rats in the dim light, put us in the presence of a much older culture than we could ever experience in the United States unless it was on an

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Indian reservation. The trip back to Bangalore in the dimming light brought the smell of dung fires to our nostrils as the evening fires were lit in the villages. Probably that smell in fading light, which would be repeated again and again, is one of the most powerful sensory memories of India that I took home from the villages. A letter from Patricia in March told us that she had not become ill from all of her shots, and she was relieved. She sent news of the horse camp she had been to with friends. Most of her letter described her horse, Nutmeg. She sent me a copy of her school play with her parts marked for me. Randy also wrote with news, but my most faithful correspondent was Bernice, my mother. She must have written me at least once a month for my life away from Dakota City. Her letters were full of church news, particularly about the people I knew. There was some about her teaching and her students. There was also news about her concerns for my brothers. There was usually something about the difficulty with Dad’s drinking and her earnest pleas that we would not use alcohol. Gardening and Grandma were other continual references. She was always thankful for any gifts we sent. Dad never wrote, except that sometimes he would send a thank you note with a few words. Mother was proud of her sons, and very supportive. By 1985, concerns about Dad’s health began appearing in her letters. The year after our India trip she told me of my father’s cancer. He would not enter into any serious anticancer regime.

TRAVEL WITHIN INDIA Soon after leaving the children at Kodaikanal, we took our first trip to a game sanctuary. The initial foray was to Bandipur Wildlife Sanctuary about thirty miles southwest from Mysore toward Kerala. For two nights we stayed in the accommodations provided by the forest service and took our meals in its restaurant. Neither service was created for recently arrived American visitors. In the early morning haze we took the recommended trail until we found an eight-foot-high stand that looked the way we imagined an elephant-mounting station might look. After about half an hour of waiting on the stand, an elephant came out of the forest. He seemed to be equipped for carrying tourists, and the arrival in another ten minutes of an elephant driver reassured us we were in the right place. We searched for tigers and elephants throughout the morning to no avail, but the birds we saw were splendid. Our next jungle search took us to Lake Periyar in Tamil Nadu with Jessica and John. The monkeys yelled at us as we waited for the ferry to take us across the water to the lodge. There was a postcard posted at the ferry terminal announcement board. It recorded Waller’s and Robert Kincaid’s visit to the preserve. Robert James Waller recorded that Robert Kincaid took a wonderful picture of a tiger crashing out of the bush. On the island hoping to find a shortcut through the brush, I followed a possible trail into the tall grass towering over my head. A sudden crash in the brush forced my retreat to the beach, and we all took the more circuitous route around the peninsula to the other side. Probably it had been one of the wild pigs that we saw making their way down to the water for their evening drink as we rounded the peninsula.

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We stayed in a government lodge called the Maharaja’s hunting lodge. One of the rooms leaked in the evening rain, but we were rewarded on our boat trip by the sighting of wild elephants and lots of wild pigs. The fine dining hall was presided over by a leftover British civil servant from the Raj in his splendid red dining jacket and handlebar mustache. Our best visit to a wildlife sanctuary was in the summer after Randy and Patricia joined us, and all six of us camped in tents provided by Jungle Lodges and Resorts in Nagarhole National Park. We enjoyed the coracles (a round boat of buffalo hide) paddling around the lake. We observed crocodiles in the water and sunning on the lakeside, huge bats hanging from fruit trees, and fish. We decamped the next morning for jeep tours through the forest, where wild elephants obligingly made appearances. A few years earlier the forest was the site for the wild elephant round-up in which several hundred elephants could be captured. We watched an early morning supplemental feeding operation for the working elephants. I imagine the most exciting part of the trip to the forest was the time when a young elephant, not quite as tall as Patricia, knocked her over playfully. The trip into Nagarhole had started on a high note when just before entering the gate to the park an old leopard strolled in front of our van and down the road beside us. Our Indian hosts at the travel company, who are frequent visitors to the game preserves, were delighted at our viewing, saying they had never seen a wild leopard. The only tigers we were to see were the magnificent collection of white tigers in the Mysore zoo. In Mysore the lights and the beautiful mixture of Hindu and Muslim architecture presented us with the largest Maharajah’s palace we would visit in India. Mysore’s altitude and general well-being distinguish it from many of the troubled cities of south India. The tour included the reception room and the marital room, each decorated in powerful murals of the capital’s past. One of the largest of the Nandi bulls in India tops off the Chamundi Hill. The two-thousand-year-old Sri Chamundeswari Temple is near the statue of the monster Mahishasura, who was destroyed by the goddess to bring peace to this part of India. It was created in mortar less than seventy years ago and signifies the sacrifice that brings peace to troubled communities. We enjoyed a quiet lunch and walked in the beautiful gardens of the former royal guest house, which is now turned into a modern hotel. The impact of Mysore is attractive, and it could rival Bangalore as a center for Western travelers. During the college’s vacation between terms we took advantage of the three-week airplane ticket Air India made available. After visiting the children, Bebb and I flew from Madurai to Delhi. The trees and boulevards of New Delhi surround the Western hotels, making for a restful visit, contrasting with the crowds, dirt, and desert of much of India. Here the Sikhs are prominent as taxi drivers, police, and armed guards. Even in New Delhi it is easy to find magicians and snake charmers working their skills for tips. Delhi itself is raucous, noisy, and its streets seem to be always jammed with motor scooters, rickshaws, camels, and cows undisturbed by the clamor. One city blurs into another, hiding the fact that three or four decades ago, seven separate cities could be distinguished. The beauty of New Delhi is owed to its British rulers who set aside the park-like city. The great architecture is from the earlier Mogul capital.

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Deserving mention is the Qutb Minar seven miles south of Delhi. It was begun in 1199 under the first Muslim sultan of India, and completed in the thirteenth century. It still stands, at nearly 275 feet high. At its foot is the earliest mosque in India. Though the British capital buildings are impressive, the older Red Fort and the palaces they contain are splendid. Delhi can claim to be among the world’s most beautiful capitals, and it certainly is the seat of power of the world’s largest democracy. The red sandstone fortress contained the Mogul seat of power until 1857. It is better described in guide books than anything I could now write from memory of almost three decades, but it alone is worth the trip to India. That is a claim I would make only for it and the Taj Mahal, another Muslim masterpiece. Across from the Red Fort is India’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid. It was built in the seventeenth century, and its domes and porticos contribute to a sense of peace and harmony to the Western visitor once he overcomes his shock at the size of its open-to-the-sky courtyard. North of the mosque the crowded shopping streets of old Delhi swallow up the visitors. By the time we returned a few months later with the children, we could begin to get oriented to the market. We flew to Agra. We were fortunate to spend two nights with views of the Taj Mahal. We were able to see it from various angles and in different light. To repeat, it is worth the hassle, expense, and difficulty of a trip to India. Its marble proportions, waters, and towers all flow together to human perfection (or close to it). Bebb was asked to pose with a Muslim bride for one of her wedding-trip pictures. The request revealed the status of color that in ancient times was religiously enshrined in caste separating the conqueror from the conquered. The fort and palaces of Agra are well worth a visitor’s time, but the Taj Mahal needs to be enjoyed in the evening, at noon, and especially at dawn. The guide books and folklore describe a mausoleum erected to love. The wise bride graced by beauty finally sacrificed her life in childbirth. Western sensibilities informed by feminism say, “Of course, it was her fourteenth birth.” But no one other than Mumtaz Mahal ever had such a tomb. Actually her husband, Shah Jahan, was buried alongside her by his son and contrary to Shah Jahan’s plans for his burial. Perhaps the best metaphor is a jewel box. It is gleaming marble inlaid with jewels resting upon red sandstone beside the Yamuna River. Some from the West or from France and Italy were brought in to aid in the construction, which drew workers from around the world. The architect was Persian, and here as in many of the tombs and palaces the influence of the broader Muslim world is seen. Today school-age children are seen inlaying marble with stones for sale to the tourists. Some of their employment is close to or consists of slave labor. The competition between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan is appreciated more deeply when it is understood that this royal line had its origins in Afghanistan. The Koran imprinted nearly in its entirety in the tomb unites these nationally divided peoples. When we came back later with the children we would also visit the forts and palaces of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, the abandoned city of Akbar. Khajuraho is only a small city (20,000 population), and it is pretty run down. But the temples from the ninth to eleventh centuries draw scholars and tourists to the site. Of

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the original eighty temples about two dozen survive, and one Hindu temple is still used for worship. It was the cultural center of the Chandella Kings, but with the ravages of the Muslims it declined into obscurity. The perspective approaching the park is like hills running into mountains in the peaks of the temples. The eroticism of the statues on the temples is captured both in the female forms of voluptuous women dressing, cleaning themselves, or preening in front of mirrors and in the more explicit scenes of intercourse of various forms and various partners. The statues are less detailed than the Kama Sutra. So if that volume introduced one to Indian eroticism, the hundreds of statues are not so shocking. Some interpretations claim an influence from Tantric practices, but I think that case remains unconvincing. Maybe 10 percent of the thousands of well-executed statues of gods, goddesses, animals, celestial beings, and humans are erotic. We did a short tour of less than a day and visited both Hindu and Jain temples. Benares, one of the oldest cities on earth, is the center of Hinduism, a major pilgrimage site, and a city for Hindus to die in and to be cremated on the Ganges. It is a test to the Western physiology, and Bebb lost a day here to a fever. I joined a professor of world religions for the visit to the burning ghats, or steps, which are the premium place for Hindu cremation. The previous day, Bebb and I had visited Sarnath only seven miles away to pay our respects to the site where the Buddha began his preaching. The Buddha, like Gandhi twenty-four hundred years later, was a reformer of Hinduism. But the degree of his dissent drove him out of Hinduism into his eightfold path, which grew into a new world religion. He, too, was made into a god, and in many lands he is worshipped in a manner completely foreign to his teaching. The destruction by the Muslims and the later Hindu revival overcame Buddhism in the main in India and left it to grow in the countries that borrowed it from India. Popular Hindu practitioners may visit seven shrines in Varanasi seeking absolution from their sins to become united in the Godhead with Brahma. But Hindu cosmology and ethics is very sophisticated, and in its many forms it produces interpretations of life for millions in India. In all of its variations it is the religion/practice of the subcontinent. Some temples prefer that Westerners not visit or that they at least refrain from viewing the inner sanctums, but in modern-day Varanasi, amid the confusion of the crowds, we visited all the temples we wished to see. Too soon, the demands of our three-week Air India pass forced us to leave Varanasi (the modern name for Benares) and fly on to the north of Calcutta. In New Jalpaiguri we left the luxury of air travel and boarded the train for Darjeeling. On the narrow-gauge (two-foot-wide) railroad one traveled about six hours in one of the three coaches to climb into the Himalayas. It was on this railroad that Mother Teresa received the vision that gave direction for her mission in Calcutta. The railroad began in jungle, but then soon climbed into the green tea fields of the foothills. Eventually the mountains became visible, and the train wound through villages where the railroad slowed down to allow haggling with merchants, and sometimes children jumped on the slow-moving train. The rails end at Ghoom (eight thousand feet), and Darjeeling lies only four miles further, and a little lower.

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In Darjeeling we stayed at the Oberoi Mount Everest hotel. The last day we were joined by the prince of Bhutan and his entourage on the floor above us. For tea we preferred the Planters Club on Mall Road. Darjeeling required hiking, and sometimes the mountains, including Mount Everest, were visible. The great view of Kanchenjunga was at sunrise when it glowed red in all of its glory. We took the 4 AM tour by jeep to Tiger Hill to view the sunrise on the mountain, but clouds intervened. The quick stop at the small monastery in Ghoom, honored by the yellow sect of Buddhists, presented an array of prayer flags and an image of the Coming Buddha. Our sad world keeps producing eschatologies of hope beyond the individual solace nurtured by faith and various stages of mysticism. Certainly Buddhism provides hope in letting go of this world of suffering, but here and there social eschatologies spring up as well with promises of a returning savior. The mountains appeared often to us in the afternoons. Even the far-off (140 miles) Mount Everest appeared, though from the distance it appeared much smaller than K2. Guide books claimed these Himalayas from Darjeeling dwarf the mountains of Switzerland. Maybe so, but the rail trip from Berne in the Alps climbs much higher than our little train from the plains to Darjeeling. We ate a mixture of Western food and Tibetan dishes. The Tibetan presence was very strong here, mostly created by the refugees. One afternoon hike took us to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute made famous by one of its teachers, Tenzing Norgay, who had led Sir Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest only twenty-two years previously. That same afternoon we visited the botanical garden and the small zoo of Himalayan animals. After two days we descended to the plains on the narrow-gauge railroad and took a plane to Delhi en route to the Northwest. The Punjab was closed to tourism temporarily because of the shootout at the Golden Temple and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. We went on to Kashmir to visit Srinagar, the lakes, and the mountains. In Kashmir we would be the guests of Muslims. We had hoped to go on to Ladakh to visit more Buddhist monasteries. Air India was converting from its leather books system of reservations to computers, but in Kashmir the old leather book system was still in use. A month earlier we had booked a flight to Ladakh for the northernmost extension of our travel to leave on Thursday, but at the Srinagar airport they assured us that the flight had left on Tuesday and there was no flight on Thursday. This was the biggest screwup in our trip. The inconvenience was minimal, and the extra couple of days in Srinagar were spectacular. We spent most of our time on the houseboat on Lake Dal. Small boats, about the size of an Oxford punt, would take us back into Srinagar and its scenes out of Muslim bazaars of the Middle East. The same small boats would take us on tours of the lake or over to Lake Nagin to explore the gardens planted by the ancient Moguls. The houseboats themselves were large enough to have three rooms and a small deck for sunning. On the deck we met various merchants who would come by to peddle chocolates, rugs, silks, or anything the tourists wanted. Taxis took us through much of the Vale of Kashmir, the twenty-eight-mile-long lush garden surrounded by mountains, the tallest reaching some twenty-eight thousand feet. Another trip explored back roads to a valley dominated by a glacier, and we took tea with a Muslim family who assured us they had no sympathy for the radicals of Iran. We found our warmest reception with the Muslim community of India; they seemed to love America and the Americans. After

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we returned to Bangalore we had cocktails with a family who delighted to have us take our hors d’oeuvres with forks from the Chicago Playboy Club. Our hostess still covered her head when the muezzin called out for prayers, but they both enjoyed their cocktails, and we enjoyed their company. The mountains and lakes of Kashmir are as beautiful as any I have visited. I had hoped to bring a conference there to enjoy the beauty of the place, but unfortunately the feuding between Pakistan and India has so far prevented such a meeting. I remembered then, and I still remember, that the Kashmir dispute was a case we studied in a 1958 course in international relations with Dr. Sellen at Morningside. Many of the other disputes—Trieste, Northern Ireland, Corfu, and so on—have been resolved or mostly resolved, but a couple, Israel and Kashmir, linger on even now. The combination of flowering fields, clear lakes, exotic Srinagar, high, snow-capped mountains calls one to return. The plane took us back to Madurai and a reunion with the kids. As Bangalore heated up during a spring vacation, we moved to Kodaikanal and rented a house that was formerly a Baptist missionary’s house near the lake. There I settled into daily writing of the book that became Christian Realism and Peacemaking. While I wrote on the porch of the house an old dog joined me. He deserved the name Dog, and so I named him. A few times I supplemented whatever diet he had, but he returned faithfully and rested between my feet as I worked on the book. Bebb continued her research, but we both spent more time with the children. We hiked, climbed low mountains, and enjoyed the village. We took time off from studies to play golf with Fred and Mary Downs. The cooking house was separated from the dwelling rooms. For the first few days we dealt with the market and did our own cooking, but we were glad when we located a cook who could deal with the local supplies. After the end of the children’s school we returned to Bangalore. The road down the mountain had been flooded in a few spots, and it took a lot of persuasion to coax the driver over a narrow spot where some of the road had been washed out.

FEAR IN GOA We all took a trip to Goa. The historical Portuguese colony provided interesting churches and museums to explore. The cathedral contained the sarcophagus of Francis Xavier. However the beaches were our favorite spot. I enjoyed the sight of the local fishermen in their narrow boats trying to catch what they could in the season of monsoons. The tides were high, and on one occasion Bebb tried to pull John out of a riptide. Thankfully, I was close enough so that upon hearing her call I could make it to her and help both of them out of the riptide. She generously credited me with saving her life and John’s, but we’ll never know whether they could have escaped it themselves. The only time we were certain the women around the temple were devadasis, or temple prostitutes, was in Goa. The subjection of women to poverty and oppression

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was one of the very visible signs of India’s traumas. I expressed it in Panorama, a Pittsburgh Seminary publication: The feminist issues in India are basically the issues of survival for women and children: the struggle for food, water, and fuel. The brightness of the traditional saris of the Indian women are seen everywhere on construction workers, agricultural laborers, and social workers. Yet the beautiful colors cannot hide the sexual oppression and absence of most basic human rights.

FRIGHTENING ARRIVAL Bebb brought the paper in one morning in Goa while I was being lazy in bed. She said, “It’s bad news.” It contained stories of the Air India plane exploding on route from Montreal to Delhi, and of the other bomb that went off in the baggage area in Tokyo of the flight from Vancouver to Tokyo. We spent the day trying to get assurances from TWA that Randy and Patricia had arrived safely in Bombay. They could assure us they boarded in New York, but they did not know anything about their deplaning. I had worried about their stop in Dubai. Randy was nineteen and Patricia almost eleven. The hotel in Bombay denied that they had arrived or checked into their room. I tried to secure plane reservations from Goa to Bombay, but planes were now delayed because of the monsoon. Consistent haggling finally secured a promise I could fly up the next day, even if I had to sit with the pilots. But the next day there was a seat. I had discussed trying to drive up there with a British civil servant who was scouring the countryside for craft appropriate to a naval museum in Dubai. As I flew into Bombay, I surveyed the slums and knew that there was little I could accomplish if the kids had been grabbed. On landing at the national terminal, I decided to check the departure lounge. There they were with a guide from the hotel. Randy had not spread any alarm to his sister at my not meeting them at their arrival, but he had gone to the hotel. They eventually received my message about coming down to join us at Goa, and the hotel had helped with the arrangements. The hotel’s failure to know that they were checked in to their room is just one of those things about Indian service. They and Randy had put all the messages together while I was flying up, and they had even gotten a message through to Bebb while I was in flight. My horrible fears started by the terrorist attack on the other plane had grown in the absence of connecting with Randy. The intervening twenty-four hours were among the most anxious of my life. We had been enjoying the campus, and Randy would take off to explore Bangalore with one of the students on a motor bike. The college had a few tennis courts, and we all played together. Patricia, at ten, stayed close to the house or ventured out with the other kids and an adult. She and John were charmed by holding snakes in one of the temples, and her confidence was strengthened by our oft-repeated lie that “Dad never got lost.” I remember it being particularly comforting to her when an elephant appeared in the crowded streets as we made our way to the great temple in Madurai.

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We had finally gotten our tourist visas renewed at the capital. It took four visits. Perhaps baksheesh would have expedited the process, but we were hesitant to rock the boat. The office building had a Muslim inscription: “Government business is God’s business.” We did not know that a governor of Ohio’s reading of that claim would lead to a freedom-of-religion case in Ohio that I would participate in as an expert witness. So we had valid visas, but they were not intended as work permits. Still, I was volunteering my services. The fact that they were for the Christian Church would not have made the officials look on them any more favorably. Some Christians in Orissa had recently been burned over a religious-communal dispute. The newspapers and the principal, Dr. Johns, informed us that an American had been arrested in another city for teaching on a tourist visa. We were told internal security had visited the college inquiring about my status. After we decided to depart a little early, Dr. Johns told us there was no real danger, but I think he was somewhat relieved. We visited Madras and a nearby village where the main industry was the carving of idols. The streets were lined with stone gods for sale. At the Madras beach we could witness fishermen who venture into the Bay of Bengal unloading fish from rafts consisting of just a few small trees bound together. The beach is one of the longest urban beaches in the world, but few swim here. There are sharks in the bay, and the beach gets fouled by inadequate sewage treatment. Fort St. George and its museum took us back into the era of the British conquest. We saw the supposed sarcophagus of St. Thomas in the cathedral bearing his name. I had an unfortunate encounter with a pickpocket within the cathedral, but nothing was lost. The classical Madras National Art Gallery was worthy of a visit. The Nataraja Siva idol in the classical dance pose is only one of the metal statues from the tenth century that still inspire, and it has become an emblem of Indian art recognized around the world. We left the YMCA guest house in Madras, and took a van forty miles south to Mahabalipuram. The city is graced by huge, beautiful stone carvings. Most of them are carved out of natural rock. Elephants, gods, goddesses, and chariots greet you around each corner. One cave temple illustrated in stone the fight between Durga and Mahishasura; both the bull and the lion are represented here from Hindu mythology, which itself may be partially based on seeing such animals fight. We stayed in a lovely beach resort here, and everyone enjoyed it after our economical YMCA adventure. A return visit to Madurai acquainted Patricia and Randy with the Meenakshi-Siva temple. The ten tall gopurams (towers) are decorated with hundreds of Hindu gods in polychrome colors. The room of one thousand pillars has the pillars decorated with more of the Hindu deities and scenes from the life of India in the seventeenth century. Professor Gangadaran furnished a short introduction to the children of the Hindu mythology, and we dined with Professor Tangaraj and his family. We slept in the seminary under mosquito netting. The seminary where Thomas Tangaraj taught was particularly dedicated to orienting the seminarians toward the social-cultural life of south India, whereas our seminary in Bangalore was more Western and classically oriented. Other high points of our travels as we finished our time in India were the game sanctuary, referred to above, and the zoo and palace at Madurai. The boys had both read about Tipu Sultan, and so the visit to his fortress and palace were particularly important to them.

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We were a little irreverent among ourselves in the visit to Gomateshwara, the fiftyseven-foot-high statue of the Jain saint. It sits on top of a hill of over six hundred steps. It is about a thousand years old, and probably the tallest statue east of Suez. The quiet dedication and discipline of the Jain faith was ignored in the light of Randy naming the idol “the Jolly Green Jain.” Though I could not be too critical, as only Bebb and I were serious students of religion and our Protestant children had already been exposed to thousands of deities on our travels. They all grasped, I believe, the humanism of the Jains, and that the statues surrounding the saint were those of gurus and not gods. Randy left for Delhi a few days earlier than the rest of us. The ticket I had bought for him turned out to be second-class sleeper accommodations, which he shared with others in the same compartment on hard berths. He spent two nights on the train and later reported on the conversations he had about religion with a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Christian with whom he ended up sharing a compartment. He spent a couple of days by himself in Delhi; then we flew up and united the family. We traveled for another couple of weeks in India before flying from Delhi. En route, the children visited Agra’s Taj Majal with us, and the fort and palaces of Delhi. A final day was spent visiting the mosque and shopping in the ancient market. On arriving for our final night at the Omni Hotel, we used the last of our rupee notes to light the last of our fireworks. I think a single rupee was worth eight cents. Our few fireworks were left over from the splendid Fourth of July party our Muslim hosts of the Only Place had provided for us. They set up grills and cooked the hot dogs and hamburgers for us and our guests from the college. They actually had acquired the fireworks for us, and they lit most of them, but a few were reserved for the kids. We were happy that none of the college buildings caught fire. For some time after our return, our affluence and the comfort of our home seemed jarringly out of place, given the reality of the poverty and disorder of India. Jessica would hold India close to her heart for years, as she developed a first career in helping educate American students on college tours to the subcontinent. Some of her trips took her to Rajasthan, which we had omitted from our trip because of the danger there at the time. Randy published an essay on India’s turbulent politics in the Harvard Political Review (summer 1985), which was written before his travel on the subcontinent. His speculations about the ability of Rajiv Gandhi to hold the order together seemed almost predictive after the religious-political divisions led to his assassination. Randy’s international economic interests would keep India relevant to his perspective, even though his major work was directed to Eastern Europe. Patricia would, on her own, dedicate two years to social work in Benin in the Peace Corps. Her journey into the rural poverty of Africa was the deepest and most sustained of any of our efforts in or for the less developed world. I hesitate to speak of its impact on Bebb. If I had appeared at all heroic, I was now known in all my vulnerability as I tried to cope with diarrhea and the difficulty of responsibility for a party of six in a strange world unknown to me. How could she forget my jumping on a taxi and lecturing the hassling taxi drivers, demanding better treatment because we were guests in their country? When she came up for ordination

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a year and a half later, her refusal to unhesitatingly affirm that salvation was only through Christ was explained partially in terms of her experience in India. The fundamentalists and misogynists grilled her for four hours before the Presbytery voted to admit her to candidacy for the Presbyterian ministry. I was able to work with Robert Smylie to prepare a resolution on satyagraha and peacemaking reflecting on Gandhi’s contribution to the peacemaking ministry of Christians for the Advisory Council, which the General Assembly accepted in 1986. The resolution recognized the ambiguities of the relationship of the United States with India. My original draft argued: India’s greatest theological gift to the United States is the satyagraha tradition of Gandhi. Gandhi’s synthesis of Hindu and Christian insights bore fruit in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s synthesis of Gandhian and Christian social theologies of liberating change. In both of these liberating theological giants religious conversations between traditions moved beyond dialogue to new syntheses of great creativity. These traditions impact upon the non-violent strategies of Presbyterian peacemaking commitments. The resolution noted the terrible poverty and violence within India and called upon the Presbyterian Church to take several actions regarding U.S.-India relations, and to work through theological education for deeper appreciation of the peacemaking gains to be made by nonviolent social strategies. The book Christian Realism and Peacemaking, which I had written in Kodaikanal, contained my chapter on Indian human economic development. My argument for mixed economic solutions to India’s lack of economic development seems to have been the way of the future, even though the Indian socialists of the faculty at Bangalore rejected it as only “mixed-up economy” when I presented it in a faculty seminar there. The theology of war and peace in the book written in Indian hill country may be the best three chapters I have written on these subjects. For me, the life between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal germinated to overcome some of the provincialism of the boy from between the forks of the Des Moines River. It deepened my commitments to nonviolent direct action as a means of social change, taught me the human origins of world religions, united the struggles for social justice to peacemaking, and satisfied that deep yearning to experience the beauty, grace, and poverty of poly-religious India. In certain company, I refer to it as my missionary year, but such a description may confuse as much as it informs. The formal report to the board of directors of the seminary on the sabbatical referred first to the two books I had finished editing before leaving for India: The Peacemaking Struggle, and the Festschrift for Roger L. Shinn, The Public Vocation of Christian Ethics, coedited by Beverly Harrison and Robert Stivers. It then summarized the India work: The results of the study in India both in the library and through travel are appearing in Christian Realism and Peacemaking, of course, but also in two courses I am teaching this fall and winter: Church and Society in

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International Perspectives and The Ethics of Peacemaking. I am also designing a course for next year in comparative ethics with a focus on Gandhi and King. One further result of the time in India was that the Reverend Mr. Thomas Chacko came from Bangalore to study in Pittsburgh. He completed a master of sacred theology degree at the seminary and studied in the University of Pittsburgh’s doctor of philosophy program for two years. He found the program there not appropriate for him, and he was ordained a Methodist pastor serving in western Pennsylvania churches. Bebb and I reported our findings in India to the Peace Fellowship of the seminary, which I had initiated a few years earlier. In October, I led a chapel service with peace hymns and prayers and shared a poem I had written about Pittsburgh, war making, and peace in 1983. A Pittsburgh Song The first European to ford the forks of the Ohio was laden with pelts traded from the natives. His load was bound for Philadelphia and the international markets of European commerce. George Washington came and selected it as a site for a fort. Then he assassinated de Jumonville and launched the French and Indian War fought here, in India, and on the battlefields of Europe for the Empire. The first Presbyterian pastor here, prayed his first Presbyterian prayer in the burning ruins of the French fort Duquesne. Then it was given a Prime Minister’s name, and it was called a fort—Pitt’s burgh. Cities in the Old Testament were forts on high places, German still retains that meaning in the names of the cities. Berg for mountain, Burg for fort. Cain’s city founded as a fort from fratricide. We Presbyterians came as conquerors, we prospered in commerce and in war.

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we prayed to God and we preyed on immigrants; we prospered and we owned “Hell with the lid off.” The workers fought back, but they lost in Homestead. European immigrants, Catholic, Orthodox, and Blacks bowed to the work ethic and social Darwinism. Presbyterian business and Catholic politics launched a renaissance; the Presbyterian conquest of the Catholic fort was forgotten. The new alliance, called a Renaissance produced a new necropolis of weapons and money. The acropolis, our high place, however, promises to become our necropolis. The city’s high places threaten to become the city’s burial place. Our high places are centers of high technological weapons. We fuel the nuclear attack carriers, we design the Star Wars technology, We build the missile guidance systems. Government becomes Caesar to be trusted. Science becomes the knowledge of war. Production becomes the Military Industrial Complex. This new trinity is joined to fear. The trinity of science, Caesar, and mammon in the context of fear threatens to kill us all. In political failure and religious unfaith, we prepare to end it all. Can we a minority find faith to undo our homage to the demonic forces? Can we replace the trust in the Military, Industrial complex

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with loyalty to a church of faith, hope, and love? The Pittsburgh Theological Seminary studies in Pitt’s fort, the high tech arsenal of democracy. Will it leave only a Presbyterian prayer in the ruins of the fort or will it give us a church fit for the time?

Oxford University Boxing Team in 1966 (Ron Stone in second row)

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Columbia, PhD robe (1968)

Ron and Randy at Little Red Light House, Manhattan

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Family in Pittsburgh

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Assistant Professor Stone leaves Columbia University/Union Theological Seminary and moves to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and University of Pittsburgh in 1969 (Photo by John H. Popper)

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Dialogue with Reverend Gail Buchwalter and Dr. Preston Williams on urban ministry and policy for Pittsburgh (ca. 1973)

Lecture on business ethics to urban ethics class (summer school) and Westinghouse officers at Glassport Iron Foundry (1976)

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Ron discusses Pennsylvania politics and runs as delegate to convention for Morris K. L. Udall in 1976

Inauguration of John Witherspoon Chair in 1992; lecture: “The Ultimate Imperative” (Credit: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)

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Brother Alan at reception (Credit: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)

India, 1985. Clockwise: Bebb requested to join bride at Taj Mahal

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Ron at picnic in Kashmir

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Ron with Professor and Mrs. Thomas Tangaraj

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John practices his rowing at school in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu

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Post-India family dinner

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Bebb receives PhD from the University of Pittsburgh

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Father’s Day at the Pirates game

Archaeology team at Ghost Ranch

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Among the petroglyphs near Albuquerque

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Bodium Castle, England

Great Pyramid

Ron and Randy in Red Square

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Dialogue with mayor of Beit Omar, West Bank

Conversation with Kosuke Koyama, Singapore

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Dialogue with sheik at Khiam Fortress in South Lebanon

Ron and Patricia in San Francisco

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Alan, Hugh, Roger, and Ron—four brothers in Fort Dodge, Iowa

Family at Lake Okoboji, Iowa, in 2013

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Wedding at Duck, North Carolina, to Linda Haddad, July 1, 2008

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Ron after finishing memoir

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Pittsburgh Theological Seminary

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Chapter 41

John C. Bennett John Bennett wrote me about some of his work in theology and nuclear politics soon after our return to the United States. His letter and his attached paper made me regret not having asked him to contribute to the book The Peacemaking Struggle. Dear Ron, I assume that you are back in this country. I am sending a copy of a paper I have written for the AAR meeting later in this month. I got permission to include as part of the paper most of my article in The Christian Century on “Divine Persuasion and Divine Judgment,” but I go a lot beyond that and raise theological issues too briefly that are almost never discussed and try to indicate ways in which my thinking can be related to policy. I realize that even the best policy-makers will not use my language or agree fully or even publically with most of my conclusions. Yet I think that there are policy-makers and public figures with whom we can work. Your chapter in the Presbyterian volume is excellent and the volume as a whole is well planned and written. My views are much the same as yours. Perhaps my only difference is that I think that the Catholic Bishops were wise in not calling for immediate nuclear disarmament. If they had done so, they would not have been listened to on their argument that leads to the conclusion that the weapons should never be used. The more people come to realize that the weapons are morally and prudentially unusable, the more they will in their minds undercut deterrence. I am glad that you do not move to theoretic absolute pacifism as portions of the book seem to do. The general criticism of the domination of militarism is sound and needs to be greatly emphasized. The book is a powerful manifesto for nuclear pacifism and anti-militarism. I wonder about the responses of your constituency . . . Love, John John and I were able to enjoy a visit in Anaheim at the American Academy of Religion meeting. I then visited Anne and him at Claremont, where she was residing in the health center. She was quite alert, but it was the last time I would see her. She asked me if I had been to Nicaragua. When I said no, she replied, “Why not?” In another letter John feared that might have sounded too critical. It did not; it was in the best spirit of the imprisoned Thoreau, and I loved her more for it. He visited her four times a day at the center at Pilgrim Place, and mentioned that he was reading the Fox biography of Reinhold Niebuhr to her. Charles Brown, the Niebuhr family, and I had a much more critical perspective than John on the book, though he had deep reservations about it as well. I had grown up assisting John, as well as the other professors in classes at Union. We had taught Reinhold’s class on moral issues in international politics together after Reinhold’s death. We had worked together against the Vietnam War. We continued to correspond regularly, and I visited him whenever I was in California. I had been able to

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arrange his presentation on the ethics of aging at the seminary and on the Fellowship of Socialist Christians at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Anaheim. His retirement from the presidency of the seminary led to his active teaching at other institutions in California for years. Anne Bennett, John’s wife, died in October 1986 at their home in Claremont. John’s letters to me commented on his appreciation of my visit to Anne in Claremont, her rising importance in the feminist movement, and how she both fulfilled the traditional responsibilities of wife of the president of Union Seminary and also was a bold social activist. Their long marriage was a blessing to many and a witness to the fact that at the highest levels of Christian ethics in the Church a student could successfully marry her professor. John told me once as Joan and I were divorcing that you have to get through those young years of marital crisis and then the way becomes easier. I remember particularly that Anne was usually a little to the left of John, and that she criticized him when she thought his positions were too timid. She was very gracious when they arrived one night early (from our perspective) for dinner in our apartment. They returned the next evening, and she again was gracious when we forgot to take the potatoes out of the oven. John told me that it was Anne who insisted it was time to appoint a woman in ethics when the question of Beverly Harrison’s appointment arose. The Pittsburgh Seminary newsletter of 1985 celebrated an enrollment of 425 students, and the new president, Samuel Carnegie Calian, was beginning to exert considerable prowess as a fund-raiser and sharp manager for the seminary. The board of directors exerted its control through the president, who also wielded strong influence on the board, and the confusions of previous, more democratic decision making by faculty with student participation came to an end. Personally, I remained politically active at the seminary, often representing the faculty to the board. I had welcomed President Calian and supported him strongly with a highly respectful oral review of his publication on Berdyaev to the faculty. Others were more suspicious of him. In his first years we were quite close. Gradually I became more critical of his many-pronged agenda, which I feared would dilute the core educational mission of the school. Understandably, he distanced himself from me and became more restrained in his appreciation of my work. He pushed the students to read the Wall Street Journal, which he argued was objective in its news reporting. I urged the reading of the New York Times, which informed me and was closer to the social positions of the Presbyterian Church, which were on the whole quite liberal and more progressive than the Democratic Party. I was still supportive of him as president, but my required review of him as a teacher was quite critical, and he was more conscious of pleasing the conservative community in Pittsburgh represented on the board, while I found my support in the Times and other book reviews, the intellectual circles of the Presbyterian Church, and liberal academia.

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Chapter 42

Third Presbyterian Church Bebb returned to her full-time studies and graduated from the seminary. Her preliminary hearings before the Presbytery had raised a challenge from the minister of First Presbyterian Church, who thought there would not be positions for these new women ministers. He did not prevail, and she was accepted. Later she processed through the Committee on Ministry and came before the full Presbytery for her trials. The meeting started with a minister challenging my new book for the Church, The Peacemaking Struggle, in heated words of disapproval. Her trials before the whole Presbytery were very unpleasant. It was an outstanding liberal-woman candidate being subjected to an unusual grilling by conservative, patriarchal figures at the Presbytery meeting in the Westminster Church not that far from her home and her own congregation. They could not agree to take a vote before lunch, and the trials were suspended until the afternoon. We all thought her several-hour trials set a record. But she prevailed and was prepared to be ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament. Still, as it was difficult to find a position, she entered into the PhD program between the seminary and the university to continue her education. I knew the pastor at Third Presbyterian Church well, as I regularly taught classes at their Sunday morning adult forum. In the spring of 1986 he asked me to teach at Third on Sundays, September 14–October 16. When he indicated to me that they would like to find a minister for Christian education and they were open to seeking a call for a woman pastor, I strongly recommended Bebb. His past experience in the business world seemed to meld well with Bebb’s tenure on Wall Street, and initially they hit it off very well. So after negotiations they worked out a position that was to be less than full-time, and she would work on her PhD. I preached one of the ordination speeches at her service of ordination at Third Presbyterian on Fifth Avenue. Sue Dunfee, a former student at the seminary, had returned to Pittsburgh as an assistant professor three years earlier. She gave the “charge” to the new minister. Later she would be a tennis partner for Bebb. Eventually she became chair of Bebb’s PhD committee at the University of Pittsburgh. Following the service on May 10, 1987, the enormity of her undertaking a very hard PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh in combination with a potentially limitless ministry hit me. I expressed my sense of dread to Bebb in an inappropriate remark to her following the service. In retrospect, many years later, I can realize that many adjustments in my own workload and in household responsibilities should have followed. The structure of Third Presbyterian is generally recognized as one of the most beautiful churches in Pittsburgh. The Reverend Bart Leach’s basketball career, business career, Princeton education, and good humor made him a natural minister for the congregation. Bebb brought high preaching talents, wisdom in educational ministry, and social justice passions to the mix. Leach’s neo-orthodox theology should have balanced Bebb’s more traditional Christian liberalism well. Her feminism was well received by younger women as well as the professional women of the congregation, and it could have been a complementary strength. The former director of education

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continued in the church, until his retirement, as a minister of pastoral outreach and counseling. It was a team that promised to turn around Third’s decline from a major church of the Presbytery to a small congregation. The center city it served was declining in population, and the integrated busing for city schools led Presbyterians with children to move to the suburbs. A few would commute for a while to church, but the general pattern was to shift membership to the burgeoning Presbyterian churches in the suburbs. We stayed in Bebb’s home in Mount Lebanon for the early years of her work in the church. Jessica wanted to finish high school there. It was a pleasant home, and only a few minutes’ walk to the high school or the shopping center of the suburb. There was also a park with deer quite close. It was about a forty-five-minute commute through city traffic to the seminary or the church. We would wait until my children were done with school or after-school activities before returning to the suburb in the evenings when they were joining us. Both Bebb and I drove Volvos, and it worked best when the schedules allowed us to take only one car into the city, but that was not always possible. Particularly after she started working at Third, we often needed two-car commutes. Randy was only home occasionally for vacations, so we usually had two kids at home, and twice a week three when Patricia came. As Jessica finished her senior year at Mount Lebanon High and prepared to matriculate to Wooster College, Bebb was notified by our realty agent of a perfect house, on Grafton Street, six blocks from the seminary. She phoned me, and I joined her at the house, which was undergoing its agents’ inspection day in the fresh snow. We made an offer and prepared to move in the early summer. The house had been built to the specifications of a gentle lady, and it included servants’ quarters, the second staircase, a bell system for summoning the help, and a remodeled kitchen. Its three stories were divided into three bedrooms and two baths on the second floor and two bedrooms and a small study on the third floor. There were three working fireplaces and two that needed repair. The dining room and sunken living room were grand. The small front yard and larger backyard were spacious for city living. The garage was narrow but functional, as it had been built for an electric car. With the extra shower we put in the basement, the house had two baths and two half-baths, so it was quite comfortable when all were present on holidays and summertime. I could walk to work, and Bebb had a short commute to the church and university. In fact, I usually drove. The Roberts children could walk to their father’s home four blocks away. Joan and her husband, Sid Morris, lived only two blocks away across Highland Avenue, making an even easier walk for Patricia between her two parents’ homes. John had his freshman year at Mount Lebanon, but now he joined Patricia in the walk to Peabody High School. John majored in soccer with quite an international team. Several of the team members would hang out at our home. Patricia was deeply into her art, and that necessitated her traveling to various art sites around the city. Post-India both Bebb and I threw ourselves into our vocations. She had nearly full-time parenting, the PhD classwork, homemaker duties, and a part-time church vocation, which was actually full-time. The death of her father, John Wheeler, on October 5,

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1986, in Jacksonville, Florida, was hard for her. She had gone to care for him, and I brought John and Jessica down for the funeral. I was busy with my research and writing; the academic, practical life at the seminary and the University of Pittsburgh; classes to teach; the Advisory Council for the Presbyterian Church; and elder responsibilities at East Liberty Presbyterian Church. In addition, my seminary study became something of a social action office, as I advised various church bodies locally and nationally on social justice issues. After I assumed official responsibilities at the local East Liberty Development Corporation, it seemed that too often I drove past the seminary to give secretaries work at either the church or the development corporation. In addition, I was speaking at a lot of churches about American policy in Central America. I criticized the administration’s counterrevolutionary policies and our involvement in suppressing peasants who were revolting for better opportunities.

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Chapter 43

Post-India Writing In 1986 there was quite a bit of follow-up work on India. Recommendations for Indians had to be written, and friends requested articles and support for Indian social causes. I was still editing and seeking publication of Christian Realism and Peacemaking, which I had written there.

STAR WARS The new year of 1986 began for me with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publishing my January 7 op-ed essay “Star Wars Would Be a Threat to the Soviets and to the World.” It was a followup on the visit of the former director of Advanced Space Programs for the Air Force Space Division, Dr. Robert Bowman, to the seminary campus in December. He had argued the plan for the new “defensive” space-based system was a threat to the Soviets because it could be used to cripple any missiles the Soviet Union had left after a first strike by the United States took out the first 90 percent of its longrange missiles. Bowman, like other experts, was arguing that we were preparing for nuclear war, not deterrence. Other expert witnesses were quoted on the improbability of the defense system succeeding. The article shifted to the economics of the system, arguing that the acceleration of the program would deprive Americans of education and health care. This was a frequent argument in my peacemaking speeches, as I argued that the welfare of the American people had to take priority over the military domination of the world. When a theological student had asked Dr. Bowman about the alternative to Star Wars, he had answered, “Friendship.” This theme of overcoming the hate-filled rhetoric of our political leaders and advertisers was another major thesis of my approach to peacemaking. Visits, dialogue, and partnership with the Russians were preferable to fanning hostility, which took a long time for rational inquiry to overcome. The military industry had gotten into the fray with an advertisement at our local airport: “Support SDI or learn Russian.” Even though I had found Russian a hard language to study and to communicate in, I agreed with the latter alternative. The op-ed piece commented on various anti-Russian cultural movements and pointed to our common Jewish-Christian heritages. I found great possibilities for friendship in our need to manage together the nuclear weapons we had created. Our Festschrift for Roger Shinn, The Public Vocation of Christian Ethics, containing the essay on my Siberia trip, was published in 1986. The party for Roger conflicted with other obligations, and I was not able to make it. The book was not really pushed by Pilgrim Press, and despite the quality of the writers secured, the book failed to make a big impact. Dr. Chris Iosso informed me that Beverly Harrison had used the book with graduate students in Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary.

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University Press of America republished my volume Paul Tillich’s Radical Social Thought after Robert Scharlemann and Theodore Runyon assured the press it was the standard work on the subject. I was pleased, as the book had taken much of my research and writing time from 1975 to 1980. Harold T. Twiss of the Westminster Press was interested in a book I projected for the centenary of Niebuhr’s birth in 1992, and I began designing that project, which involved a survey of his students. The book was to emphasize his teaching, the content of his courses, and the degree to which Union Theological Seminary was his actual home or base of operations. I thought the Union context had been slighted in the important biography of Niebuhr by Richard Fox. I had the opportunity to comment on Fox’s book at the “Books on Business Spring Series” over lunch at Kaufmann’s sponsored by the Pittsburgh Business Times and the Pittsburgh Council for Higher Education in March. I was critical of the book’s psychological speculation. The author was not prepared to appreciate either Niebuhr’s theology or his thought on international politics. However, I particularly complimented the book on its in-depth presentation of the younger Niebuhr. I was a little less critical years later after I read the letters of the early Niebuhr revealing his own self-doubts. Fox had access to the letters before the rest of us learned of them through their deposit in the Niebuhr Papers at the Library of Congress.

REINHOLD NIEBUHR ON BOOKS In 1984 Robert Handy, Church history professor at Union, asked me to speak on Reinhold Niebuhr’s use of books to a meeting of the Friends of the Burke Library, which had been formed for the remodeling of the library. I accepted for 1986. I wrote to Ursula for advice in March and sent my paper to Christopher Niebuhr for comment. I did not receive any advice, and so I went ahead in May 1986. The paper was especially well received by the two dozen or so guests at the meeting, and a nice reception followed. Beverly Harrison and I went to another reception that served as dinner, and I spent the evening with her and her husband, James. I had learned that afternoon before the event from President Donald Shriver that Ursula had protested my giving the paper. She apparently thought that the event was the grand opening of the remodeled library, and she was angry that she had not been invited to the event, which in reality had taken place much earlier. Ursula and I exchanged correspondence about the event. Donald Shriver praised my tact in answering her, assured me that the paper and lecture were very well received, and invited me to a forthcoming Niebuhr event for the next year. Ursula, of course, knew more about Reinhold’s use of books and the New York context for the discussion of books than I did. I thought I had met Robert Handy’s invitation rather well. Larry Rasmussen, the Reinhold Niebuhr professor, asked for a copy of the paper for a discussion in his class on Reinhold Niebuhr’s use of the work of Ernst Troeltsch. Beverly had asked him to procure it, as she was to discuss that subject in his seminar. All in all I received more praise for that paper than I usually received. Ursula and I corresponded a couple of times over our disagreements, which diminished as time passed. Her concern over the issue led her to two works. One was simply a list of

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books she and Reinhold had read and discussed. I found it very helpful. The second was a paper, “The Niebuhr Library,” that addressed the intellectual context of book discussions they enjoyed. I congratulated her on the paper and asked that she publish it.

BIBLICAL COLLOQUIUM Pittsburgh Seminary, under the leadership first of Marcus Barth and then of Ulrich Mauser, sponsored a school of thought known as biblical theology. I had published Ulrich Mauser and Donald Gowan’s papers on the Bible and peace in The Peacemaking Struggle, and I thought very highly of their work in this area. John Yoder, a Mennonite theologian from Notre Dame, had published on the subjects of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr’s positions on Christian pacifism. He himself represented an understanding of Jesus as a pacifist with a rather complete political program. Most of the Mennonites were quietists withdrawing from political participation, but Yoder advocated an activist but pacifist participation in social life. We were both asked to participate in the Fifth Biblical Colloquium at the Seminary. I was asked to present the case for a modified dualism in Christian ethics, which distinguished between a radical ethic for personal ethics and a responsible ethic for social ethics. Professor Yoder would make the case that ethical dualisms were misleading. He argued for a radical pacifist ethic based on his political interpretation of the New Testament. I occasionally used his book The Politics of Jesus in ethics classes to present an alternative to Reinhold Niebuhr. I personally did not believe that we could find a political ethic in Jesus. I thought it not too relevant to argue Jesus was a pacifist in the modern sense, since Jews were not subject to service in the Roman army, and a good Jew could not have participated in the Roman army of occupation. The New Testament often used military metaphors and described Jesus’ association with Romans, but these references were too little to build an ethic of war and peace upon. Since Jesus never addressed the military issues in the Roman Empire, I had no idea of what his particular ethic would look like when confronted with American imperial responsibilities. In my understanding, Christian social ethics always required relevant social sciences, and this was too far from Jesus to assert direct connections other than the requirements of Christian love. Christian love drove toward the responsibility to protect as well as the responsibility to aid the victims of violence. I thought we could ground a social ethic in Paul’s theology of faith, hope, and love connecting the Christian virtues to the classical virtues as Augustine had done for his time within the context of imperial responsibility. I presented a paper recognizing modified dualisms in Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. I thought Niebuhr drew his modified ethical dualism from these sources. All three of these thinkers recognized the responsibility of the Christian in the armed forces or police to use violence in a restrained way to protect citizens and establish order. Niebuhr’s dualism was grounded in what he thought a Christian could do and the necessities of a socialist revolutionary movement in the 1930s. It was based in his personal experience, but he generalized it to the reality of Christian life in the world.

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This was because in the 1930s he was tempted by the Christian perfectionism rooted in the thought of many of his social gospel friends. He had been a pacifist, but he realized this was not correlated with the need to be responsible in political action, so he proposed this personal-social dualistic view of Christian social ethics for the activists. He always recognized the rights of other Christians not to participate in politics or the use of force. In fact, he saw a consistency in Mennonite refusal to vote and to refuse service in the armed forces. I thought a distinction between personal and social responsibility made sense, even if it could lead to problems. Sociologically such a distinction might not appear obvious, but it was to the political actor. Yoder could not agree. He refused to believe that social institutions were always more corrupt than the individual. He asked, “Is not the Church a social institution promoting the Christian life?” I could only answer, “Yes, and no.” Sometimes it exhibited a high ethic, but often it was corrupt. His Mennonite churches were different from my Presbyterian Church, which assumed social responsibility. We could not accept each other’s biblical interpretations. We had a different perspective on social responsibility grounded in our commitments. These same arguments would appear throughout my career. I did not believe Jesus was a pacifist in a modern sense, nor did I believe he was an exponent like Gandhi and King of nonviolent social action. I was an enthusiastic supporter of nonviolent social action, and I have practiced it on different continents, but I did not find Jesus organizing it. I could not accept John Yoder or his colleague Stanley Hauerwas’s idealization of the Christian Church. The churches I knew were not as ethically sensitive as many individual Christians who had learned their ethics from the Church but remained suspicious of the actual Church in the world. I appreciated the encounter with John Yoder, who was a formidable debater and scholar, but I could not agree with him, nor could he with me. It was a good thing we had our individual churches in which we both could function. Ulrich Mauser told me months later that he had a different interpretation of Augustine from mine, but he did not elaborate. The Biblical Institute published my paper without criticism as I had written it.

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Chapter 44

Peacemaking The issues around the Church and peacemaking kept me busy during 1986. Bishop James Ault requested advice on the Methodist bishops’ letter on peacemaking, and he sent my remarks on into the Methodist process. Later I learned that my friend Alan Geyer was the major drafter of the document for the bishops. Washington, D.C., churches were also asking me to speak on weekend seminars on peacemaking. Dorothe Soelle and I co-taught a seminar on “Resistance and Peacemaking” at Ghost Ranch in August. The Soelles and the Stones visited some Native American historical sites together. Later she would stay with us in Pittsburgh. We led the class in a demonstration against nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos labs as part of the course, using the materials Dana Wilbanks and I had prepared for the church as curriculum. Bebb, three children, and I were able to make the drive to New Mexico. Georgia O’Keefe was missed, as she had died in March 1986. I particularly loved her work, and Patricia went through her O’Keefe period in her own art. I had chatted with her on the ranch, and several of the children had visited in her home, as had Bebb and I. In particular, I remember her embarrassment over the room in the ancient house overlooking Highway 78, which had been used to imprison Native Americans being sold into slavery. On the occasion of my father’s death a few years later, Patricia painted a lily in the O’Keefe mode for me, which still hangs on my wall. Six months earlier I had reserved five pack mules for the descent into the Grand Canyon. It was to be a big event to conclude our trip West. Jessica chose not to ride down, but the four of us mounted our steeds. They were too wide for us, and our joints ached almost the whole way down the trail. I think I probably had the worst case. At the bottom of the trail, I offered to carry the mule back up the trail to avoid the pain of being spread so unnaturally. Both Bebb and I were terribly sore. John was a little less so. But Patricia had been at a horse camp for a week for two summers, and it did not bother her. Aside from the sharp aches, the trip down and back was beautiful and a little harrowing at places, but the wide mules knew their way and were sure of their footing. We stopped at Mesa Verde on the trip home. I had visited before, but it was the first time for the children, and all were suitably impressed and glad to ask the ranger tour guides tough questions. John, with his own funds, bought a green monkey as a gift for Patricia, she having appreciated it in the store. The kids also collected bottles to turn into the store for extra money when we camped at Mesa Verde. It had not been possible for Randy to make the trip. He often came to the ranch, but he was spending a semester in Freiburg, Germany. He planned to be with us in late August in Pittsburgh and to return to classes in mid-September. He sent John a Germanlanguage birthday card, hoping that with some little help he could understand it. He made a special request for a book to introduce John to the German language, even if in translation, saying that was how his interest in the language was aroused. Actually, my

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memory is that I insisted he study German. Randall’s facility in all language study increased over the years, and he was the outstanding linguist in the family until he married a language teacher, Martha Koenig, and they raised their children bilingually. He reported that his Fourth of July party in Germany was a great success and that his solo “Star Spangled Banner” received great applause despite strong anti-American feeling at the university. He also reported on the great anniversary celebration of his suburb’s twelve-hundredth anniversary.

CONTINUING WORK ON PAUL TILLICH Jean Richard of the Laval Faculty and a friend from the Tillich Society asked me to come to Quebec following Ghost Ranch to present background context for the translation work his seminar was doing on the socialist Tillich. The French-speaking students were delightful. Various ones showed me around the city, and one weekend Jean and I visited one of his young colleagues by the lake north of the city. A student could be encountered earning his way by playing an accordion-like instrument on the boardwalk overlooking the St. Lawrence River. I spoke in English to his seminar. My French, though stronger than my German, was still inadequate for conversation or give and take in the seminar. The trips to Quebec in the summers of 1986 and 1987 increased my appreciation of French academia and French Catholicism greatly. In the summer of 1987 Bebb brought Patricia to the city with her. The Canadian socialism of Jean Richard provided an agreeable context for interpreting Tillich. The centennial of Paul Tillich’s birth was 1986, and I was asked to give papers to various academic gatherings. One of the best of these events was at Hope College in Michigan. My friend Mary Ann Stenger was there from the University of Louisville. Jonathan Smith from Yale and Langdon Gilkey from Chicago were also among scholars featured. Arthur Jentz from Hope College had carefully designed the event, and it went forward very well. The papers were later published by the Society of Values in Higher Education in its volume Soundings in the winter of 1986. Mine was on “The Correlation of Politics and Culture in Paul Tillich’s Thought.” It related Tillich’s thought and action from the early revolutionary Tillich in Germany to the elderly professor in America protesting against nuclear weapons and their threats. My conclusion to the rather descriptive academic paper reveals my passions at the time and my hopes for a more engaged academia: Some of us in academia and the church are more responsible for the shape of the culture than we are for politics. We can do things in culture that politicians cannot yet do and retain power. We can attack the hatefilled anti-Communism that poisons our culture. We can attack and create alternative programming to the mass television nonsense that deadens the minds of American citizens. We can demand that Christianity be intelligible and that ministers be intelligent. We can attack the one-sided individualism that thwarts planning in society and social responsibility in church. We can practice and advocate resistance to militarism. Politicians sensing the restraints of our poisoned culture must necessarily move

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more slowly; but if we move, they can move. In a Tillichian sense of expectation we can hold up a vision of humanity transforming itself as it learns to educate itself, feed itself fairly, plan for welfare rather than compete for greed, accept a political-cultural pluralism, engage world religious systems in dialogue rather than in terror, and venture out of a star-wars mentality into a star-trek dream. In our hopes we can participate in a theonomous (God-directed and -fulfilled) struggle toward a dynamic just-peace.

ADVISORY COUNCIL ON CHURCH AND SOCIETY (ACCS) My thought was taking on the character of the Presbyterian Advisory Council on Church and Society (ACCS). It was a dialectical relationship as the council was taking on more of my thought and the seminary received both of these contributions. This mutual dialectical relationship was a social one. The council and the seminary both worked through committees, and the formation of my mind or the contribution of my thought to the council or seminary was a social process. The General Assembly resolution on not renewing the rescheduling of loans to South Africa is similar to the materials I had published in Social Action in 1968. A few years down the road I would teach the course “Ethics and Politics” with Roy Ebers, a South African, on apartheid and overcoming it. The council required about five out-of-town meetings per year. These were usually on weekends, so they did not interfere with classwork. In 1987 there were ACCS meetings in Newark, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Then there was usually a meeting with the Peacemaking Committee, probably an editorial meeting, and some years there would be a course at Ghost Ranch for a week in the summer. We often stayed two weeks at the ranch. About this time, between weeks at Ghost Ranch, Dean Lewis and his associate Gail Benfield, Bebb, and I spent a day touring the Spanish American churches in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. For me the work of the ACCS flowed into the life of the seminary and into my own writing. My personal life took on a lot of the ACCS’s scheduling agenda, particularly when our work in resistance to militarism attracted a lot of attention.

NASHVILLE PRESBYTERY AND RESISTANCE The Nashville Presbytery was very hospitable, providing accommodations in a private home and a guide for touring Nashville before the meeting of the Middle Tennessee Presbytery. Dorothy Doherty, the chairperson of the Presbytery’s Peace and Justice Committee, was very gracious, and she supported the process when it was criticized. I spoke to about two hundred elders and ministers in the Vanderbilt University Chapel. The local paper, The Tennessean, provided excellent coverage of the event and of the protests against me and the Presbyterian Church. The paper did feature what I

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considered the more inflammatory aspects of my talk and slid over the traditional Presbyterian theology undergirding it. I introduced the study “Presbyterians and Peacemaking: Are We Called to Resistance?” I argued that in the context of militarism and the “idolatry” of a nuclear buildup for security, God’s justice required us to consider resistance and noncooperation with the military. I informed them that the Church was in a process of trying to discover God’s will regarding the military policies of the United States. I explained that though we discussed various forms of resistance in the study paper, neither Dana Wilbanks nor I regarded all of the means as wise responses to the present situation. I discussed the Calvinist strong yes to government and reminded them that sometimes the Church has to say no to government and face the consequences. I attempted to persuade them that now was the time for the church to be thinking and deciding on the issues. The chairman of Presbyterians for Democracy and Religious Freedom from Nashville, John Boone, objected that he was not given time to speak to the Presbytery. One delegate from the Presbytery moved to cut my time to thirty minutes to allow equal time for challenges. The moderator noted there was time set aside after the meeting for further dialogue. John Boone and a student from Reformed Seminary joined me for discussion after the Presbytery meeting. Another twelve to fifteen Presbyters joined us. I was used to the Presbyterian Laymen, another right-of-center Presbyterian group, challenging me. They had denounced me in several issues of their publication, The Presbyterian Layman. Actually, their name was disingenuous. Though funded by laymen and Sunoco Oil, its leadership were clergy opposed to the social mission of the Presbyterian Church. The Institute for Religion and Democracy was another corporate-funded group that attacked the work of the General Assembly on social justice issues. I believed John Boone was related to the Institute, which spent a lot of money attacking the study process. The student, a veteran of the Vietnam War, argued that war was justified, and he resented any critique of the military. According to the newspaper, the document presented by John Boone to the Presbytery accused our paper of being soft on Communism, advocating a position bordering on anarchy and dangerous to national security. The dialogue was polite and orderly, but the disagreements were very sharp, and Boone felt it impossible to trust my report that the paper was for study and not a draft for General Assembly. Mrs. Doherty reported that the Peacemaking Committee would study the paper and respect the process and report to the Presbytery. In the summer of 1987, I joined the working group meeting on faith and economics at Ghost Ranch. This in-depth study by economists, political scientists, and professors of Christian ethics was developing materials to get beyond the previous failed attempts to develop a social ethic on American economics. This again fed into my course on Christian ethics and economics taught at the seminary. This work was reported to the General Assembly. My major contribution to the project was a paper on the economic ethics of John Calvin, in which I showed how he affirmed using public institutions for the common good and was not averse to using the city government of Geneva to regulate economics. It moved way beyond the ideas of Max Weber about Calvinist ethics to show that at its foundation Calvinist ethics were very much oriented to social

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reform, public institutions, and social welfare in the spirit of Christian ethics. Bob Stivers edited the papers and produced a book, Reformed Faith and Economics.

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Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness The minutes of the 1987 General Assembly recorded my appointment to a large committee to plan the consultation among the Presbyterian seminaries and the ACCS. This seemingly innocuous moment was to become very important to my vocation in future years. My term on the ACCS was about to come to an end. The ACCS, now joined with the southern Church’s Theology and Culture Committee, was to take on a new shape in the merged Church. As the new Church decided to move its offices to Louisville, and to slightly downgrade the importance of ACCS into the Committee on Social Witness Policy (CSWP), Dean Lewis resigned as head of the organization. He had directed it for its existence of fifteen years. We celebrated his tenure with a modest party after our meeting in San Antonio. After his wife, June Lewis, died, he moved to New Mexico near Ghost Ranch. Soon he became program director at the ranch. Dieter Hessel succeeded Dean Lewis as director of the social policy arm of the Church, now titled CSWP. He soon picked up the interest in the seminary professor’s discussions. We developed an organization called Theological Educators for Social Policy Witness to serve as a think tank for CSWP as well as a coordinating body to encourage Presbyterian seminary social witness.

RETURN TO PRAGUE I returned to Prague in November 1987 for the Christian Peace Conference’s Second International Symposium on Global Issues. The meeting was a group of twenty-one scholars, including both Marxists and Christians, from around the world focusing on new thinking for peace and justice. The Soviet Union was beginning a crisis as it turned to Gorbachev’s “glasnost” (openness). Major papers were delivered and discussed by Mar Gregorias of India, Professor Jaromir Sedlak and Lubomir Mirejovsky of Czechoslovakia, Nelson Miya of the African National Congress, Professor Ivan Frolov of the Soviet Union, and me. One major accomplishment of the seminar was to revive Christian-Marxist dialogue in Czechoslovakia, which had been underdeveloped since the 1968 suppression of “socialism with a human face” by Soviet forces. Of particular interest to Christian participants were the debates over the adequacy of the humanism that was inspiring moral renewal in the Soviet Union under the policies of “openness, democratization, and restructuring.” I suggested the inadequacies of the “real humanism” of professors Sedlak and Frolov, asking them to deepen their humanism grounded in Marx by returning to the teachings and images of the human in Jesus the Christ. The debate was open and engaging, even if agreement was lacking. The current emerging respect for the moral vision of Christianity in Communistdominated societies was noted by several speakers.

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The topics of new thinking, humanism, globalization, and renewal of the human were very broad. I chose to focus basically on two topics: the experience of the Presbyterian Church discussing resistance to militarization and Paul Tillich’s theological reflections on resistance to nuclear war making. So I had before me an actual case of four hundred churches choosing to participate in a study of proposed action, and a theology of depth that turned toward resistance. The paper was published under the title “The Struggle against Militarism, Part of Our Global Responsibility” by the Christian Peace Conference in Prague in the 1988 book, North-South East-West: Fate of This One World. My dialogue with Professor Frolov of the Russian Academy of Sciences was broadcast on Czech radio. A Czech theologian told me years later that it was listening to that dialogue that assured him Marxism was collapsing and that the Soviet Union would in time follow. None of us in that particular meeting in Prague knew how soon that would be. This was my last conversation in Prague with the advocates of real humanism understood in Marxist terms. The next time I returned, five years later, the symposium sponsored by Charles University would be on the theme of “human rights.” Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s peacemaking work was noted by Dr. Lubomir Mirejovsky of Prague, who had visited the seminary. As a citizen of Czechoslovakia, during his visit he had been impressed by students volunteering for work with the poor at East End Cooperative Ministry and by their study of Tom Bell’s novel Out of This Furnace, based on the stories of several Europeans’ work in the industry of Pittsburgh.

SEMINARY SOCIAL WITNESS The planning committee from ACCS saw its work come to fruition in the “Consultation on Church and Social Policy” at Mo-Ranch in October 1987. Seminary board members, administrators, students, and faculty gathered around the themes of the characteristics of reformed faith and the responsibilities of the seminaries toward the social witness of the Church. The one concrete action coming out of the consultation was the creation of a meeting of Church social ethicists. I nurtured the new organization, and we received some of the funds left over from the consultation to continue the work on seminary social responsibility. I chaired it for its first seven years. It met annually in a seminary to work on pedagogy, the teaching of social witness, to comment on the development of papers by ACSWP, and to strengthen bonds of support among the denominations’ social ethicists. The first meeting appropriately was in Louisville Theological Seminary in 1988, enabling the ethicists and other professors to meet the denominational executives in the new Church headquarters. The second meeting of the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness in 1989 was planned for McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. The director or coordinator of ACSWP met with me, the previous year’s host, and the coming meeting’s host on site to plan the forthcoming gathering. Most of the denomination’s future social witness task forces would have one or two of the members of the group we named Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness (TEPSW) serving on the task force. Also, much of the future social witness of the denomination was begun in the discussions of TEPSW. This was especially true for work related to international

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relations and peacemaking. Regular features of the meeting were the sharing of syllabi and work projects within the group. Special workshops were held on case study methods for teaching and the use of field trips for seminary education. In the next twenty-five years all of the Presbyterian seminaries were visited. Each visit included an evening with the seminary administration on the social role of the seminary and its strengths in teaching the social mission of the Church. Usually one afternoon would contextualize the respective seminary with a visit to work related to that particular seminary or to unique features of the location. Examples were slave routes in Richmond, architecture in Chicago, unique social-mission churches in Chicago, the industrial sites of declining Pittsburgh, agriculture in Dubuque, and so forth. The group went abroad to Geneva and Cuba visiting Huguenot historical sites and the World Council of Churches in France and Geneva. We made an early Presbyterian visit to the seminary in Matanzas after the revolution. For me the annual gathering was a very important meeting with a company of friends and a place where academics could relate their work to Church social action and policy. Attendance at the meetings could vary from fourteen to fifty, but it usually held at around twenty-five. Often we participated in the life of the school by volunteering to teach classes, putting on special events, or preaching in chapel services or in Pittsburgh at the East Liberty Presbyterian Church near the seminary. The group missed one year when the ACSWP was changing its leadership, but usually the group held its meetings throughout the various changes the denominational staff or offices were going through. I found the group more supportive of academic social action than either the Society of Christian Ethics or the American Academy of Religion. Its closer tie to the Church and its programs that involved money and people gave it a special academic relevance to me. Not all social ethicists or other professors valued it as highly as I did, but I consistently made all of the meetings and continued in its leadership. I would occasionally skip the Society of Christian Ethics. Sometimes I failed to attend the American Academy of Religion, but its hosting of the North American Tillich Society continued to attract me to most Academy meetings. The American Theological Society was the most prestigious of any of my groups, as its East Coast group was limited to one hundred, but I could not find the same relevance in the group as in the TEPSW. The turmoil in the Church over the discussion about Church resistance to militarism and nuclear weapons continued into 1988. One of our paragraphs on militarism provides the context for the opposition by many: Indeed, the increasingly powerful role of military establishments, goals, and values in international relations and national culture points to the ascendancy of militarism in today’s world. Militarism refers to the dominating influence of military ideologies and institutions in all facets of contemporary life. It is manifested in various global developments: the nuclear arms race, the production and proliferation of other weapons of mass destruction, the massive trade in weapons, the reliance of governments on force and the threat of force to deal with conflicts of interest, the use of military forces and techniques of violence as

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instruments of internal repression, and the influence of military priorities in civilian sectors of society. Militarism is the context and cradle in which the demonically dangerous capacity and willingness for nuclear war is nurtured and nourished. The right wing of the Church was very disturbed by our study process, but 1,600 churches ordered our materials, and nearly four hundred participated deeply in the study. I could never claim credit for all of this furor; the worry about the military and the weapons was deep in the Church. The whole council and now the new committee labored on the project. The Presbyterian Panel conducted social scientific research on the issues. The churches responded with their own materials, direct contact with ACCS or SWCSP, or by hosting speakers on the issues. Several military representatives signed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal criticizing our work. Dean Lewis and his successor Dieter Hessel took much criticism within the Church for our efforts. The Peacemaking Program of the Church ran from the discussion of our project. But finally, after a task force chaired by former moderators of the Church was formed and they issued a report to GA in 1988 called “Christian Obedience in a Nuclear Age” (CONA), the fire died down. Its furor was then outdone by the issues around homosexuality and the ministry. The book on peacemaking that I had worked on in India was finally published in 1988. Christian Realism and Peacemaking: Issues in U.S. Foreign Policy dealt with the theology of peacemaking in the first seventy pages and then turned to specific issues of: human rights, justifiable war, counterrevolution, development particularly in India, terrorism, Russian relations, and finally Church strategies for peacemaking. It did not repeat the arguments for resistance to militarism. Most of the activities we would later group under just peacemaking were present in the volume, as was a vision of just peace. The longest chapter in the book concerned the meaning of human rights in the Senate debates over the rejection of Ernst Lefever for secretary of human rights and the testimony of philosophers and theologians over Niebuhr’s perspective on human rights. Bob Stivers arranged for John C. Bennett to come up to Puget Sound to discuss the book on the deck of his cabin. John was very appreciative. Earlier he had worried that the rejection of nuclear weapons even for deterrence could not be said openly by policy makers. His position was close to mine, but he was more hesitant than I to move out of the realm of possible political discourse. He feared our position of resistance had been perceived as politically irresponsible. His contribution to my thinking on these issues was very important to me. He had been my first teacher of Christian ethics and international relations, and then we had taught together. He rubbed shoulders with more policy makers than I did by his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. I was more concerned that the churches speak the truth directly, even if it was disregarded for a time by policy makers. Our final policy was a more direct refutation of the morality of threatening to destroy another people. Niebuhr never gave up deterrence, and I don’t know that John ever did either. Niebuhr’s position was that if it failed, he hoped to be among the first casualties. At the time, I was also working on editing essays for a volume entitled Theology of Peace, a collection of Tillich’s essays. It was published two years later and contained

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Tillich’s judgments on international relations and resistance to nuclear weapons. I have often used Tillich’s short statement calling for resistance to nuclear weapons with all of our imaginative wisdom and courage in other peacemaking writings of mine. His neverbefore-published essays criticizing the work of the Dulles’s commission on peace were included, as were the critique of the pope’s efforts. The essays chosen included his work from 1938 to 1965. I thought it important that his dedication to peace work be realized as well as his basically Christian realist position. Roger L. Shinn was delighted by the project, and even though we had not requested a blurb, he sent an endorsement to the publisher: Ronald Stone has given us a superb collection of essays by Tillich. Some of these, long hidden, are here published for the first time. Others have been barely accessible. Drawn together in one volume, they are a magnificent contribution to all of us who would be tough-minded and hopeful in the struggle for peace.

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Chapter 46

Robert Chesnut I was serving on the Session of East Liberty Presbyterian Church when Robert Chesnut accepted a call to become our pastor in 1988. He brought youthful experience to the position. He had worked in and on urban church matters since his college days at Wooster, and he had enjoyed a successful pastorate in Evanston, Illinois. He had taught at McCormick Seminary in Chicago and worked on placement issues in urban churches there for student ministers. He openly declared he would come to East Liberty Church if the congregation would support a transformation process. I enthusiastically supported him in his efforts, although I did not have the enthusiasm for spirituality issues that he and his wife brought. His wife, Janet, had a master’s degree in spirituality. He was skillful in raising funds for new programs through grants from foundations, and he was dedicated to the church having relevance to the community. In the closing years of his ministry he published the church’s story in Transforming the Mainline Church. At one point he was nearly exhausted by opposition to some of his initiatives. He and his lawyer drafted a letter of resignation, which came to the personnel committee on which I served. I prayed in the nave of the cathedral-like structure before going to the meeting, which had representatives of the Pittsburgh Presbytery and the East Liberty personnel committee assembled. When the letter of resignation was passed around I urged that the letter be picked up to permit some prior discussion. It was. I explained that my prayers provided no assurance that Bob resigning was appropriate or helpful to the congregation. I simply asserted that he certainly was a good enough pastor for the church, and in some ways he was outstanding. Further, the resignation of another pastor after the disputes over the previous pastor would be bad for the reputation of the church. I asked Bob not to resign that night and assured him he had no need to bring a resignation to the personnel committee or the Presbytery. Bob continued his exciting, learned ministry for several more years until he reached retirement age and health issues inclined him to retire and move to Santa Fe. Bob and I had not agreed on every complex issue he tackled. But he was an excellent model of church leadership, even if too forceful a leader for some of the congregation. Our friendship continues. In our later years we were able to meet at Ghost Ranch when we were teaching classes there. Bob led a project on the multicultural Church, and I taught various courses there. Before Bob retired we had jointly taught a course at Ghost Ranch for some of our congregation and a few others on justice ministries in the Church. Bob was a member of a group of so-called Tall Steeple Pastors. I imagine our steeple was the tallest of all the Presbyterians who gathered there. A pastor in Maryland organized a seminar on national security for the group. I was asked to come along as a resource person and lecturer. I imagine Bob’s hand was involved in that decision. I was delighted to participate as interlocutor at the Central Intelligence Agency and at the National Security Agency, the largest of our intelligence agencies. At one of our lunches

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I was seated next to Edwin Meese. He and I made small talk uneasily. My lectures were in Presbyterian churches where church members working for the intelligence agencies gathered. (The contents of the lectures are discussed in chapter 52 on “spies.”) I developed the theme that secret intelligence personnel, or especially spies, were liars by nature. Secrecy and stealth essentially involve misrepresentation. I developed the thesis out of the stories of spies in scripture, all of whom were suspect. In all good pursuits of knowledge, one needs to be able to show how the knowledge is found and that it is verifiable. The sorry record of intelligence mistakes reinforced that theme. Some members of the intelligence community were incensed, and some of the pastors were nonplussed. Later I published my findings from extensive study of open sources. One publication was in the Canadian journal The Ecumenist. The second publication was in my chapter on the Ten Commandments in the section on “You Shall Not Bear False Witness” in The Ultimate Imperative. There were a couple of other speaking opportunities on the subject. One was at the Harrisburg Presbyterian Church to a more supportive audience of Christians involved in peace ministry. The biblical equation of spying with deception and lying is too clear to be avoided in Christian discussions on the subject. Of course, the broader social scientific work is also crucial to the process. Bob and I drove home to Pittsburgh together from Washington, D.C. I remember sharing with him my perceptions over a couple of decades of visiting, lobbying, and speaking in Washington. Early on I had learned that the business of Washington was government, but now it seemed the business of Washington was war. The friendship with Bob was very sustaining, and I supported him before his critics. His preaching and educational work was outstanding, and he led the church well.

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Chapter 47

Father, 1990 My last meeting with my father was in the beginning of the winter 1989–1990. The snow had not yet fallen, but it was cold. I drove up to Dakota City from Des Moines. Methodist pastors in Des Moines, thanks to Hugh’s initiative, had invited me to Iowa to speak on urban ministry. I stayed at Hugh and Betty’s farm across Highway 80 from Adel. I drove past the old Bob Feller farm where he had spent his boyhood. On the trip I passed by John Wayne’s birthplace and through Madison County. The love story portrayed by Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County echoed through my mind. Hugh had driven me around the covered bridge county. Dad had suffered a financial disaster near Winterset when a small bridge he was building burned up in the winter cold. The resultant state penalties for not finishing on schedule contributed to the bankruptcy of the Stone Construction Company. The sale of the remnants of the company my freshman year in college meant there was little family support for further academic study. So the scenes of those bridges, the family farm, the café in Winterset—all had images for me beyond the Clint Eastwood romance. The turn north onto Highway 169 would take me by the cold farms on the frozen prairies to Humboldt County and its county seat of Dakota City. The Dakotas had camped by the Des Moines River, which marked the boundary of Dakota City. The pioneers, including my grandfather Eber, had spent their first winter in dugouts among the Dakotas, more popularly referred to as Sioux by the early French fur traders. Dad and Mother welcomed their oldest son warmly. Bernice cooked my favorite dishes. After a breakfast of poached eggs and fried mush, Dad and I took a nostalgic trip up to the family homestead. As we pulled out of the long, crushed stone driveway, he noted that he had removed the basketball bang-board over the garage that he had made for me when I was in high school. He said that neither he nor Bernice was playing much basketball. He also mentioned they intended to reduce the size of the garden, but the orchard would remain the same. We went first to the Ford Garage where the mechanic adjusted the carburetor on my rental car. Then we took the Highline Road past my cousin’s farm to Livermore, a small town north of Dakota City. Livermore was declining, but its consolidated school of Twin Rivers was thriving. I scored my one touchdown there back in 1956, and I never forgot Dad chiding me for not intercepting a pass when I played on defense. The pass had, to my embarrassment, glanced off my shoulder pad. We visited the Union Cemetery north of Livermore. There by the old oak tree were the graves of the pioneer Eber, his wife Lucy, and their daughter. Next to them were the graves of his parents, Samuel and Electra Stone. Samuel’s grave bore the plaque of a veteran and the notation that he had served in the War of 1812. They had sold the family farm in Milo, New York, and moved west to join Eber in 1856. I insisted Dad

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smoke his Camel outside in the cold rather than in the car. Maybe I had finally grown up. He would smoke his Camels until his emphysema and lung cancer killed him. We drove to the old homestead across the Des Moines River, named by the French after the small Indian tribe at the confluence of the river with the Mississippi. He pointed out where the log cabin had stood in the middle of a large field. To the west of the cabin there was still a large oak forest filled with Indian graves. To the northeast stood the frame house that Eber built in 1875, but death from typhoid prevented him from ever living in it. His wife, Lucy, had it finished. Fifteen years later I would write a book about this homestead. How I wish I had known of that future and questioned Dad on the details of his memory. We write too many books, but if we refrain from writing, the memories are lost with death over two generations. The following morning, after breakfast of pancakes, strawberry jam, and bacon, we said good-bye. I held Mother and told Dad for the first time, “I love you.” He said, “You know I love you.” I should have said much more. It was the first time I remember speaking of love with him. Then, as I got in the car, I said, “See you in the spring.” He replied, “I won’t be here in the spring.” It was in the spring that I heard. Gonzalo Castillo and I were at Vanderbilt University to listen to Gustavo Gutierrez lecture and to arrange our trip to his institute in Lima, Peru. We were well received in Nashville by the faculty. We enjoyed the hospitality of their faculty club. We sealed our arrangements with Gutierrez in the Catholic Bishop’s Palace. That evening Bebb phoned with news of Dad’s death as he was transferred from the hospital in Fort Dodge to the retirement home north of Humboldt. Dad may have willed his expiration. He never would have gone into a retirement home under his own decision. Gonzalo and I went to a bar for drinks. A couple of days later, our family was at the airport. My beautiful and bright children, Patricia, Jessica, Randall, and John, with dignified Bebb, presented the picture of a great family. I have a memory of meeting and talking with Thomas Henderson, who would later be among the donors for the John Witherspoon Chair in Ethics. In Iowa, I drove too fast and received a ticket for speeding on my way to see Grandmother Teresa in the hospital at Fort Dodge. My grief numbed me. Hubert was memorialized in the new Methodist Church. The church occupied the site where years earlier he had built the educational building and contributed its cornerstone. It launched us on our lives of faith and theological study. Alan went to the University of Chicago Divinity School after his master’s degree at Iowa. Hugh went to the Yale University Divinity School after his bachelor’s at Iowa. He has spent his life serving United Methodist churches in and around Des Moines. Roger, after Iowa, received a master’s degree at Columbia in political science before graduating from Iowa Law School. He may have remained the most orthodox of the four boys by avoiding divinity schools.

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Fred Schultz, the former minister who had taught Joan Protestantism and accepted her into the Methodist Church, stormed into the family room asking loudly, “Where’s Joan?” I took him aside and explained I was now married to Bebb, who was a Presbyterian minister. He had been very prominent in my formation. He and his wife had visited us while we were in New York City at seminary, and he always remained proud of my first book. Dad was buried in the Union Cemetery beside the three children who had preceded him in death. As we exited the grounds, I reminded the family that Dad had built those beautiful stone pillars guarding the entrance to the cemetery. As we returned to the church we passed buildings he had erected that stood as monuments to his work: the Ford Garage, the lumber yard, the rebuilt Main Street buildings, and the most beautiful house in Humboldt, north of Taft Park. The reception at the Methodist Church following the funeral was a little underdone. I should have taken a hand in organizing it. Demps Christenson, a locally famous athlete who had provided some boxing coaching for me and worked my corner in Des Moines, came up and said, “Keep your left up.” My daughter caught her feelings of the graveside ritual in a poem she published in her literary magazine, Beyond: TOGETHER At the altar flowers piled red and high green leaves shiny like Christmas beckon Dad walks forward to see his father one last time before the coffin’s lid shuts him out and head down prays to his God eyes closed to the sight a body before him with a lifetime behind it

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only memories of walnuts to me I take his hand wet from the cold on his cheeks hold it tight in mine seeing more wrinkles in his face than I’d noticed before knowing him better than I’d known him before together we stand as I watch his eyes close.

We took a few tools of his. I particularly took the chisels I had brought him from my first trip to England. Sheffield chisels were to him the best. I showered in the basement where he had encouraged me to box. It was where he built our train boards. In retirement he had time to use those chisels on his wood lathe. He had moved Grandpa Stone’s work benches and cabinets into that basement in Dakota City. The local newspaper had celebrated him and Bernice for the fine dollhouses they had built there in their retirement from building and teaching. I would return to that gray-stucco-covered home for another five years to visit Mother. I walked in the gardens and orchard. I would pause at the spots where I buried our cat Jimmy and our Newfoundland-American Water Spaniel mix dog, Blackie. Dad and Mother both walked with me, in memory, on those strolls. As the oldest son, I had been blessed to know Dad before the drinking wore him down. He was very strong for a little man, and he would demonstrate strength to me by lifting the eighteen-pound mall with one hand from the end of the handle, bending it up to his nose. He urged me to fight when challenged, and he supported my boxing, which was so important in my development. He tolerated my love for the Church and taught me with the aid of his men to work construction. He played catch with me and encouraged me in athletics. He could have taught me much more that was important, but in the Iowa way he did not, and in the Iowa way I did not ask.

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Chapter 48

Latin America In 1990 Gonzalo Castillo and I received an American Association of Theological School’s faculty grant for research in liberation theology. He was an advocate of the new Latin American, liberation theology and I regarded myself as a friendly critic. We went first to Costa Rica. There, I immersed myself in the study of Spanish. I would walk through the center city, grab a bus, and go out to the suburbs to the language school for three weeks. Gonzalo made a trip to Nicaragua for a week, where the civil war had subsided. He got closer to the revolutionaries than I did. We visited social reformers, particularly friends of his. The Biblical Seminary where we stayed was a center of liberation theology. My Spanish did not develop as well as I had hoped. It had been stronger when I studied in Mexico City College twenty-seven years earlier. Gonzalo expressed his disappointment with my accent, saying, “You wasted your time and money.” Continuing our joint interest in ecology, we visited game reserves and national parks. We hiked in the jungle for short excursions. One particularly rich experience was a trip deep into the mountain jungle by tractor and wagon to Rara Avis. The colorful birds seen on our walks more than compensated for the food poisoning I suffered. Our explorations of Lima, Peru, were launched from a suburb overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We both participated in Gustavo Gutierrez’s institute for liberation theology. We rode the bus into the city and spent most of the day at the Center. Gonzalo continued after I was stricken with another illness. We made visits to various barrios outside the city to visit base communities of liberation theology work. Gonzalo worried about my health and safety, as some of the places we visited were far from normal protected tourist sites. One time in the center city a youth grabbed my watch band, but it did not break. I slugged the kid and he ran. When a crowd gathered, Gonzalo hurried me away. He thought I might be naïve about the intentions of the crowd. Later he suggested I should have grabbed the assailant. I felt I had done relatively well. He also would find me medicine for my various stomach ailments when I became feverish or a little delirious. A phone call from Bebb indicated that my skin cancer was malignant, and that I would need to have it removed when I returned from our trip. The need to remove basal cell growths would continue through the years to inconvenience me a little. My Spanish was adequate to benefit from Paginas and other publications, but inadequate to follow or to participate without translation in conversations. Sometimes Gonzalo would translate, but often I missed a lot of the conversations. We spent a couple of days with Mark Stivers, whom I had known since he was a baby in New York City. Mark was studying at the University of Lima where Gutierrez taught. We had arranged to meet his sister Laurie, who was guiding rafting trips on the rivers of Costa Rica, but then missed her.

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We relocated to Cuzco, where we stayed in a liberation theology–sponsored institute for workers. But Gustavo was now forbidden to appear in Cuzco, as his work was under fire from the episcopacy. The institution was languishing under Church pressure. Our days in Cuzco were spent visiting projects and base communities as well as enjoying the environment and the historical sites. We will not forget great dinners overlooking the Cathedral Plaza. The day trip to Machu Picchu introduced us to one of the highlights of Inca culture in the mountain-retreat center. Its beauty was moving, and I could sit and enjoy it, as my camera had given up in this most photogenic place. We spent another day touring the Sacred Valley, visiting ruins of Inca civilization and talking with the people. The remains of Inca civilization were everywhere. We walked among their descendants. Our final stop was at the Theological Center of the South in Santiago, Chile. Here in the company of theologians we gathered impressions of the previous life under General Pinochet. They told their stories of the U.S. intervention and the killing of President Allende. As Gonzalo asked about the uniqueness of liberation theology’s commitment to the poor, they responded, “We are the poor.” I took another part of the sabbatical to visit Rio de Janeiro, Iguassu Falls, and Buenos Aires with Bebb. In Rio de Janeiro we enjoyed the beaches and the music. A former student was the pastor of the downtown Presbyterian Church, the first of the denomination in the country. He arranged for one of his elders to introduce us to the favelas and to the orphanage his church supported. Bebb spoke to the children. He and his wife entertained us for dinner, and he shared that he had drafted the religious liberty clause for the new Brazilian constitution.

BUENOS AIRES In Buenos Aires, Beatrice Couch, a Presbyterian missionary, took us under her wing to show us the city. Long evenings of discussion with her at her home or at restaurants filled us in on the theological situation. Some of the faculty at the Union Seminary where we stayed were helpful. The seminary had been occupied during the time the generals ruled. There was still some suspicion of American visitors. Jose Miguez-Bonino had been very forthright in his opposition to the military rule. I had known him previously as a visiting professor at Union Seminary in New York. A few years later I would help to bring him to the centenary celebration of Paul Tillich’s birth as a lecturer. Bebb and I joined the “Women in Black” in their circle march in front of the “Pink House,” the Presidential Palace, in downtown Buenos Aires. Demonstrations for human rights were staple fare by this time. The question was whether we would be imposing our Yankee selves on an Argentinian women’s cause. They were protesting their disappeared sons, children, and husbands. Our cause was only the condemnation of the U.S. complicity with the military dictatorship. Bebb had a black scarf, and I stuck out as one of the few males to join them. The women welcomed our presence. On reflection, the consistency with my “Colossus of the North” paper for Ronald Hilton of Stanford at Mexico City summer school in 1957 seemed obvious.

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I took Beatrice Couch’s manuscript to the United States to try to secure its publication. I did some editing, and Robert MacAfee Brown had written a preface for it earlier. However, I was unable to secure its publication. It remains in the library of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, representing one of the earliest liberation theology manuscripts by a Protestant woman. Between the two cities we visited the wonderful Iguassu Falls dividing the three countries of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina. The Falls are featured in that tragic film, The Mission. The film demonstrates that whether the Indians became Christian pacifists or resisted violently, they lost to the European colonists. The football playoffs between Brazil and Argentina were broadcast in both Spanish and Portuguese at opposite ends of the long hall in the Hotel at Iguassu. From one end, goals were celebrated in Spanish, and alternatively, at the other end, in Portuguese. Later in Buenos Aires we were able to celebrate in Spanish Argentina’s World Cup victory. The Argentinians were happy to welcome Americans into their celebration. Occasionally, we were told how much they loved the United States. The two months of travel in Latin America reinforced experiences a quarter of a century earlier in Mexico and prepared me for the continuing dialogue with Gonzalo Castillo. On our return to the United States we taught a course on liberation theology and Christian realism at Ghost Ranch and once at the seminary. We also engaged in a dialogue at the Woodrow Wilson Center of Princeton University. Paul Sigmund, an expert on Latin America, who had taught with Reinhold Niebuhr and coedited a book with him, commented on our presentations. He was more inclined toward a Christian realist perspective, which put Gonzalo at a disadvantage. Several members of the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness who were in the conversation knew liberation theology, but most, at that time, taught from a Christian realist perspective. Most of the group welcomed liberation theology as a corrective to our North American perspectives. Few of us could identify with its Marxism or its tendency to sound utopian. We as a group wanted liberation theology to continue its demands for the poor of Latin America. We strongly opposed the CIA, the School of the Americas, and Vatican suppression of liberation theology. The Presbyterian Church project on Latin America, “Hope for a Global Future: Toward Just and Sustainable Human Development,” was strongly influenced by the program of liberation theology. Still, it remained North American, and basically realist, in its development. The essays by Gonzalo and me were published by Dieter Hessel in the volume The Churches’ Public Role.

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Chapter 49

Urban Ministry The seminary needed to stress urban ministry in the context of Pittsburgh. A seminary located in Iowa or New York or Washington would have called for different emphasis. Here the ethos of social Darwinism, work ethic individualism, militarism, and Presbyterian domination shaped the seminary and inspired ethical critique. I would not have developed an urban ethics course or worked for an urban ministry institute in Iowa. Pittsburgh felt very gratified when post-deindustrialization reports on its livability continued to list it as one of the best places in the country, and in the world, to live, and especially in which to retire. Yet its pride reinforced tendencies to be cruel to racial minorities and the unsuccessful. My courses to a great degree were shaped by the social problems of Pittsburgh, which I listed as militarism and the danger of nuclear war, racism and minorities’ deepening alienation, individualism and Church support for reactionary politics in the electoral process, masculinity and the difficulty of achieving justice for women in church and society, conservative Christianity resisting social ministry, unemployment and the resulting personal and social degradation, aging and the resultant problems. I designed courses and programs around all of these issues, though I missed the opportunity to teach about ethical issues associated with aging. We brought John Bennett out to work on these related issues. Now I am living in the midst of aging issues. The development of three required church and society courses within the curriculum, and two required ethics courses, necessitated a lot of politics, and one paid a price with colleagues for such achievement. I was happy that we did more in these areas than most seminaries, and I urged my colleagues in the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness to undertake the necessary politics to achieve similar results in their schools. After I had retired I was referred to as an “empire builder” by an old opponent in a faculty meeting. The seminary decreased its work in church and society and social ethics after my departure. But I had understood it as the work God would have me do for the succor of his people. When speaking theologically, I saw it as helping the church to fulfill God’s mission. If I were thinking more secularly or speaking to secular academic colleagues, I might describe it as assisting ministers to become responsible citizens and leaders in the Church. Dieter Hessel published an essay on my strategies, “The Urban Ethos of Seminary Education,” in his edited book Theological Education for Social Ministry. My allies in the African American Presbyterian churches in the city pushed me on the lack of development of black faculty at the seminary. We had not had much success since the dean, David Shannon, resigned his post and moved on in his career. Another, more militant church historian left us after less than two years, and our recruitment efforts stumbled. Meetings with the Reverend Jimmy Joe Robinson, the leader of the black construction coalition from Bidwell Presbyterian Church, indicated there might be some foundation money available for a black Presbyterian faculty member who would

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relate to the local churches. Jimmy and I had stood side by side on a bridge in 1969 during police violence until he was arrested and I jumped off the bridge. Later I took my class to his church, and he often appeared in my “Church and Society” classes. He was clear to me about the usefulness of the foundation grant to move his seminary. That grant helped motivate the seminary to form a search committee to recruit an African American faculty member to teach urban ministry. The seminary succeeded in bringing Ronald Peters to the post. Barry Jackson had chaired the committee, I believe, but the leadership of Judge Justin Johnson was very prominent. Jared Jackson, an Old Testament professor with strong commitments to justice in the city, was helpful. Ron Peters, though he had taught at the seminary as a visiting professor, still had his doubts. He had just completed his PhD in education at the University of Massachusetts, and he would be in high demand. Professor Peters would frequently say in public if I were in the audience, “Professor Stone drove me to the airport; as I shared my doubts about coming to the seminary, he remarked, ‘Give it try for a couple of years, you can always go back to the parish.’” He came. He did not leave until a quarter of a century later, when he accepted a call to the presidency of the Interdenominational Theological Education Center in Atlanta. During his tenure he created an urban institute serving urban ministers, and particularly the black churches. A couple of times, when introducing myself to African Americans as a teacher at Pittsburgh Seminary, they would say, “Oh, you mean Ron Peters’s seminary.” The president of the seminary asked me to mentor Ron Peters, but I thought it best to let him develop in his own unique way. I assisted him by suggesting he take over the course in “Urban Church and Society.” As a required course it gave him access to all of the master of divinity students. He changed the course I had taught to a course more in black studies. For me it had been the course in which I assigned the most black authors, and where I lectured on race relations more, but he deepened that work, and spent less time on the Presbyterian ethos of this particular city than I had. As reported earlier, Gonzalo Castillo had taught the course before me, and he served with Dr. Peters on the board for the urban institute. Each of us had done something different with the course, but it served as an introduction to the nature of social ministry to all of the students. The same year he joined us, I published my Reformed Urban Ethics: A Case Study of Pittsburgh and moved my work in urban affairs to an elective with the same name. I continued my struggle to use the best of Calvinist ethics to counter the problems of a work ethic in industrial society. Ron Peters and I were natural allies, and I remember him coming to my sickbed in the hospital later and urging me not to retire from the seminary, saying, “You are our leader.” The book represented my distinctive work, but it had been hard to find a publisher for it. It failed to make the book reviews of the New York Times as my previous books on Niebuhr and Tillich had. It was not even reviewed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Partially this failure was due to my publishing it with a research press without wide circulation outside of libraries. The Lilly Foundation awarded a small grant to subsidize the tuition for a hand-picked group of twelve urban ministers to discuss the chapters for eight weeks. The grant also provided a small fund to the seminary for administration, and an announcement for the book was sent out to ministers in the

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Presbytery. This would lead to my further participation in Lilly-funded urban-ministry projects. The social science behind the project was the work of Ernst Troeltsch and students of his thought, James Luther Adams and Max Stackhouse. I also used Max Weber and the interpretation of him I listened to in Cambridge by Professor Shills. Other sociologists of religion were in the background, but in the pursuit of understanding the ethos of Pittsburgh’s reformed Christianity, these were the most helpful. Contributing to my analysis was a clue from the head of the Pittsburgh Foundation in 1970: “Six men in Pittsburgh make the decisions, and I can tell you which Presbyterian church each of them belongs to.” Of course, the statement was an exaggeration even in 1969, but by 1991 that power was being more widely shared. Still, the combination of Weber’s “Protestant work ethic,” social Darwinist ideology, and individualism expressed the Pittsburgh contribution to the industrial-military complex. The lack of cooperation between labor and the captains of industry had destroyed the steel industry in the city in the 1980s, and the city was experiencing the fallout from that crisis. Several of the ministers I asked to participate in the seminar were directly involved in those conflicts. The social science was undergirded by my mixture of hopeful action and Christian realism that had been laid out in my previous book, Realism and Hope. It was neither social gospel nor a conservative Christian position. Instead, it expressed a socialdemocratic political orientation with the hopeful realism of John Calvin and Reinhold Niebuhr. The problems of Pittsburgh had been anchored in a morbid Calvinism, which needed correction by the very social thought of John Calvin, which had not been corrupted by Darwinist social ideology or cruel capitalism. Calvin, interpreted through a progressive reading of Reinhold Niebuhr, could encourage social reforms for Pittsburgh. The argument proceeded, through a Christian theory of justice and its relationship to the gospel of love, to argue for more attention to the common good by the churches. The evangelism of the churches was affirmed, and it needed to be done in terms relevant to modern urban life. Social action grounded in biblical justice was also part of the essence of the Church. The book proceeded through recent Presbyterian progressive thought about economic life. I eventually diminished my teaching of business ethics, as the new president of the school was interested in teaching and discussing those issues. One of the differences that separated us was that I always focused more on Church economic teaching and practice, and President Calian moved on quickly to businessmen teaching and acting out of their own appropriation of business ethics. Gonzalo Castillo once told me that the president had told him that he taught business ethics so much to counter what I was teaching. We also cooperated with each other. He included me in his business ethics discussions at the Duquesne Club with Presbyterian pastors and business leaders, and I contributed through discussion and sometimes introducing speakers. But I was never given a leadership role there. I secured a place for him at the Ghost Ranch seminar on reformed economics one summer. The remaining chapters of the urban ethics book proposed an experientially based ethic for activism against racism in its contemporary forms. This chapter treating racism

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as sinful ethnocentrism was the longest chapter I ever wrote on the subject, though I often addressed it in my writings on Niebuhr, and benefited from dialogues with James Cone on that subject. Some of those conversations are reflected in our later writings. The chapter on politics reflects my earlier writing on the subject in Reformed Faith and Politics. The argument is extended by comparing Jerry Falwell and Reinhold Niebuhr, much to the discredit of right-wing religious politics. The chapter concludes with the national and Pittsburgh housing scandals, and lays out for Presbyterians a program for action on the homeless issue. My first lecture at Union Theological Seminary had been on ethics and housing. Bebb Wheeler Stone, a former student and my second wife, kept the issue before the Presbyterian Church. The concluding chapter of the book was called forth by the deep implication of Pittsburgh in the military systems of the United States. Stackhouse had used the term necropolis to describe the armed technological city, and I adapted the term in my discussion of the ethos of Pittsburgh. Peacemaking had to be part of the ultimate concerns of religiously sensitive people in the city. Beyond critique, it explicated the idea of a just peace. It carried forth my own ideas of resistance to militarism and the wisdom of the Church’s position calling for extraordinary utilization of ordinary means to fight militarism. So the book uniquely presented what I believed to be true about social science informing Christian ethics, and the beginnings of my own formulations of a Christian ethic, which would be published a few years later. It focused on my environment in the city. I knew people who represented what I was discussing in more abstract terms. It covered the four areas of practical application of social ethics that held my interest: race relations, economics, politics, and international affairs. Another characteristic of the book, which I perceive only now, after a comment by Donald Shriver, is how Church-oriented my social ethics have been. My work is as a churchman. I work with labor unions, non-Church social-justice groups, the government, development agencies, and others, but my primary base is in the Church. The year we were serving on the search committee for Ron Peters, I spoke in a symposium on “The Inner City Syndrome” with Leon Haley, the president of the Urban League of Pittsburgh. With Ron’s presence on campus, these appearances fell more naturally to him. There would be some confusion with two Rons working in social and racial justice. On one occasion the head of the Detroit Black Caucus entered into a really serious phone conversation with me about an invitation to me to address the black churches in Detroit on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. I would have been happy to do it, but he had me confused with Ron Peters. Similarly, though, I had taught a course on Martin Luther King Jr. for years, but now I deferred to Ron’s teaching the course on King. Urban ethics was expressed particularly in the East Liberty Development Corporation where I served first as the public safety chair and then as chairman of the board. We renovated a theater to invigorate the arts and assisted in moving Home Depot into a large area that Sears had abandoned. A predecessor thought I should carry a gun, but I resisted the temptation, as we tried to combat the drug traffic and held meetings on public safety in apartment buildings. Eventually I took a role in hiring off-duty police to provide extra protection for the streets and

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encouraging my church to provide security for its block. If, as a thinker in international relations, I recognized the need for force to protect, it was a necessary consequence that we protect our streets. We were engaged in long-range economic development, but some of the need was for immediate protection. John Calvin had argued that if we see the need for police protection, we must recognize the need to build and defend the city walls. When seminary students were nearly deterred from tutoring inner-city children in our church because of gunfire at Highland Avenue and Penn Avenue, it was time for leaders in the community to provide more protection in the city streets.

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Chapter 50

Patricia Peabody High School stood across the street from the seminary at 515 North Highland. The Seminary was 616 North Highland. In good weather Patricia’s creative writing class would meet on the seminary lawn, and biology classes would tour the seminary’s trees. Seminary football games were sometimes played on Peabody’s field, and seminary swims were in the high school’s pool. Her work as an artist and a poet came together in her writing workshop’s publication of the art journal Beyond in 1991 and 1992.

1991 She had visited the memorial quilt for AIDS victims in the Convention Center. Then she volunteered to work there for a couple of days. In Beyond she presented her interpretations of visitors’ feelings through three vignettes, personalizing it by taking the names for an aunt and two uncles as visitors witnessing the quilt. The stories were about her thoughts. Her black-and-white photography for the journal was mostly drawn from a trip to Iowa with her mother: her photos were Dakota City’s grain elevator by abandoned railroad tracks, farm equipment, and corn fields. She knows part of her comes from the farm. She caught in her photography a subtle photo of my mother and a photo of the lily she painted for me from my father’s funeral. Her poem of the funeral, “Together,” appeared beside the photo of the painting. Her other photos were black-and-white scenes from nature and the crumbling wall to her home on Stanton Avenue. A couple of Pittsburgh bridges appeared, as well as a portrait of a bargeman. A distraught portrait, in black-and-white paint, showed almost frightened faces, a spider and a web, flowers emerging from fingers, and an empty multi-squared diagram. She and two others had been responsible for the art work. She included sixteen of her own pieces in a sixty-page journal. To her embarrassment, they had her writer’s workshop presentation party of the journal at the seminary auditorium. So I got to welcome them to my place. Her stepbrother, John, lightened the journal up with his homage to Dr. Seuss titled “Malpractice” through seven stages of life. John graduated from Peabody that year and prepared to go to Oberlin College in the fall.

1992 The next year they had their party in the Birmingham Lofts. Patricia served as art director. Her art of black-splattered paint dripping over off-white serves as the two covers and a major motif throughout the loose-leaf publication. Her friend and fellow artist, Elena Sniezeck, had six individual pieces and contributed along with Patricia to some others. Patricia had nine pieces, plus the cover, some other joint works, and a four-page spread with Elena. She had really made the journal hers, along with her friends. The work had a cold feeling to it, something to be expected of a creation in the

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Pittsburgh winter. One member of her writer’s workshop had committed murder that year, and the high school quarterback was murdered earlier in a separate incident. The urban reality pushed down on the young people, and many of Patricia’s black-andwhite photos are of dark Pittsburgh scenes, rail tracks, and a deserted basketball hoop. Peabody High School must have been tougher on her than I appreciated. She traveled the city to find art instruction. Her dedication was clear, and her teachers praised her. Her brother Randall was away for the year. He was engaged in research for his dissertation in the newly opened archives in Russia. He had, for her life, been immeasurable support. He wrote faithfully, but still he was gone. The happiest picture I have of her is laughing with John as they went off to their first day of school at Peabody in 1991. John was away, too, at Oberlin College. Missing Randy, she published a poem to him in this, her senior year, in Beyond. “for randy in moscow” My holidays have forever been choreographed by you from the patient wait for your footsteps at the door to the moment you’d pick me up and spin transforming back into the laughing clinging doll you always knew was waiting for you First November and now December you are not here our traditions seem as incomplete as the carols without your voice they miss you I stir the cranberries dig out the buried recipe for eggnog from scratch imagining the grin you could always pull from my ticklish space

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between my ribs Moscow’s probably snowing on you now as I watch Pittsburgh’s slush slink into the sidewalk cracks I hope that there it’s piling thick and white as Santa’s beard and thus you’ll find a spot on some famous museum’s lawn where you can lie down in the snow and make an angel for me Patricia Stone ’92

After her journal publication, she graduated, in the National Honor Society, with High Honors, in the huge Shriner’s Temple Auditorium in Oakland across from the University of Pittsburgh. Her art adviser, Pam, sent me a note saying, “Patricia was always so modest about her extraordinary talents I was afraid she’d never mention these awards.” She received six separate awards from the Pennsylvania School Press Association for her work on Beyond for 1992. There was also an award from Columbia University for superior achievement. I took her on her college trip to Boston, Yale, Williams, Brown, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and we interviewed at Cooper Union in New York City. I felt maybe Greenwich Village was a little too harsh for her. I think she was accepted wherever she applied. She did not apply to Yale (no undergraduate art studios). I hoped she would choose Brown. Alan’s school, Alma College, would give her a complete scholarship. She chose the University of Texas. The School of Art and the quality of the sunlight were impressive. She wanted a public university in a city. She never adjusted to the mores of Texas, however, and she resented it if she were identified as a Texan. Her letters from her first year at Texas were very happy. She was feeling the power of herself as an artist and winning the freshman scholarship in art. She was excited about all of her classes that year, and she shared details of her philosophy class with me. Her cards and correspondence never missed a holiday, but we were especially happy when she could come home.

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Chapter 51

Randall The brother she missed so much in her poem was in Moscow. He spent the academic year of 1991–1992 researching his PhD dissertation in Russia, Poland, Prague, and Hungary. He wanted to bridge the gap between new theoretical insights in international political economy and studies of the Soviet Union and its satellites. He would spend the year conducting over ninety interviews in Russian, German, and Polish languages with leaders of the four countries’ trade policies and particularly in their negotiations between the satellites and the Soviet Union. The time was ripe. Leaders of the negotiations were now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, ready to talk about their careers in trade negotiations. Archives previously closed were, at least temporarily, open. The dissertation based on this work would demonstrate how suboptimal results in trade negotiations were often the result of self-interest by individuals, institutions, or states, rather than the self-interest of the dominant state. Cooperative agreements might have benefited the whole of the Soviet-dominated world, but in fact other interests prevailed. The interviews and documents of the national archives revealed the betrayal of the rational good of the whole to particular interests. Randy would form friendships in each of the countries. I was able to provide him with a few contacts from the previous regimes whom I had met during my dialogues for peace with Christians in those countries. His future wife, Martha, would visit him when they could afford it and her own studies allowed. She was finishing her own master of divinity degree at the Harvard Divinity School, where she would win the preaching prize for graduates. His interviews would lay the basis for future work, as he would remain engaged with the politics and economics of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. So the complex dissertation was, in one sense, an area study. It was also a new venture in direct agency theory and microeconomics, with a correction to rational choice theory. More than that, it provided data from interviews and archives previously closed to scholars. Realist insights about human nature are pushed to the microeconomic level and explained in terms of institutional incentives that thwarted Soviet planners as the satellites pursued their own interests and the interests of their actors. The combination of theory, history, mastery of languages, and empirical observation would continue to characterize Randy’s further work in international political economy. His letters would provide details of providing a Thanksgiving meal to Russians and receiving their hospitality in return. These were the holidays when Patricia and I missed him. His accounts of helping archivists move materials from one building to another across Moscow were amusing and unique. I marveled at information he was able to garner from leaders and archives. In 1991–1992, Moscow was not very safe for Westerners, and we feared for his welfare and security, but he managed. On his return he was met by Bebb and Jessica at the airport. Jessica was off to India to lead a college group to their study in Punjab, and, within hours of her departure, Randy returned from Eastern Europe. Soon those holiday meals Patricia had pined for in her

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poem could be resumed, both in our house and in his mother’s home. At our place, contributions of Randy from Russia were joined by Jessica’s reflections on India, Patricia’s memories of her stay as an exchange student in France and memories of India, and John’s good humor from Oberlin. Sometimes the conversations were pretty heady and sometimes just good fun. I expect they were more serious than fun, and the dinner prayers almost always included references to events of the day or more general petitions for justice and peace. Patricia confided later that all the Ivy League talk put her off to the point that she chose a public university. After Oberlin, John went to Harvard, where I had been a visiting research fellow in 1975. Bebb’s turn at Harvard would coincide with some of John’s time there. Randy’s dissertation would win the Senator Charles Sumner Prize from Harvard University and the Helen Dwight Reid Award for best dissertation from the American Political Science Association. During his two years at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, he would turn it into the book Satellites and Commissars, published by Princeton University Press in 1996. All of this led to his appointment in political science at the University of Rochester in July of 1996. First, and more important, was his marriage to Martha Koenig in December 1992. They had met at the First Congregational Church in Cambridge, next door to where our ancestor Gregory Stone had founded his estate in the seventeenth century. Randy had surprised the senior pastor by asking him if he were a Niebuhrian. The Reverend Allen Happe, who came from the Evangelical and Reformed side of the United Church of Christ, responded, “We have common influences.” Assured on that score, Randy settled into that congregation his sophomore year. There he met Martha, who was serving as student minister in the congregation. Their romance developed into engagement, and she visited him in his Eastern European haunts as she could. During his year in Russia and Eastern Europe he wrote wonderfully informative letters of his work in various archives and of the complications of dealing with the postCommunist bureaucracies. An early letter from Poland reflects his spirit in 1992: Warsaw, 1992 Dear Dad and Patricia: Hello from Poland! I have a new address and telephone number. Calling is much easier than in Russia, but you have to contend with a Polishspeaking operator at the school, which Martha says is a trial. Don’t dial the extension (this does not work). The operator will answer and say something incomprehensible to which you should reply stoically, “pyainch, trzee, trzee” (533). He or she will then say something that sounds like “want ya,” which means “I am connecting you,” and seem to hang up. Be prepared to wait an inordinately long time, after which he or she may or may not come back on the line before connecting you. My answering will be on if I am not there. I will usually be home in the evenings. . . . I was met at the airport and brought to the school, the main

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school of commerce where I am staying in the “Hotel,” which is a lot like HDS’s Rockefeller Hall though the rooms are bigger. I am happy here, so I decided not to insist on getting an apartment, which would mean more money. The location is convenient; I have use of a kitchen and washing machine! I have my own phone for incoming calls. I have a black and white TV, and I can get one Russian channel as well as Polish ones. My work is going quite well. As I expected, all I needed to get myself going again was a couple of days of boredom; now I am back up full speed. Most of my old contacts have been fired, but one is still in place at the Central Planning Commission (it still exists!), and he has promised to help me find several of the people I am looking for. He also thinks he can get me into the Commission’s Archives. I’ve got several other networks working at the same time, so I should get plenty of interviews. I’ve reestablished my academic contacts as well, and they think my research is very interesting and on the right track, which is encouraging. My Polish is much better than I had expected. I knew I could read newspapers, but I am surprised to find that I can understand the TV too, and my conversational Polish is better than I had expected. I’m reading Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Rings” in Polish, which is a challenge to my vocabulary (which is weak on medieval, legendary and military terms) but is made much easier by the fact that I read it five or six times in English. My imagination and childhood memories fill in the unknown adjectives, and no doubt make the prose much more gripping than it really is. Warsaw is in many ways a pleasant surprise. People live better and have much more hope for the future than in Russia. The economy and the parliament are both a royal mess, and there is no longer any doubt that the market reforms have been badly botched, but there is no sense of impending doom here, like there is in Russia. If anything Poles are more confident than they were two years ago. In spite of a statistical decline in buying power of almost 50% since Jan. 1990, most people probably live slightly better than they did then. Take Care! Love, Randy Dad, Did I tell you Martha and I would like you to go ahead and put down a deposit for the Inn at Harvard, both conference rooms A & B, for Sunday, Dec. 27th, from 7:30 until 11:00 or 12:00? Thanks, I think they’ll put on a very nice party. Both families turned out well for the wedding weekend, which had the rehearsal dinner at the Harvard Inn and the wedding and reception at the First Church. A fire in the kitchen of the Sheraton Commander Hotel forced both families to meet on the sidewalks in their pajamas and robes in the middle of the night. Following the marriage

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and their graduations, the newlyweds took up residence in Woburn, Massachusetts, where Martha served as pastor and Randy commuted to Harvard (and then Brown) for his post-doctoral work. His career blossomed in the following years. He published Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition in 2002 with the Princeton University Press. He followed that in 2011 with Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy, again with Princeton. He was named professor of political science at the University of Rochester in 2010. Regarding peer-reviewed articles, as representing a higher hurdle than publishing books, he published a major essay most years. Additionally, he enjoyed directing the Center for Polish studies at the university. Other academic prizes followed, and his research abroad was usually financed by foundation or government grants.

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Chapter 52

Spies I secured the Federal Bureau of Investigation file on Reinhold Niebuhr for the book I was writing for his centenary in 1992. It was over six hundred pages, and it provided some details of which I was unaware. Most of it had been undertaken in the spirit of the McCarthy investigations, and it contained J. Edgar Hoover’s description of him as a “Christian revolutionary.” Generally it neglected his strong anti-Communist writings and jumped on his socialist-democratic politics. I folded the work from the file into my work on the FBI and the NSA in preparing lectures on the dangers of spying and the biblical tendency to regard spies as liars. I submitted the essays to Christianity and Crisis, but by this time the journal, under Leon Howell’s leadership, was much more critical of Niebuhr than I was, and the journal did not accept them. I later published the essays partially in The Ecumenist and The Ultimate Imperative. Some of my research appeared later in Politics and Faith. The irresponsible critiques of Niebuhr in the journal, and its reluctance to use my work, pushed me further away from the journal. I stopped renewing my subscription some years before it folded. When I received my own FBI file, I noted that the firm had sent my records to Australia, where I had planned to lecture and join the vice president in a dialogue. All my plans for Australia had been conducted in semi-private channels of communication; that underscored the seriousness of the FBI investigation of me. The plans for Australia were dropped, as the projected expenses became too great for our family budget. My file, though far less significant than Niebuhr’s, contained many damning inaccuracies. Later I secured Paul Tillich’s file, and the FBI’s work became a source of reflection for me on these two American theologians. The Advent Letter that Bebb wrote for 1991 reported the children’s news, related above, and the announcement that she was now head of staff for Third Presbyterian Church. The retirement of an associate minister, and the sudden resignation of the senior pastor, Bart Leach, left her in charge for a couple of years. Presbyterian rules forbade her from succeeding to the senior position once she had served as an associate pastor or interim. The new responsibilities increased her workload coupled with her dissertation work, but it also made the vocation much more attractive. The transition back to the associate’s role after being in charge would be difficult. The letter also mentioned that I was lecturing around the country on spying and on Reinhold Niebuhr for the centenary of his birth. I put my discussion of “The Central Intelligence Agency and Christian Ethics” in the form of two rather long lectures. After the Washington, D.C., meeting with the Tall Steeple pastors, the work was shared with the Penbrook United Church of Christ, the Interfaith Peace Committee of Harrisburg, and the Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg in October of 1991. I noted the various scandals surrounding the agency and that the new director, Robert M. Gates, pledged to reform it. The CIA had hidden the various malfeasances of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, including money laundering, drug dealing, and support of terrorist business actions. The agency had infiltrated and

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corrupted the Rochester Institute of Technology. It had issued a report on Japan, treating Japan as an enemy. Public discussions of CIA abuses had tarnished its reputation. Time magazine had questioned its value in light of the end of the Cold War and its $30 billion expenditures. My outline proposed to survey biblical considerations of spying, to reflect on secret wars in light of just war theory, to examine its reports on a prominent theologian, and, finally, to present concluding reflections on morality and the intelligence community. The emergence of the leadership of Russia and the United States out of secret spy organizations witnessed to the power of the agencies. The attempted coup by the KGB that resulted in its reorganization and various secret wars, arms deals, and secret policies of the CIA shook the confidence of the United States in terms of the intelligence-gathering credibility of the secret spy organizations. The many references to spies in Numbers, Joshua, and Judas in the New Testament involved lying, and the Bible’s discussion of the hidden identities treats spies as liars. The lying of Rahab became an object of theological disagreement between the authors of Hebrews and James. Immanuel Kant took up the same issue almost two thousand years later, and Bonhoeffer followed him. Bonhoeffer himself would escape military duty by spying as a minister in a convoluted three-crossover plot. He, as a Christian minister, joined the military intelligence as a minister to spy on the ecumenical movement and German churches while he used his ministerial cover to betray the German military directed by the Hitler government. I brought this duplicity up with CIA representatives, but Clair George (indicted for lying to Congress) had already claimed that their lying abroad did not mean they would lie directly to the government. As I walked by the William Casey use of Jesus’ words, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth will set you free,” decorating the entrance to the agency headquarters, it was hard not to laugh cynically. The paper developed the biblical references to spies and lying extensively as well as the CIA’s record of lying. The paper presented evidence of CIA torture and alliances with murderers in Central America. Contemporary development of these issues would look at the history in the wars with al Qaeda. Various books on the CIA were used as sources, but I had personally heard testimony from witnesses to U.S. torture. The second section turned to secret wars by the CIA, and it developed Niebuhr’s critiques from 1966. Reforms initiated in the 1970s were found to be inadequate as agents lied to congressional committees. Fears of the CIA “becoming a secret government,” with its own policies in opposition to those of Congress, were coming closer to reality. A review of just war theory showed that most of the CIA wars did not qualify as justifiable, as they were not carried out by proper authority and they were not means of last resort. Usually these secret wars did not succeed, but sometimes when they did they left us with horrors such as Iran or Guatemala’s genocide. The strengths of the United States were its economy, its educational institutions, its people’s morale, its republican form of government, and its religious spirit. These were all antithetical to secret agents, thugs, and secret wars or bribery of dictators. The universities were better sources of knowledge than were cloak-and-dagger operatives

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whose intelligence was colored by their hidden dirty-tricks activities. Randall Stone’s estimates of the weakness of the Soviet Union were more accurate than those of the CIA in 1988–1989. Allen Dulles had told me about the weakness of his agency in 1956, and William Sloane Coffin knew personally of sending betrayed agents to their deaths in his Secret Service days. Over lunch at the International House, Dulles admitted that often government leaders would trust their reading of the New York Times over reports by the CIA. The paper then turned to the bungled investigation of Reinhold Niebuhr from 1942 to 1969, and it also reminded readers of the misuses of FBI investigations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Daniel Berrigan. The bureau also misrepresented my speech on the FBI at the Church of St. Benedict the Moor in Pittsburgh. I never said the FBI should be ended, as its agent reported. I only said it needed to be reformed and focused on crime and not on the reform of race relations or the student protests against the Vietnam War. The discussion of Niebuhr reflected on other governmental spying on churches. I also noted that some of the worst reporting in the FBI report was from religious folk who feared Niebuhr’s ideas. In the closing fourth section on morality, I quoted fears by Harry S. Truman on the diversion of the mission of the CIA to operational actions and the danger of its becoming a fourth arm of government. The CIA missed the changes in the Soviet Union. To quote a paragraph from the paper: The intelligence community bribes officials, corrupts elections, gathers information, arms revolutionary forces, gives intelligence information to armies on both sides of international wars, conducts counterintelligence actions, attacks terrorist leaders, etc., throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How much of this do we regard as moral and/or necessary? The recognition that the CIA, as described by Senator Moynihan, had been wrong on most of its major political judgments, and that its economic ventures had failed, meant that reduction in its budget was in order, and closer supervision by Congress was needed. The CIA should not be trusted to manage the shah’s SAVAK, Noriega’s drug trade, Somoza’s secret police, or the Marcos budget. Christian morality in international relations uses just war criteria, promotes the seeking of more justice and peace, and utilizes norms of sustainability, sufficiency, and participation of people in vital decisions. It leans against lying, secrecy, clandestine operations, and murder. Dreams of world domination are nightmares to sensitive Christians. Christian pressure must be in the direction of openness, truth telling, nonkilling, democracy, and reduction of the causes that give rise to secret agencies and secret police. A new orientation would recognize that the United States is strong enough to get out of the gutter and conduct an honorable foreign policy. Congress should slash the budget of secret intelligence, turn more to the universities for information abroad, and turn to the Pentagon for the rare necessity of secret intelligence and justified covert

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operations. The above paragraphs summarize the case I was presenting in the early 1990s. The wars in Asia and Africa with militant Islamic forces and new technology raise further issues to explore today.

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Chapter 53

John Witherspoon The story of John Witherspoon had fascinated me for years. When Samuel Calian asked me to negotiate with the donor for the named chair in ethics, he excluded only the names of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and he further stipulated it was to be in Christian ethics and not social ethics. I should have suggested Christian social ethics, as I had been brought to the seminary to undertake Christian social philosophy, and it was understood I would not be responsible for theology or practical church work. Actually, I did both, and undertook other tasks as well, but I understood myself as a social philosopher in the Christian tradition. My suggestion of John Witherspoon was acceptable to Thomas Henderson, a lawyer who broke the asbestos case open. Witherspoon, a controversial Scot immigrant, signed the Declaration of Independence and served for six years in the Continental Congress. As a revolutionary and a theologian, he was a hero to me. His tutoring of James Madison in political philosophy, thereby giving the U.S. Constitution a Calvinist character, was the essence of what an academic chair in the Presbyterian tradition ought to be named for. There was a little hubris in taking the name of the president of Princeton for a Pittsburgh chair, but neither Witherspoon nor I were totally free from that sin. The seminary put on a fine dinner, and as it followed the board of directors’ meeting, board members were present. I chose younger members of the community to assist in the service. They included my former student and new colleague, Steve Crocco; my new colleague, Gonzalo Castillo; a favorite student, Kirk Barner; and the director of admissions, Gail Bowman. The choir sang, “To Everything There Is a Season,” and we moved to “For All the Saints.” The public reception was fine, and many from East Liberty Church came for the evening. My address was on the indisputable center of Christian ethics, the love commandment. I fleshed this out with its implications for justice and how, in its essence, it summarized the commandments and other viable principles of Christian ethics while relativizing them in its own absolutism. This gave Christian ethics a deontological character, as in scripture, but provided force and flexibility to inform contemporary life. Usually the seminary published the lecture for named chairs in a booklet, but I reserved mine for the new ethics textbook I was working on titled The Ultimate Imperative. I would, in later writings, sometimes put this in the Pauline expression of faith, hope, and love. But love, with its social meaning in justice, was always primary. It was also the bottom-line ethic of those theologians I took most seriously: Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Niebuhr, and Tillich. More important, it was the ethic of Jesus. Nothing changed at the seminary because of the new title. I enjoyed it from time to time. I visited Witherspoon’s grave in Princeton, and I reveled in the stories of the British mistakenly celebrating his death at their hands. They had hanged the wrong parson. After teaching in Aberdeen University I visited his old church in Paisley, which is now used as a theater. Its use as a theater might bother him more than it did me.

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One did not pause too long over a ceremony. There was a summer school at Pacific Lutheran University to teach, Mount Rainer to climb upon, Randy and Martha’s wedding, Patricia’s art scholarship as a freshman at Texas to celebrate, and “Introduction in Ethics” to teach in the fall term. The whole time of 1992 was enlivened by the expectation of a Clinton victory and an end to the Reagan-Bush reign. I interpreted the election in Washington Report to Presbyterians as a victory for the political center, where the program of the religious right remained a second-tier issue. The economy, the unpopular foreign policy, and the promises of attention to neglected issues in the domestic area had been more important than the cries from the right wing. On the other hand, Pat Robertson won some local victories and Ralph Reed crowed about their stealth organization. I predicted the ongoing struggle for the control of the Republican Party. There were a few incremental gains in the direction of the moderate-liberal, social policy of the Presbyterian Church. The center not only held but also prevailed. The synthesis of modernizing religious sanction for progressive (but not radical) policies looked strong with the outcome of the election. The strength of American Protestantism was in its modernizing tendencies from a non-establishedchurch basis. There was only minor support for more theocratic politics. I warned that the gains were only incremental and much more needed to be done to make politics more representative of women and ethnic minorities. I hoped the slim margins of victory would keep the new administration humble. After all, the need to remain humble was one of the most important contributions of Christianity to modern politics, and it was not often realized. Another piece in the Report noted that the average age of the new Congress was 52.9 years. That was my age, a little beyond midlife. I sensed I should be at the height of my powers, and I returned to the subject of my youthful writing.

MORE NIEBUHR While working on panels and lectures on the approaching centenary for Niebuhr’s birth, I was also wrapping up publication of my second book on him, Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the 20th Century. I knew from my own experience with Reinhold how much he consulted with friends and colleagues at Union about current events. The seminary served as that which the liberation theologians called a “base community.” It had also been the place where decisions about his journals were made. His “at home” gatherings were famous for joining students with distinguished visitors and for his interaction with students. Despite his hectic outside schedule, he met his classes and carried his academic teaching load. No study of Niebuhr previously had interpreted him as a teacher. This interpretation I attempted by reproducing, from notes, the essence of his class work. My survey of over four hundred students provided more material on his teaching, and I included the results and the remarks about his teaching in the book. I also included revisions of my judgments from my previous work, and I reproduced elements of my previous book to provide a framework for the interpretation. John C. Bennett worried that I had not adequately signaled the inclusion of the earlier work, but when I found it

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recorded in eight notes, plus the specific reference in the introduction to its inclusion, I relaxed on that score. I avoided arguing he was only a seminary professor, but the emphasis on him as an educator was needed. His serious work in classes on theological ethics was a correction to the tendency of those who only read his more secular writings to think he could be understood simply as a political philosopher. It is true, however, that his later writings emphasized liberalism and pragmatism more than the theological work that characterized his middle years. Probably only those who were in his seminar in the late 1960s were better placed to know how he continued to work in theological ethics. The book fulfilled its purpose in guiding interpreters of Niebuhr to take him seriously as a teacher of theological students. It did not sell widely after 1992, the centenary. Nor was it reviewed as widely as my first book. Christopher Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Bennett, and Roger Shinn all praised it generously, and my more conservative dialogue partner Michael Novak wrote, “It is the best introduction yet to Niebuhr and his thought.” Others that same year heaped praise upon Charles Brown’s new book: Reinhold Niebuhr and His Age. I hoped, along with John Bennett, that publishing the same year, the year of the centenary, did not hurt the sales of the two books. I had undertaken mine to correct the interpretation of Niebuhr, and Charles, who had offered to collaborate on a Niebuhr book two decades earlier, had contributed much of his life of scholarship to his Niebuhr project. Charles and I assisted each other, and he shared materials as he discovered them. Meanwhile, I was helping publish works of a feminist critique of Niebuhr, but I did not respond to Judith Plaskow and Susan Nelson until my last Niebuhr book in 2012.

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Chapter 54

Justice and Peacemaking Robert B. Birge, the vice president of The Living Pulpit, asked me to write a short essay on “Justice and the Wrath of God” for his journal. As it happened, his wife, June Bingham, the earliest biographer of Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote the facing page. This short piece was my first publication of 1993. Written between the election of 1992 and the inauguration, it was my closing piece on the Reagan-Bush years. Humanity waits for justice and struggles for justice. Over 28 centuries ago, Amos proclaimed, “Let justice roll down like waters.” It was a mighty image for a prophet from the edge of the desert. Over 21 years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. recalled that dream of justice before the Lincoln Monument. The King’s court of Bethel and its court priests expelled Amos, just as the people of the establishment watched as Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down. Our cities burned in response, as they still burn. Justice in Scripture meant righteousness, restoration, living in right relations, or the peace of the community. It eluded the people of Scripture. In America it has meant fairness, participation in governing, equality, sometimes of opportunity, sometimes of rewards and equality joined with liberty. The dream of the psalmist was that peace and justice would kiss, but the embrace still eludes humanity. Karen Lebacqz’s book title expresses the reality Justice in an Unjust World. Humanity is too anxious, and too self-centered in its personal, family, communications, social and national expressions to fulfill justice. Still people of good will seek it in two distinguishable ways, and both are relative. Their seeking of a concept of justice is always relative to their own social and historical situation. Their seeking of a community of justice is relative to the historical situation of the sought community. So both conceptually and in a community, we have only partial realizations of justice. Justice can be thought of in three distinct ways, attributive, distributive, and retributive. Attributive justice is the claim that each one can be treated as one. Aristotle’s “to each according to one’s due” can be understood to function attributively. Each human being as human being receives the attribution of a certain dignity or due. If the community decides that certain individuals from the community deserve special attributes that is a further elaboration of attributive justice. Distributive justice is both the system and the discourse about how the system distributes the goods of the society. Various societies have developed different theories of distributive justice. The United States has largely reduced distributive justice to the rules of fair play within modified-capitalist oligarchy. Both the Old Testament with its protections

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of the poor, and the New Testament’s criteria from Acts for the Jerusalem church, “to each according to need” had deeper, more critical realizations of justice. The third meaning of justice as retributive is the making right of wrong relations. It involves the punishment, and the rehabilitation of criminals. It also involves restoration of the harm done to individuals or groups. That is the aspect of justice usually discussed within the language of the criminal justice system. Jacques Ellul has suggested that the meaning of a city can be understood by the reality of its prisons. Prisons are where the most serious of the victims of a social reality are incarcerated. If the population of American prisons consists disproportionately of the members of certain disadvantaged social groups, or of chemically dependent people, or veterans of a particularly unjust war, or of the poor, or of the legally underrepresented, then to that degree the society is unjust. The reality of the American system of retributive justice illustrates current failures to achieve either more attributive justice or much distributive justice. All Christians know that God loves and requires justice. Trends in the United States recently have been to decrease justice in its expressions of equality and liberty. Most Americans have had their liberty for development and fulfillment decreased. The life chances of current Americans are to an obnoxious degree unequal. Inequalities in access to inherited wealth and family income and inequalities in educational opportunity determine to a disproportionate degree one’s role in life. There is little equality of opportunity in an increasingly polarized society, and the level playing field is seldom found. Sociologically put, the United States is increasingly less just. Social pressures are building by decay, alienation, and revolt. Theologically put, the wrath of God against the United States is increasing. The alternative theme to justice for the following few years was just peacemaking. In the fall of 1993, I taught a course on Isaiah and peacemaking at Shadyside Presbyterian Church. The Bible study course at the church sponsored the seminar, and I enjoyed consulting and using the study resource by Walter Brueggemann published by the Presbyterian Peacemaking program. I thought the numerous Bible studies on peacemaking published by the program were among the best resources generated. They also served me well in General Assembly debates about the lack of biblical undergirding for peacemaking in the Church. The course proceeded well despite the Shadyside folks being more politically conservative than the churches that usually asked me to teach. The coordinator of the class, who was also a board member at the seminary, thought it helpful to present me with a short essay on the pains of the disillusioned liberal. After Clinton’s victory, the essay could be regarded as a compliment, but I always surmised that the donor intended it as critique.

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At Glen Stassen’s request I had written on realism and peacemaking for his seminary’s journal, and he asked me to join his “Just Peacemaking” project as one who had written on the topic and assisted his church in adopting just peacemaking perspectives. We presented the project in a plenary session of the Society of Christian Ethics in January of 1993 and followed up with meetings in Thomas Merton’s monastery near Louisville and in Jimmy Carter’s Center in Atlanta. My class on “Moral Issues in International Politics” spent a few days at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York City that spring. Robert Smylie, the coordinator for the Presbyterian Church for the United Nations office, arranged fine seminars for my classes on whatever topic I suggested. Three days at the United Nations added to the hours spent in the classroom for this class, but the students never complained about this extra commitment. They often complained in course evaluations about the length of reading assignments. But I never regarded the assignment of a book a week as too much for graduate students. I began adding a new course on the ethics of peacemaking to the curriculum. It bore a resemblance to the “Moral Issues” course, but it contained more on church peacemaking strategies and less on the theory of international relations. Occasionally we would include church members on the trip to the United Nations. This was particularly true when Bebb was ministering to the congregation at Third Presbyterian Church. On one occasion the eccentricities of some church members embarrassed me at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, but it was helpful for seminary students to see the difficulties of relating Christian ethics to real Church life when it touched on politics. It probably did no harm for the assistants to the ambassador to meet real Americans, either. I continued my Max Weber/Ernst Troeltsch course for doctoral students at the university, and I taught the large “Introduction to Ethics” course every year. Now I was teaching one course in international affairs and ethics under one title or the other each year. Each year I would offer a seminar on Reinhold or Richard Niebuhr or Paul Tillich. Less often I would combine Gandhi with Martin Luther King Jr. or King with Reinhold Niebuhr. I was working on my ethics textbook from the lectureship for the Witherspoon Chair until its publication in 1999, but the practical involvement in the leadership of the local development corporation and my local Presbyterian Church kept me out of the Ivory Tower (perhaps too much). Some days I felt I was taking materials to my secretary at the church, stopping by my office at the development corporation, before I could get the pages I had written the day before to my secretary at the seminary. I did dash off a short essay for A New Handbook of Christian Theology on peace that year, but my research would have to develop before I started publishing books again. The Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness was planning a meeting on ministry to the Hispanic population at Austin Theological Seminary. The leadership of the Advisory Council of Social Witness was changing, and one meeting was postponed. Lydia Ledesma and Ismael Garcia helped in the planning. As Patricia was studying at the University of Texas, I did not mind the extra trips to Austin through this transition. The Reverend Peter Sulyok, who had served as assistant to the coordinator, was chosen to head the office. He provided excellent staff services to the TEPSW for years.

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After one of the committee meetings in Austin, Patricia and I took a Holy Week break to drive over to Ghost Ranch where my friend Marcus Borg was leading his seminar on “Seeing Jesus Again for the First Time.” Patricia and I both lost some of the seminar time, as we were suffering from terribly severe colds. It was on this trip that I had two visions of Jesus. One was in the painted desert of the ranch, where I saw him suspended on the cross as in a Salvador Dali painting. The second was beside the road as we exited the ranch, appearing as a swarthy peasant in a humble robe from the Middle East. Through the years, I had made various work plans for writing projects and classes. Sometimes these notes would include programs for social service I was engaged in. Often the plans tried to correlate the work. It was pretty obvious that engaging in writing on subjects I was also teaching and working on in a practical way would increase my efficiency and hopefully my relevance. In 1993, at the beginning of the year, I started journaling. The journal kept for most of my succeeding years at the seminary consisted of planning my work and agonizing about my marriage. Often the irregular entries were driven by pain. Bebb and I were not at the same place in our respective lives. We undertook marital counseling with a variety of professionals four times in our twenty-year marriage. My entries reflect, alternatively, hope and despair for the marriage. By early in 1995, I had written about the marriage, “I think it is over.” There were still good times to be had, children to graduate from college and graduate schools, comfort to be given each other, and vacations to take. In retrospect, we probably took too long to dissolve the broken marriage. Without family near, there were few forces to reinforce the value of family. Bebb’s radical feminism critiqued family. My primary family experience in Iowa had been a negative influence, and so neither one of us had the deep convictions to overcome problems and hold it together. This entire trauma was detailed in pain in the journal. Of more interest to this intellectual biography was the incomplete work. I returned again and again to listing as projects a rewritten master of divinity thesis on morality and John Foster Dulles’s contrasting roles as Mr. Protestant on international relations and a militant secretary of state. The other unfinished project was various versions of a history of social ethics. Sometimes the project was described as a history of twentiethcentury Christian social ethics and sometimes as a total history of Christian reflection on politics from Jesus to Niebuhr. Both were occasionally begun, but then other projects would intervene. So these remained unfinished or only barely begun. An acceptance by Westminster publishers of a book proposal encouraged the work on Dulles, but the rejection of a grant for the work from Louisville Institute discouraged going ahead when I had the time. Westminster’s interest in an introduction to ethics book drew me away from the Dulles project. I spent the next few years giving major research and writing time to the introduction to ethics book. Though all the books I eventually wrote were accepted for publication, there were also rejections by publishers. The introduction, titled The Ultimate Imperative, though encouraged by Westminster, was eventually published by Pilgrim Press. This was a reversal of my experience with the 1992 volume for Niebuhr’s centenary, which was rejected by Pilgrim and then published with much fanfare by Westminster. The same mixed record

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was true for research grants as well. Probably only one out of three of my grant proposals were accepted. The acceptances were sufficient to ensure that normally there were funds to provide necessary travel for sabbatical research. The grants underwrote research in both of the great English university libraries. They underwrote sabbaticals at Harvard and Union. They made the United Theological College work in Bangalore possible. Travel to ecological study in both Brazil and Costa Rica was gained through grants. The funds necessary for the Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem were provided by the Association of Theological Schools, which was my best source. The final Lilly Fellowship underwrote work in France, Russia, and New York. Obviously, my mentors, Niebuhr, Bennett, and Shinn, had all been active in journal publication. Bennett had joined with Niebuhr in Christianity and Crisis. Shinn had founded the Union Theological Review, and of course Niebuhr had three predecessor journals to his major magazine, Christianity and Crisis. I had edited Social Action for a year in the 1960s, and I knew the value of having a place to record your ideas and push your causes. I considered it often, but I could never find a base for it at the seminary in Pittsburgh. I struggled with founding it as a joint project of the church and the seminary. Sometimes I would tell Gonzalo I was going to do it, and then I would retreat from the commitments in favor of more direct social action or the writing of books. I had some doubts about the ability of my colleagues to write that which I would like to publish. Through 1993, I struggled with starting it. Eventually I persuaded Dr. Chris Iosso to found a journal for the social witness of the Presbyterian Church. He chose to put it online, and it had a very successful beginning in 2012–2013. I introduced him to a potential donor whom he put on the editorial board. It replaced Church and Society magazine, which the hierarchy of the Church had refused to fund any longer. So my conviction that Christian social ethicists needing to organize, speak, and write from their research was in part fulfilled by others. Too many hours were spent planning or dreaming, but many of the dreams were turned into reality. Gonzalo and I received a small grant from the Association of Theological Schools to work on ecological issues affected by globalization. We chose to investigate, together, projects of preservation in Costa Rica in the summer of 1993. Friendships at Biblico Seminario, established in a previous visit to San Jose, facilitated our explorations there. He planned further work in Argentina, and I planned on an extensive trip to Amazonia in 1994. Before these trips could unfold, Bebb had an invitation to a Presbyterian women’s leadership meeting in Puerto Rico. I hooked on to the visit to the island as a spouse. There I climbed the large mountain, observing tree frogs for the first time. I was a little chagrined when I reached the top only to discover there was a road up on the opposite side to the one I had climbed. Other time was spent on the beach while the women were meeting at the hotel. One day we drove across the island to enjoy the Latin American Art Museum. I also negotiated a proposed visit to the seminary in San Jose for the Theological Educators organization with the authorities at the school. We intended to bring the Theological Educators’ group to the island in the near future. I had not written much on ecological issues since my first paper on “Limits to Growth” in 1972. My learning from these trips was put to use in the Presbyterian developments of ecological justice issues. I would not teach a full course on ecological ethics until just

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before my retirement, but my experiences showed up immediately in the “Introduction to Ethics” course. In May 1993, Gustavo Gutierrez made his second trip to Pittsburgh Seminary. He had come at my urging him for the Henderson Lectures. His presentations were a great success. I shared the limelight with both him and Gonzalo this year. Conversations were delightful, and issues around Latin America began to make their way into my research plans. He had agreed to speak at East Liberty Presbyterian Church for the Sunday afternoon service on the occasion of the Pittsburgh marathon, which made worship on Sunday morning nearly impossible. I was disappointed when he had to leave for Paris early to accept one of the highest honors of France. I huddled with the minister Bob Chesnut, and we asked Gonzalo to fill in for Gustavo. I was doing some lecturing in churches about faith and politics in Latin American churches, but with the Reagan-Bush administrations in the past, these issues seemed less urgent in the churches. I kept reading on the issues of sustainable development and thought about attending the conferences of the Ethics Society on Sustainable Development. I never made the society’s meetings, but I read essays prepared for the group. Bebb and I chose to attend the church’s seminar at Ghost Ranch on sustainable development. I had applied for the task force on the subject, but I had not been chosen. Gordon Douglass, chair of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness, wrote me a nice letter explaining the choices they had made for the task force. We spent a few days prior to the seminar around Santa Fe. We took in the Audubon Bird Sanctuary on a very good day for birding. The various raptors were spectacular. We also got in touch with the land through the corn ceremonies being danced at the Santa Clara pueblo. The ground shook with the power of the stamping feet and the ancient rhythms of the dancers. At the ranch, George Tinker and Larry Rasmussen showed how extensive the changes for sustainability would have to become. George B. N. Ayittey laid out the difficulties for Africa. Beverly Keene got down to policy recommendations. Peter Sulyok summarized and pushed the listeners to consider how the Church could be prophetic on these issues without raising fears that would prevent action. It was a very good seminar, and it promised that the Church would develop a sound policy toward ecological justice. Both Bebb and I were familiar enough with the subject so that we did not learn a lot that was useful, however. Before leaving the Southwest, we bought a clay statue of St. Francis to improve our backyard and to cover up the electrical pipe that spoiled the view of the side garden. The task force on sustainability worked particularly on Latin American issues. That experience and my own previous experiences on the South American continent encouraged me to plan my most amazing ecological research trip. Though I had touched Brazil previously, I had not seen the Amazon.

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Chapter 55

Amazon A plane delay due to rain in Pittsburgh almost caused me to miss my connection in Miami. In Caracas I joined Chileans in a card game, and then caught the flight to Manaus. My thoughts during the night flight were of doomed Indian tribes whose forest was under attack. The fires of dead vegetation from deforestation were an everpresent contribution to climate change. The estimate was that they produced 7 percent of the carbon added by humans to the atmosphere. I had observed the process in Costa Rica, where the old-growth forest was burned to provide weak pastures for a few years. The soil from the granite shelf of Brazil would collapse under rain; cattle grazing further depleted the land. The forest reproduced itself; the pasture could not. Brazil’s half of the world’s rain forest could not stand up to the exploitation by the World Bank, unregulated capitalism, subsidized deforestation, hydro-electric programs, and extractive industries. The extraction of gold, iron ore, and bauxite would provide fortunes for the oligarchs, but contribute little to the laborers or the occupants of the Rio favelas. From my window seat the clear skies were full of stars, but absent was any radiant light from the Earth. Deep in the forest it was dark. All of these impressions flooded into my mind as the plane descended into Manaus, which had grown to a million people. I was met at the airport by Bill Somplatsky-Jarman, the coordinator of ecological ministries for the Presbyterian Church. He introduced me to Captain Mark, the skipper of our ship, at 4:30 AM. We immediately departed for Mark’s boat, the Toucan. Bob Stivers and others including Bill’s wife, Carol, had arrived earlier. As my bag was hustled aboard, we cast off into the Rio Negro for our trip upstream. Below Manaus the Rio Negro joins the Solimos from Peru to form the Amazon, but we were headed north up the Rio Negro. The river was estimated at its current flood stage to be seven miles across; below Manaus the Amazon becomes the world’s greatest river. The small cabin in which Bob and I bunked was near the engine room, and it must have been the smallest on the boat. I thanked Bob for his choice. The air and noise level were both greatly improved when the engine was stilled. Much later, on our return trip at Novo Airão, Captain Mark took us on a tour of the new keel laid out for the future Toucan. Through the early morning we cruised through the largest island system of any river, the Anavilhanas Archipelago. As dawn broke we were greeted by the calls of exotic birds and the vista of the great trees. At one place on the Amazon it is said to be 310 feet deep and the equivalent of five or six Mississippi Rivers. Mark’s orientation emphasized the environment as a unit. Each species depended on another. Half of the species may be unknown or their role in the ecosystem only marginally understood. His staff biologist, Andrew, said the Amazon is the least inhabited region on Earth, at half a person per square mile. He claimed that half of the Northern Amazon basin had not been explored by anyone. To some interpreters,

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including the tribal peoples who were near and may have been viewing us while remaining unseen, it was us against the ecosystem. The second day we explored a lagoon unknown to our guides. Mark defined our trip as an expedition because we explored sites new to him and to our guides. The howler monkeys set up a great clamor as we sailed beneath them on our launches. That day we saw both gray and white dolphins. Scarlett macaws were spotted in high trees on the terra firma forest. On land we walked through the forest, and viewed (with the help of interpreters) interactions among plants and insects. The next day, early in the morning, we walked in the awakening forest. Spider monkeys bounded, and again we saw the macaws. That evening the poor soil of most of the Amazon was explained as sediment from granite from which the minerals were bleached out by centuries of sun and rainfall. In the afternoon we swam playfully with the dolphins, which seemed happy to have our company. We took a walk in the forest with a local guide. He explained medicinal qualities of plants. He sounded like a pharmacist showing his wares. The significance of the Amazon for healing humanity remains unknown, though European glimpses of its power go back to the first discovery of quinine. He related stories of killing a jaguar that killed three of his dogs under his house. He also reported on a thirty-foot anaconda that tried to kill his children. The origins of our fables on animals against humans became immediately clear on listening to his tales, which children and grandchildren could later relate. He also ran a small retail lumber yard beside his house. Many of the trails we walked on passed by stumps, indicating more local lumbering. The best hardwoods might be sold wholesale to Manaus dealers and floated down the river or carried to their goal by boats. On our return to the Toucan we found it surrounded by vultures and dolphins. Bob Stivers’s talk mentioned Jim Nash’s Loving Nature and Phyllis Windle’s essay “The Ecology of Grief.” Windle’s point was that marking and mourning the death of species would make ecology study more passionate and effective. By July 25, I recorded that we had seen birds from Venezuela; the rufus-throated hummingbird; the scarlett, blueheaded, and dusky macaws; many festive parrots; various species of hawks and swallows and two species of kites; representatives of the tangier family; and king vultures. We spent two days on the Rio Jauaperi, our northernmost penetration of the Amazon basin. We got up early on the upper deck to watch the jungle quietly awaken. A gunshot briefly interrupted the still. Howler monkeys provided a clamor, and hundreds of birds vocalized their protests. Sunup followed at 6:25. That evening we took launches and, with flashlights, explored for caimans. Unfortunately, our quarry was wary and we saw only a few small ones. After leaving the Rio Jauaperi at its confluence with the Rio Negro, we headed downstream as Columbus kites and brown martins feasted on a cloud of dragonflies above the canopy. A flock of black skimmers passed over two canoes crossing the river. Our guide referred to the Indians living here as living in paradise.

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In the evening Bob Stivers gave a shortened version of his lecture on “Integrity” as a normative concept for protecting the forest. As we sailed out of paradise, we approached Airão. It had been a rubber collection point. Here viscous dreams of plunder left a ruined ghost town. The economic potential of the Amazon has been often overestimated. Investments have been made, perhaps followed by profit for a few years, but usually the extractive industries have run away, leaving the populations behind. At our site a ruined mural depicted a steamship landing. There were failing piers, and some deserted, falling warehouses remained. The rubber boom collapsed in the Amazon when it moved to plantations in Asia. Soon we were near Jau Park, which was founded in the hope of preserving a large area of the forest after the collapse of the rubber trade. That afternoon, on the sixth day, we discussed deforestation of the rain forest with Mark’s leadership. It is not the settlements that are the primary threat in Brazil, but rather the relationship between cattle and the forest. Often the same corporation profits from lumber and cattle. Once the forest is removed, cattle can feast on the land for a few years, but their grazing further degrades the poor soil. It replaces the ancient slash-and-burn agricultural practices of the tribal peoples. The primitives would have moved on, leaving the forest to regenerate over generations. Now, cattle replace agriculture and destroy the land. The combination of lumbering and cattle is the primary threat. Once the roads for timber are introduced, people can follow and establish settlements. The export of timber is not the same threat it was. Except for fine woods, the timber is consumed in Brazil. Andrew remarked, “Mahogany is twenty times more valuable than the softer woods.” Mark thinks Brazil has the last great forest in the world and, after the other rain forests are cut, they will come for the Amazon. After Indonesia and Africa, Brazil will be the big prize. Mark and Andrew both regarded sustainable development as a hoax. The forest is so interdependent that development destroys it. They regarded sustainable use as predation. Brazil’s need for funds and its population growth, both for the short term, point to the exploitation of the Amazon. The high prices for mahogany and other rare, tropical hardwoods pay for the machinery to deforest. The expensive trees are scattered, and the roads to extract each tree may take out another fifteen to forty trees. Brazil is determined to use the forest, so destruction will come. The replacement mono-cultural plantings do not work very well in Brazil, as insect predation defeats them. The restrictions on farmers to cut only half of their forest produce unknown results. Many species leave the small plots, and the ecosystem collapses. Large preserves are needed. Jau is the best example. Only one hundred people live in the vast, two-million-hectare park. Countries unable to afford large preserves will lose the forest, and the world will soon be a different place. Brazil is a sovereign country, and it will decide the fate of its forests. Outsiders could help by providing funds for large preserves, but financial help so far has not matched foreign rhetoric.

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Bill asked about indigenous populations defending the forests. Mark responded that the Indians are under tremendous pressure. Gradually most are acculturating, and they sell the timber to acquire products they want. Their timber is bought for mills outside the reservations. To protect the reserves, you need armed guards at the gates of the preserve. .

Also, the rubber tappers and hunters degrade the forest. Mark continued, “We have traveled days up the river without seeing anyone; 80 percent of the forest to the north is unexplored. The gene pool of the world is here, along with chemicals in plants that humanity will need.” We walked in the forest noting sites where individual trees had been harvested for homes, canoes, or a school. We slept in a tent that evening. When we reached our guide’s home, we visited his manioc field and noted the white-throated toucan on the table awaiting preparation for the family’s lunch. The guide, as settler, seemed to be a one-family assault on the forest. Our guide had never seen tourists before. It was the first time Mark or Andrew had met him. He was reimbursed with some cash and several medicines. That morning, as we headed back to the Rio Negro, we observed plumbers kites, king vultures, yellow-headed caracaras, white banded swallows, forktailed flycatchers, various kingfishers, a dead yellow-ridged toucan, a channel billed toucan, an Amazon umbrella bird, and a tropical flycatcher. As the boat cruised on the Rio Negro toward Manaus, I spent most of the night watching the river from the bow. After our arrival we walked to the hotel. We spent the evening dining and talking with a tour from the Plowshares Institute managed by Bob and Alice Evans. The couple had roomed next to the Stivers and Stone families at 527 Riverside Drive in New York City when they were all doctoral students in religion. The evening discussion revolved around human rights, land questions, and the rights of the Indians in Brazil. Other friends from the Plowshares’ trip included Heidi Hadsell and Debra Kapp, both of whom taught at McCormick Seminary in Chicago. Bob Stivers would join this tour after Manaus. We toured the eco-park featuring monkeys and took the boat out again to the meeting of the waters where the darker water of the Rio Negro flows for miles with the whiter water of the Solimos to form the Amazon as they merge. Our fishing efforts produced meager results. We spent the closing days in Manaus in more presentations on the inhabitants and natural history of the Amazon and visits to local museums. We visited the markets designed by Eiffel, builder of the famous tower in Paris, and the grand opera house, Teatro Amazonas, from the age of the rubber barons. The last evening seminar featured Mark Baker on the Amazon from his fifteen years of exploration and Bruce Nelson, a scientist, on the dimensions of the Amazon and technical issues. Much of the states of Para and Rondonia were already deforested, and a great deal of Para has been reduced to desert.

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Mark thought the center of the Amazon might be protected while other states of Amazonia would be degraded. Some three hundred scientists were now studying the Amazon. There was a greater ecological consciousness in the country and politics of Brazil. Large parks might be funded. Brazil has eliminated subsidies for large-scale ranching, but the increase in the road network, concerns of the military for roads, and expanding extractive industries all promised the reduction of the forest. He thought that in the next fifty years the surrounding edges of the forests would be gone and the center degraded with the loss of species, decline in the fish population, and the elimination of large animals. The most effective U.S. help would be financial, to preserve parks. The Amazon will be the last large forest. While Nelson stressed the importance of the Jau Park, he noted the human resentment of people expelled from the park. He admitted that of all of Brazil’s parks, only two, Iguazu and the Christ Park in Rio, were well managed. I had seen these on my previous trip to Brazil. He pushed his recommendations of preserving the forest in large parks, funding reliable NGOs, and communicating with activists in Brazil with e-mail and financial support. The rain forest protection stands against the trend of humanity to record its final act as destruction of its environment. The beauty and solitude of our trip were on the Rio Negro in the northwest of the Amazon. If we had traveled to the border between Venezuela and Brazil into the Yanomami tribal areas, we would have seen the destruction of the life of these peoples by the invasion of the miners. International groups attempted rescue, but the invasion of forty-five thousand miners has disrupted the land. Government policy encouraged the invasion. The dotting of the countryside with hundreds of airports and empty mine pits as the breeding places for the mosquitoes threatened all with malaria. Some of these mines are among the most brutal places in the world to work, and the consequent violence of the miners overwhelms the indigenous dwellers of the forest. In the south in Para, the Kayapo people face plans to inundate their land with water backed up by projected dams. The miners there rampage through the forest without regard for the natives. Most of the trans-Amazon roads have taken the lives of the local Indian tribes and opened up unplanned immigration of the population from southern Brazil. The income disparity in Brazil is the most extreme on the continent. However, the poor dwellers of Rio and São Paulo are not equipped for jungle life, and in the absence of governmental planning, the settlement attempts of the Amazon have been miserable failures. The Amazon’s future hangs in the balance. Typically, where the immigrants meet the natives without planning, law, or order, the intersecting chaos destroys the indigenous population and the forest. Hollywood’s discovery of the native crises promises a dream of hope. But generally the dreams of the Amazon by white people, whether these were dreams of empire, rubber, manufacturing, paradise, or slavery, have been as fanciful as El Dorado. Columbus thought he found innocents, and he reported to his monarchical supporters how they could be exploited. Will the dreams of the Hollywood moguls fare any better than those of the slavers, missionaries, miners, and anthropologists who followed their visions to the Amazon basin?

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Twenty years after my trip to the Amazon, the struggle to unionize workers still goes on, though there are more martyrs now. The liberation theologians and ministers who assisted the Indians have been reduced in numbers and power by conservative popes and bishops. The largest dam construction proceeds, even if the grandiose plans of some of the military dictators have been reduced. The removal of the trees is beginning to reduce the rainfall in the forest. Deforestation continues. Dreamers hope for more dams, more roads, more population intrusion, more cattle, and more gold. The forest resists in its own way, but the Indians falter and are degraded by the capitalist onslaught. Geoffrey O’Connor made his tenth photography trip to the Amazon in 1995 as I was finishing my first short tour. He did not report on the Rio Negro, but he spent most of his travels recorded in Amazon Journal among the Kayapo and Yanomami indigenous peoples. By 1995 limits to exploitation of both tribes were in place. The Yanomami had a park protecting their lands, and miners were being tried for genocide. The Kayapo were being reimbursed for resources from their land, and some of the middlemen from among their tribe were being tried for graft. Their forest land was being demarcated as he visited. O’Connor would repeat the cliché, which he now often heard, “No one cares any more about the Amazon.” The costs to the people of the invasions by rubber gatherers, miners, military roads, and Indian agents had been very heavy, but at least for a while the pressures were lessened on these two peoples at opposite ends of the forest.

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Chapter 56

Mother Mother retired from teaching, and some of the spirit went out of her after Dad’s death. Two heart surgeries further reduced her liveliness, and she did not want to undergo a third. She usually visited family in Pittsburgh for Easter. This year she couldn’t come out, and I visited her while she was staying with my brother Hugh, who was single at the time. We thought it best she remain with him in her recuperation. I rented a truck and brought up some of her things, including her bed from Dakota City. Neighbors helped pull me out of our front yard in Dakota City after the loaded truck sank into the wet soil. During our spring visit, we got schedules confused. She thought I was preaching the Easter sermon, whereas actually I addressed an Easter breakfast crowd on peace issues. Then I returned to Hugh’s house, and she made poached eggs and white sauce on toast for me for the last time. Even as the church service started, she thought I was going to leave her side to preach the sermon. She nudged me to get going; I apologized to her for the confusion. She was sorry she had not heard me speak at the breakfast. She had taught, as Dad’s sisters had taught. They had been educated at Iowa State Teacher’s College. She picked up her college credits when she returned to teaching in 1958. She graduated with honors from Drake University after I finished my PhD, and after she had helped the younger boys through college and graduate schools. I never understood Dad’s devaluing teaching. It must have been hidden somewhere deep in his psyche. Perhaps it was a defensive reaction to his being the only one of his siblings who did not graduate from college. In late April 1995 she visited Alan for the Scotland Days at Alma College. He and Jonieta ran in the race, and they led the Scotland Parade. In the evening his board of directors were invited to the college manse to taste Scotch before dinner. Hugh had accompanied Mother and taken her home to Des Moines. While he was away the next evening, she phoned 911 for emergency help, as she was having a heart attack. The responders broke open the door to enter Hugh’s parsonage, but they were too late. Hugh reached me by phone on May 1, just after we had returned from John’s graduation at Oberlin. I had chosen, after some hard discussions, to go to Ohio rather than to Alan’s home in Michigan for the Scot celebration. So our previous conversation over Easter that year was our last meeting. Roger, the cleverest of the sons, said at her memorial service in Humboldt that Mother’s secret ambition had been to work as a photographer at National Geographic and travel the world. She had furnished the drive to travel in their retirement years, as well as the funds. Roger also told the story that we were Methodists because Grandma Tilton insisted on Sunday school for her brood. The Iowa winters were so hard that they could not make it in to town to attend Catholic services, so they stopped at the rural Methodist Church outside Eagle Grove, Iowa. The lawyer could have a laugh at his

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three brothers who all pursued Methodist theological studies, though at different schools. Dad was secular. Mother was a pious believer. We got our toughness from him as well as our Anglophile orientations. Our religion and appreciation of school we got from Mother. Of course, she had to be enrolled and taking classes to teach in the public schools in the 1950s–1960s, but she loved her studies. Drake University in Des Moines, where she graduated, was a hundred miles from Dakota City. She picked up her college credits around the state. She and other teachers needing credits would pool their driving to keep their teaching certificates valid. In later years, when I was in Humboldt on a writing project, I would hear expressions of appreciation and almost reverence for her. She taught the children of her former students and brought learning to the prairies. Dad’s grandfather had done the same, but I never heard about that from Dad. Yet, in fairness, Dad served on the school board when his business was the most prosperous thing in Dakota City. He insisted my fifthgrade teacher keep me after school until I learned my mathematics. So I should not make the contrast too stark. Mother was from poverty and Dad from relative wealth, but in their later years Dad depended upon Mother’s teaching pension for the nice things of their life. He was also appreciated as a builder and as one who could get things done. While the love of learning came from Mother, an appreciation of history, and particularly English history, came from him. Hugh returned from his study at Yale to Iowa to be near and to help Mother. His loyalty extended to providing a home for her after her heart surgery. My contribution was only to try to visit twice a year and to entertain her and Dad when they could come see me. They had not made my second wedding, though all my brothers came. Mother’s continued loyalty to Joan probably alienated Bebb somewhat. In any case, they never became close. Mother was a faithful correspondent, and her letters to me would fill a book. They have been a guide to writing this memoir, filling in facts and events in Iowa beyond the power of my memory. Memories of her flow to her doctoring my rabbits, providing birthday and Halloween parties, working in the grocery store when necessary, caring lovingly for grandparents, and cooking, always cooking. She taught us to share fresh produce from her garden and to attend to those in need by example. How precious are memories of returning at noon from school on a cold Iowa winter day and discovering a quilt laid out over the dining room table with three generations of women working on the art. My brothers report that after her funeral I sounded as if I were having a relatively long conversation with her in the basement of the house. Maybe so, my memories are vague, but I suspect my brothers are correct. For several years the professor, the minister, the lawyer, and the college president would talk about their family dynamics, trying to understand their origins and their good fortune. She would appear in my dreams for years, providing counseling, critique, and comfort. The youthful pictures of her are beautiful. In the 1990s she had sent me a picture from the newspaper of her and her Maple Grove class before she married. She wrote in her

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letter, “I cannot remember when I was so skinny.” The older pictures show her as distinguished. Early fond memories include her taking Alan and me to search for spring wildflowers in the ravine. She was the first to teach me to fish in the Des Moines River. Later Russell Christenson would take on that role as an older friend. I feel she was somewhat depressed by the loss of three infants. I cannot say for certain, but I think the success of her younger boys overcame the depression so that it did not cripple her, although a certain air of sadness would not disappear. Her life was full for a mother in a small Iowa town, but she had larger dreams than her marriage to a man who was usually under the influence of beer by the time he came home from work. Sundays became more precious for all of us because they were free of the influence of alcohol on Dad. The best testimonies to her are from her former students and the children of those students, whom she also taught, but the testimonies from her coworkers in the schools and the church are equally reverential.

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Chapter 57

John Bennett and Nuclear Weapons John Bennett died on April 28, 1995, only a few days before Mother. I had visited him a month earlier. Dean Lewis had asked me to visit him and videotape an interview on the churches and the dawn of the nuclear age. Dean had invited Edward Teller and some of the scientists at Los Alamos to participate in a seminar on the atomic bomb fifty years after its use. He asked me to convene the seminar, and he hoped I could bring a witness from John Bennett to match the years of experience Ed Teller had with the weapons. I had secured a video crew and gone out to visit John. His son, John Jr., advised against our interviewing his father. He felt it was an unfair imposition. But John wanted to try, and the Reverend Fred Stoerker, my old friend and John’s, thought it would be possible. We prevailed, and I began the interview. John could not remember details, however, and despite his good spirit I did not obtain an interview that deserved to be viewed. But John and I spent several pleasant hours together. We reminisced about our early efforts to oppose the Vietnam War, and we gossiped about academic colleagues. I was asked a couple of months later to come out to Claremont to speak at John’s memorial service. I was honored to be asked by Fred Stoerker, who was the associate minister at the Claremont Congregational Church. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin was asked to be the other major speaker. Bill and I knew each other, and though we both led in the antiwar movement, we did not always agree. Through the time before and after the funeral I came to appreciate Bill more than I ever had before. His warm humanity, which I had not known, came through in those hours, and I forgot about our differences originating in his establishment upbringing and my Iowa roots. Our differing interpretations of John Bennett were minor. I described him as a moderate surrounded by a country going to extremes. Bill described him as a radical. But the difference was not significant. We meant the same thing. I’ve never forgotten Bill relating that he, Robert MacAfee Brown, and Bill Weber were demonstrating outside the United Nations for control of nuclear weapons when they learned of John’s death on April 28. He said, “He was our teacher and we loved him.” Those words seldom fail to bring tears to my eyes. I built my oration around four virtues that had characterized John C. Bennett in my estimation: fairness, moderation, passion, and humility. I mentioned his relief at the end of the Cold War. He had participated in it deeply as a Christian ethicist. He had written books on living with Communism. He had quoted Simeon on learning of the birth of Jesus in his Christmas newsletter on learning of the new directions of Russia: “Let thy servant depart in peace.” As in many other governmental changes, hopes were not to be realized, but the atomic threat was lessened. My remarks at the memorial service follow: “John C. Bennett: Four Virtues before God”

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John was my teacher, mentor, and colleague in the 1960s, during the 1970s–90s he was my friend, wise advisor, and companion. The first virtue I would mention is fairness. The first time he summoned this youth from Iowa to the office of the Dean of the Faculty, it was to caution me that perhaps I had been a little unfair in my criticism in the student newspaper of the political ethics of a junior faculty member. Five weeks ago when I interviewed him on the moral meaning of the nuclear age, he said that in all fairness he wouldn’t comment critically on his European colleagues’ silence about nuclear deterrence. In between his comment in the early 1960s and the interview in April of 1995, he taught the Protestant theological world about fairness to Roman Catholics by instituting programs with Fordham and Woodstock, fairness to women by destroying glass barriers which hindered women at Union Theological Seminary, fairness to African Americans by leading the acceptance of Black faculty at Union, and fairness to Hispanics by honoring Cesar Chavez. Fairness was a theme of his life. He pursued it for others and pushed his friends to establish it. John Bennett had an incredible capacity to be fair with those he disagreed with and he could, and did, present their positions fairly. The second virtue that leapt out from the life of John Bennett was moderation. The theology was balanced; it considered all the sources. It was self-corrective and with its moderate balances it corrected the extremes of others. In his special field of the ethics of international relations this moderation guided his policies; neither isolationism nor imperialism, but engagement, neither surrender nor war but keeping alternatives open, neither anti-communism nor retreat but responsible policy, neither absolute Christian policies nor secular policies, but moral policies influenced by Christian ethics. Yet he is known for writing a book, The Radical Imperative, and being one of two religious leaders named on the president of the United States’ enemy list. Characteristically, John Bennett’s moderate positions put him squarely against the extremism of an evil war in Vietnam, against mean policies of punishing the poor, against racism, and against extreme policies of pretending officially that China was ruled from Taiwan. Against tyranny and/or democratic stupidity a moderate, Christian, balanced position appears radical for a time until God proves its worth. John Bennett’s third virtue was passion. His passion for fairness, peace, and justice was thorough. Students would phone him from jail, whether it was civil rights, South African freedom or anti-Vietnam War actions that put them in jail. He never dissented from their passions, in fact his own passion would lead to his arrest over Vietnam while president of the seminary. Anne Bennett, of course, helped. She was always pushing John and the rest of us for more passion for justice. The fire which took her to Hanoi during the war warmed many. I visited her in the Health Center at Pilgrim Place near the end of her life during our cruel policy of aiding the

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Contra war. After our polite conversation she asked: “Have you been to Nicaragua yet Ron?” To my negative reply she asked: “Why not?” When I was working as John’s graduate assistant he became dismayed about the quietism of the Union students on Vietnam. So we conspired to bring Reinie to the campus to speak on the Vietnam War. The results in the Union student body of his irony and critique were astonishing, and for years later lack of passion was not the Union problem. But only a few years later, after the student occupation of Union, Bennett, now teaching in California wrote me decrying the tendency of the students in the 1970s to drift into mysticism and quietism. Some of the best of John Bennett is hidden in his wonderful letters to his students. The mensch of John comes out better in letters to his ethics students than anywhere else in his writings and they need to be shared. It was his passion for life that made John Bennett’s contribution in his retirement years so distinguished. The final virtue I would mention is humility. At Union you could not help but learn that pride was the big sin. But learning that our unbelief in our anxiety produced pride did not cure us from it. No matter how many honorary doctorates he received in one week, God kept him humble. Anne helped some too. John Bennett’s humble, passionate, moderate, and fair life is proof of the gospel of Christ he served. In 1993, his Christmas letter repeated a Niebuhr prayer that he and Anne had used in their 1980 letter which expressed their faith: “God who has made us the creatures of time, so that every tomorrow is an unknown country, and every decision a venture of faith, grant us frail children of this day, who are blind to the future, to move toward it with sure confidence in your love from which neither life nor death can separate us.” Occasionally his humility rose to prophetic vexation, but an inner peace controlled. The central subjects of thirty years of correspondence between us were: Communism, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and nuclear weapons. When the long Cold War ended he expressed his gratitude in the words of Simeon, “who could not see death before he saw Christ.” On seeing the baby Jesus, Simeon said, “Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” In peace John Bennett departed. Our Lord, treasure him now we pray. Amen. John had been one of the original clergy who objected to the “surprise atomic bombing of Japan.” Throughout his career he had opposed tendencies to rely upon nuclear destruction as policy. He entered the policy debates as a responsible member of the Council on Foreign Affairs, and he maintained restrained arguments that people connected to the policy makers could hear, even if the policy makers were too committed to policies of mutual assured destruction. John worked with Reinhold Niebuhr on the ethics of nuclear weapons for years. He edited the praiseworthy book, Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience. After I started writing books on

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international politics and policy papers for the Presbyterian Church, our judgments varied a little. I probably was more influenced by the just war criterion of civilian immunity from war. Also, my playing with Russian children and spending more time in the Soviet Union than him had been influential, though he had visited. In any case, he thought my strongly asserting that nuclear weapons could hardly ever be used morally and that they were inherently immoral was not as helpful as the Catholic bishops’ position of morally approving time for negotiations to undo the crisis of the weapons. He was more approving of the bishops’ position than I was. Although my argument sounded like immediate nuclear disarmament, that was not my position. Realists in the Christian tradition like Bennett, Niebuhr, and Shinn tended to want to make judgments that statesmen could make. I wanted to insist on the autonomy of the moral judgment from political actors. The statespersons were responsible for figuring out how to implement the moral positions, or close approximations of the moral positions. Of course, the dismantling of the nuclear deterrent was the responsibility of the professionals to achieve, but they needed to hear from the moralists that relying on weapons that, in their mere existence, contained the possibility of destroying another country’s children was wrong. In Pittsburgh I was closer to the people who actually made the weapons than my professors in New York City. My babysitter’s father fueled the nuclear aircraft carriers. The president of the seminary board of directors was also chairman of Westinghouse Electric. Many of the people assembling in our business ethics seminar at the Duquesne Club were also in the nuclear business, and I needed clarity, not more time to judge the reality.

LOS ALAMOS After praising John, I took my learning from him to the Ghost Ranch Seminar. I invited Glen Stassen to join me as another Christian ethicist. The scientists from Los Alamos made about half the presentations, and Glen and I produced the other half. We were all happy that Los Alamos Labs were working with the Soviets to dismantle nuclear weapons. They were also reducing the size of our weapons and decreasing our stockpiles. We spent a lot of time on the current state of the arms agreements with the Soviet Union. We toured the museum at Los Alamos, where previously Dorothee Solle and I had led demonstrations in protest. Some of the classes were held at Los Alamos and some at the ranch. Ed Teller played the piano with a group of scientists for entertainment at the ranch one evening, as he had years ago when in the 1940s the scientists had used the ranch as a site for rest and recreation. The major disagreements in the seminar were sharp exchanges between Ed Teller and me. He could not accept the moral principles of civilian immunity from the just war tradition. He explained it was not his tradition, as he was Jewish. On one occasion he said, “If you are correct, my life’s work has been in vain.” I felt no need to reply. Still, the general atmosphere in the seminar was positive, as the scientists were trying in their research to make the world safer from their previous accomplishments, and that could be affirmed. Teller went into some detail about the petition from the Chicago labs to use the first atomic weapon as a demonstration rather than a surprise attack. He argued that his later opponent, Oppenheimer, had prevented the petition from being circulated at Los Alamos, claiming that such decisions were the work of generals and politicians,

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whereas the lab’s task was just to build the instruments. I quoted Bishop Bell of Chichester: “There were certain things scientists should not do.”

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Politics My high school principal had selected me to attend Iowa Boy’s State, and he gave me a little advice on how to pursue political honors at the statewide meeting. Holding political office at the high school came to me naturally, but I was a little awed at the state level. Later educational experiences at college led me to choose all the political courses the small schools offered, and I developed a nose for politics. As a small-town lay pastor, I preached an election day sermon and generally encouraged the people of the Church to fulfill their political vocation as Christians. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had objected to the curriculum at Union being overpoliticized, but for me it was very appropriate. At Columbia the International Fellows Program and courses in political philosophy and the theory of international relations all developed my political instincts. My major reason for going to Oxford was to study political philosophy with John Plamenatz. At both Union and Pittsburgh, my classes had large dimensions of Christian political philosophy in them. Most of my work for the Presbyterian Church had political dimensions. I failed twice to win elected political office, and only later in life was I appointed to a county political office. Early in my teaching career at Pittsburgh, I required students to participate in political campaigns and to write a paper on a moral issue they discovered in their political work. Eventually I realized this required a time commitment from the students over their heavy academic work that was unfair, and I relented. Every election year I would offer a course on the giants of Christian political thought and conduct class discussions on the political events of the day. The classes would usually focus on Augustine, Calvin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other figures on whom the students chose to write their term papers. Part of my reluctance to pursue ministerial ordination was that I thought I would not want to be burdened by the label if I ran for political office. The dean of students at Morningside College who taught history and politics was a successful candidate for Congress for western Iowa. I considered that avenue as a possible vocation for a while before I settled on teaching as my calling. His was one of the offices burglarized in the Watergate scandal.

CONTRACT ON AMERICA My writing that received the most responses in 1995 was the essay “Contract for the Rulers of the United States of America.” The previous election had produced a new Republican majority in Congress under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich. He had outlined his hoped-for program in the “Contract with America.” My response was in Monday Morning (February 20, 1995). The contract, I said, was for the rulers of America who were mostly white, male, and upper class in income. Gingrich played on the covenant theme and the Ten Commandments while not recognizing that the

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biblical covenants always cared for and protected the poor. The new morality gave the advantage to the establishment. The “Contract,” designed to make the poor less dependent on government, was conceived by congressmen who were themselves dependent on the U.S. government for income, health care, offices, staff, generous pensions, protection from violence, recreation, and food services. Perhaps no class, unless it is the military, is more dependent on the U.S. government than Congress. The ten “bills” emphasized that services to the poor were to be cut even though holders of home mortgages receive more subsidy than the poor. The dependence of the superrich was not to be attacked, but the focus was on the dependence of the poor. Nutritional programs, aid to dependent children, and food stamps were all to be cut. The “bills” being read during Christmas season reminded one of Scrooge and King Herod. I mentioned that as chair of a public safety committee in the inner city I appreciated the emphasis on the need for more police in the streets. But the “bills” did nothing to increase hope for the poor in the inner city or to expand educational opportunity. “The spirit of the Contract is punitive: Execute more, imprison more, and reduce social programs that encourage inner-city youth.” “Bill 8” of the contract reduced government regulations. It insisted all regulations be reviewed for their economic potential. It would particularly stifle regulations to protect the environment. There was no evidence that the United States had voted to destroy the environment on November 8. Slight majorities in Congress were no mandate to destroy nature. Some other provisions of the “Contract” could be accepted. Some provisions depended upon one’s economic philosophy. But when taken as whole and read as the moral document it proposes to be, it reflects too much the moral ideology of the rulers, and it is too mean to the poor. In summary, it was more a “contract on” than a “contract with” the United States of America. The short essay received many responses—most were positive, but then most of the readers were Presbyterian clergy. One wanted to explore studying for a PhD in values with me. A few were critical, but very few. I have written books that received fewer written responses. Gingrich could not achieve his agenda, and he soon turned his attention to accusing President Clinton.

URBAN DEVELOPMENT In 1996, I continued my work in politics and faith in a Ghost Ranch seminar, but major non-curricular efforts were spent in guiding the East Liberty Development Corporation (ELDI) through a difficult period. As violence increased I served as public safety coordinator and then as president of the corporation. The move of the executive director to Phoenix complicated the process. My pick of a new executive from the ranks of banking, for the goal of handling the finances of the redevelopment of the Frick Building across from East Liberty Presbyterian Church, was not successful. Tensions among employees in the office exploded, and he resigned. As he had been my choice, I

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resigned as well. We had reopened the theater across the street from the church, and the violence had been reduced by the time I left office, but we never succeeded in remodeling the Frick Building. That goal would not be fulfilled until 2013, when the business climate in East Liberty had improved. Improvement began, and by means of some controversial measures we used ELDI to involve the city government in cleaning up the old Sears store site and helping to finance the first big-box construction of Home Depot across from the seminary. Some churches had hoped to use the site, but I held out for business development as the greater need in East Liberty for the immediate future. We already had a lot of churches!

RELIGION AND POLITICS Similarly, in my writing on religion and politics that year, I insisted that we lived in a secular republic that encouraged Church participation in the political process at many levels, while resisting government support for churches. Right-wing religious politics received my usual criticism. It was deficient on the justice issue and too naïve about the difference between their hopes for the City of God and what could be achieved in the secular city. My short essay in the Living Pulpit, a resource magazine for preachers, emphasized that both sickness and health could come from religiously inspired politics. I thought the apocalyptic politics were particularly unhelpful and urged the opponents of such politics to stress “the gross inequality in income, racial injustice, class prejudices and gender discrimination.”

KKK A few of my students in rural Pennsylvania had difficulty with the Ku Klux Klan. A Methodist pastor and former student, Bob Zilhaver, contacted me with the issue around Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. At his suggestion, I produced a comment for his Spirit, the local newspaper: “KKK Contradicts Values of U.S. Public Schools” Congratulations on your first-page column on the KKK’s request for public school facilities. The school board’s response of no action seems very appropriate. We trust Solicitor David Young will persist in this refusal to the KKK even if this requires a long legal battle. The KKK’s terror, bigotry and purposes contradict fundamentally the values of the United States public schools. The school cannot be forced to legitimate, by use of its facilities, forces which threaten the foundations and values of public education. The Spirit would serve the public and its readership well if it would publish well-researched material on the KKK and other dangerous groups. We all

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need to be reminded of the KKK’s history and its purposes so that we may oppose its racism before it grows into a significant, malignant movement. I am writing to the Spirit as one who teaches ministers who serve in your area and as one who benefits from Christian support from your churches. Significant numbers of my students have come from your communities and that arouses my concern about the health of your part of our commonwealth. Other students would have trouble from the KKK. Sometimes the students were intimidated, as they did not know which members of the governing, local church bodies might be secret members of the Klan. I would advise them as to courses of action to counter the Klan and to keep their pulpits. Some participated in organizing counterdemonstrations against Klan parades. The Reverend Mr. Robert Zilhaver took the matter to his Western Pennsylvania Methodist Conference and got support for organizing education for the ministers of that conference about the Klan. In their 1996 meeting, the General Conference of the Presbyterian Church approved the overture I had written on “Theological Ethics and Political Participation.” Its purpose was to revisit the action of 1984 and to strengthen Presbyterian commitments to progressive politics, and probably to produce a new study book similar to the 1983 volume, Reformed Faith and Politics. I had hoped to push the denomination toward even stronger action criticizing right-wing Christian political action for ignoring the important issues of social injustice and unequal income distribution. Little action followed except for some Ghost Ranch seminars and consultations. Eventually the funds were used for the task force working on assuring that the Voting Rights Act would be renewed, and to study voter registration and participation. The statement did not achieve its practical purpose, exactly, but it remains an example of the Church speaking a word for the City of God to the political process without controlling it. Another initiative that I shared with Gonzalo Castillo was the planning for the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness (TEPSW) to visit our seminary in Cuba. The trip had been proposed and discussed in the 1994 meeting of the society in Pittsburgh. Transitions in leadership of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy and the complications of obtaining visas postponed the journey. We would take that trip in January 1997.

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Cuba My brother Roger married an attractive lawyer, Laurie Crawford, in their new home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on January 10, 1997. At the party that evening, as the conversation turned toward love, I reminded the family of Sigmund Freud’s observation that the purpose of life was caught in the two realities of love and work. A little general discussion followed on the subject. However, brothers Alan and Hugh took opposing positions on the meaning of love. The conversation then turned into a rather raucous debate between the two of them, reminiscent of the bawdy scenes of Plato’s Symposium. I attempted to quell them by suggesting this was really the tension of perspectives found in the two different divinity schools they had attended. But that did not quiet them. Hugh represented an interpretation that love was a gift of a gracious God, which was in line with the thought of several professors from Yale. Alan stressed love as an injunction or an imperative resulting in duty from a Kantian perspective, more grounded in the University of Chicago. The wide-ranging debate evolved into several other arguments, including the degree of respect John Wesley deserved. Roger pleaded with them to put their differences aside, as this was his wedding day. Personal dimensions entered into the debate, and they followed each other from room to room as the debate became more of a quarrel. We all went to bed that evening with the issues unresolved. Alan and Jonieta drove me to the Cedar Rapids airport early the next morning. Alan still felt badly about the exchanges. My flights took me to Nassau, where I met the Theological Educators, and we left the next morning for Havana. Our group of twelve consisted of Gonzalo Castillo-Cardenas, Gordon Douglass, Heidi Hadsell do Nascimento, Carol Johnston, Lidia Serrta Ledesma, Donald Shriver, Peggy Shriver, Ron Stief, Robert Stivers, Ronald Stone, Peter Sulyok, and Dana Wilbanks, the chair of TEPSW. We were met at the airport, and within an hour of our arrival in Cuba we were at our accommodations in the Motel “El Valle” outside of Matanzas. The Seminario Evangelico de Teologia in Matanzas was the center of our visit. It sits high on a hill viewing the city below and the Matanzas Bay. All of our locations for the first twenty-five years of our society would be in seminaries, as our primary work was as seminary faculty interested in the social policy of our Presbyterian Church and in improving the teaching of social ethics within the Church. The ecumenical school in Matanzas had forty-six resident students and five other students. It had five full-time faculty and eighteen part-time instructors. It received support from the World Council of Churches and from German churches. The churches were growing and needed more pastors, as many pastors had left immediately after the Cuban Revolution. Most of the students served churches as pastors on the weekends. The seminary leadership advocated a prophetic role of the church very similar to our own perspective of teaching social ethics. The government had relaxed its pressures on the churches and encouraged their creative role in social morality. The Church had a

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critical role to play, saying yes to the goals of the revolution and no to social problems like increased prostitution, associated with tourism, and foreign ideas not rooted in Cuban experience representing Eastern European Marxist dogma. The first day we were exposed to lectures on Cuban culture and economy and a tour of the city of Matanzas. The poverty, related to the collapse of trade and aid relations with the previously socialist countries of Eastern Europe and to the U.S. boycott, was obvious. The collapse of the Soviet trade of oil for sugar left many of the old American cars in Cuba without fuel, so traffic jams were never a problem. The priorities of the revolution for health and education were now threatened by the economic situation. Some change was coming, as European tourists spent U.S. dollars, which were traded in the economy, and some private businesses were being tolerated. The Versailles Presbyterian Church in Matanzas presented the group with a vision of social ministry that could be implemented in Cuba now, since the interview with Castro on religion had been published. The book Fidel on Religion recognized the usefulness of religion in social service and morality. He had been led to see this through liberation theology even though Catholicism had been resistant to his revolutionary agenda. So from our first day we were pondering the U.S. role toward Cuba, the revolution, and the tension between radical and conservative Catholicism, all of which were heightened by the expected visit of Pope John Paul II in the following year, for which the Communists were preparing. The second morning was spent in dialogue with Caridad Diego of the Office of Religious Affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He regarded the days of tension with religious organizations to be past. Freedom of religion was embedded in the Constitution. He recognized tensions in the past between the party and the Catholic Church, and that Cuba was a very religious country. The party may have been excessive in its relationship to Catholic hierarchy in the past, but the good quality of relations now was witnessed by the prospective visit by the pope. He did not agree with me that the visit of the pope was dangerous to his ideology. He was very positive toward the social attitudes of the Presbyterians and their leadership in social theology. Later we would meet two Presbyterian ministers who were members of Parliament in Cuba. He also insisted Christian believers were members of the Communist Party in Cuba and that they and other believers were welcome. We had lunch with the Luyano Presbyterian Church in Havana, and continued our conversations about religious freedom and social witness with the pastor and key lay people of the church. The church provides medical service, a parochial school, social ministry to women, elder services, and special programs for children in the workingclass, poor neighborhood. The Church relates ecumenically to churches in Germany, the United States, and Canada. Mario Castillo interpreted for our group and introduced us to the Museum of the Revolution, the port of Havana, the market, and the cathedral. We wandered freely around on our own to Hemingway’s bar, cigar shops, and conversations with citizens of the city. The beautiful old city was showing its poverty, and wonderful colonial buildings were in need of repair, which, in all probability, awaited the restoration of relations with the United States.

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As the Cuban trip served also as our regular meeting, we used January 15 to undertake some of our own work for the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP). We worked on the development of the task force on building community, a report I gave on the “Just Peacemaking” project, and the results of the sustainable development policy from the last General Assembly. We also began work on a resolution on Cuba. In the afternoon the visit was to a Christian base community sponsored by the Presbyterian Church in Cardenas City. The community center had an academic and urban development focus. Pursuing the development of Church and community, they had constructed this new community center with dormitories, kitchen, and rooms for meetings. Actually, the building could be compared to facilities in many of our large urban churches, though the theology underlying the project was more geared to the needs of the poor. The work is similar to the work of my local Presbyterian Church in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh, though it has a theology of liberation undergirding it. The founding minister, Raimundo Garcia-Franco, a Baptist, depends on the support of Presbyterians, among others. He is using alternative energy sources and encouraging courses in ecological responsibility. From Cardenas City we went on to a pig farm, which was utilizing bio-gas for its energy source. The day was completed with a visit to a workers’ cooperative that produced its own food. I noted that while the workers going to the fields in the back of the truck were dark-skinned descendants of the slaves brought to Cuba, the driver was white. I have observed the same patterns in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, but here it showed the incomplete work of the revolution. After dinner in Matanzas we were treated to a sparkling lecture by the elderly Rene Castellano on Afro-Cuban religions. Santeria (one of three traditions he talked about) came from the Yorubs of Western Nigeria. Its many-god pantheon mixed with Catholicism and its hoard of saints that could be joined to the African traditions. Santerias still think of themselves as Christian. Coming out of the Presbyterian Church in Havana, one was surprised by objects of African religions being sold in the shop across the street. On Thursday we spent the morning in discussion with faculty and students about their courses and pedagogy. Most of the pedagogy is standard lecture, and an apology was offered that with so few textbooks, lecture is a major means of conveying knowledge. The students spend a lot of time serving their churches, and they recognized the need for strengthening the library and recruiting more full-time professors. In the afternoon we met with a professor of ethics at the University of Havana who explained the curriculum in ethics at the university. Professor Luis Lopez-Bonbin explained that the emphasis on Soviet Marxist philosophy had declined since 1984, and that now they were reflecting more on authors writing in Spanish, including Cubans. Lopez-Bonbin knew the thought of some liberation theologians, and he found it helpful. There was a lot of discussion in ethics concerning values, and they tried to approach the value questions through Marxism. The material faults of the system were producing a crisis in values in a suffering society. The achievements of the Revolution in education and

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health were worth fighting for, he argued. Yet socialism had to be rethought for its Cuban context. Reinerio Arce-Valentin of the Centro de Estudios in Havana, who worked with the Cuban Council of Churches, argued that Cuban socialism had to find its own way and not depend on East European models. The early 1990s had been very hard for Cuba when it lost its European markets and support, but now things were improving a little. Paying for goods with dollars was now possible, and the liberalization was having some good effects. His hopes of providing an alternate model for Latin America sounded to me like illusions of revolutionary enthusiasm. A few hours later we enjoyed the new economy through a small restaurant in a family home. Dana Wilbanks as chair reported on six initiatives from our Thursday morning working session. • Forwarding the theory of Just Peacemaking to the Advisory Committee for development toward General Assembly policy. • Changing the ACSWP recommendation on Cuba, and advising that members of the trip be used to resource the resolution at GA. • Suggested changes for the resolution on disarmament for the 1997 GA. • Accepted the Auburn Seminary invitation to New York and combine it with work at the UN office. • Revisited the purpose of TEPSW and noted the need for more work on pedagogy. • Discussed the experience in Cuba and recommended a Library Project and a Group Statement on our visit as well as resourcing the GA on Cuba. Other follow-up suggestions for individual members of the group were discussed. Our meeting with the Roman Catholic Church in Matanzas brought us in touch with the most disappointed group regarding the Cuban Revolution that we encountered. Several of the Catholic representatives were professional people. They reported on antiCatholic discrimination in the first years following the revolution. Things were better now. Earlier, Catholics were often removed from teaching positions and discriminated against in university admissions. One complained about forcing surgeons to undertake manual labor, while a woman doctor insisted that it had been good for them. Some of the group defended the revolution for its accomplishments; others demurred. The publication of Fidel on Religion had helped immensely. It was now possible to talk about religion openly, and the faith seemed to be flourishing. Away from the formal discussion, one suggested that the Roman Catholic hierarchy encouraged dissent from the revolution. The Church had lost some of its privileges; it now was one of several religious groups, though by far the largest. Examination of the planned community at Sabanilla delayed our arrival at the small church at Triunvirato. We worshipped with the congregation, which had waited for us

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to arrive. The enthusiasm of the congregation was catching. Even later we enjoyed a party back at the Motel “El Valle.” Our last full day was spent at the beach for tourists at Varadero. We enjoyed the beautiful beach and visited the tourist hotels, which looked much different from the rest of Cuba. The Presbyterian Church in Varadero is pastored by Sergio Arce, a Princeton graduate who has taught in several North American institutions. He is a member of the Cuban Parliament. He spoke of the increased spaces for Protestants after the revolution disestablished the Catholic Church. He interpreted his role as a minority in the Parliament, and on politics in Parliament. His church is recovering from the migration of many of its members to Miami after the revolution; now it is growing again. The beautiful church building had mostly been paid for by Germany. That evening we partied again at the home of Dr. Carlos Camps, our host. On Sunday we attended worship in Havana at First Presbyterian Church before leaving in haste for the airport. After four-and-a-half centuries of colonial administration by Spain, U.S. domination from 1900 to 1959, and Russian influence until 1990, Cuba was now free to find its own way in a tough economic world that rejected its socialism. During our stay, the growing dollar influence was important, although later socialist allies in Venezuela and China would emerge to cushion the effects of the U.S. embargo somewhat. In 1997, Cuba looked like a tired socialist country, with some signs at the airport still in Russian, but it was also an underdeveloped country without a significant market for its sugar. Many of the socialist projects were abandoned. When the East German Embassy closed, the Methodist Church bought its bus and used it for transporting children to Sunday school while we were there. We noted that there were many reports on the increased suffering of the poor while Cuba renegotiated its precarious place in the world economy. The churches were alive and vital, and, in the realm of ethics and behavior, they were rivaling Marxist ideology as a source for building lives and community. The Theological Educators left Cuba with prayers and with some projects for the ten thousand Presbyterians living and praying on that beautiful island. On my return, I had lectures to give on Cuba at Third Presbyterian Church and East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, and the General Assembly meeting in Syracuse to advise on its resolution on reforming U.S. relationships with Cuba. Panorama, the seminary newsletter, published my report on the Cuban trip in the spring of 1997.

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Just Peacemaking and Humanitarian Intervention Through 1996–1998 I worked particularly hard for the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy on ethics and humanitarian intervention to save populations from genocide or massive human rights violations. Peter Sulyok asked me to chair the committee, and we carefully selected a representative group of church officials and professors to work on the subject. From the community of Christian ethics, Ismael Garcia, David Little, and Edward Long Jr. were particularly helpful. The resolution was presented to and adopted by the General Assembly in 1998. In addition to chairing the committee, I attended an ethics and international politics seminar at the Merrill House in New York City and involved my class in discussion of the issue at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York City. Developments in just peacemaking theory had been advancing in the churches, and the issues of humanitarian intervention were laid before the Church, especially through the reports of John Fife on the horrors of Bosnia he observed. Our task force brought the two developments together and worked out for the Church the most complete policy on just peacemaking that had been developed to date. It also explained the just war theory and developed criteria by modifying the just war criteria to fit the situations of massive human suffering or genocide. The result of the resolution was to recognize both just peacemaking theory and justifiable war traditions as guides for the Church, and to lay down a body of criteria for international interventions in humanitarian rescue. It was an example, I believe, of the Church carefully speaking for the City of God to the powers of the City of Earth to put the theological model in Augustinian terms. The resolution was opposed at the Syracuse General Assembly by pacifists representing the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship who did not want the Church to justify armed intervention for rescue. It was also opposed in the final voting by a representative from Pittsburgh Presbytery, who objected to the $60,000 being included for nonviolent peacemaking work among the tribes of South Sudan. A year later, when I interpreted the Church’s position to a World Council of Churches Consultation in Geneva, the Russian delegation opposed supporting any armed intervention. The Latin American representatives, with a bad history of intervention by the United States, also opposed the policy. On the other hand, representatives from African nations were glad to encourage U.S. intervention to prevent massacres. The young diplomat from Kosovo warmed my heart when she referred to the United States as the savior of her people. I was also pleased by the hospitality of Dr. Heidi Hadsell, a future chair of the TEPSW, who was directing the study center at Bossey where we met for the consultation. Although the policy had been passed by the General Assembly, the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program delayed publishing the policy until after the United States had

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intervened. The Church failed to urge UN intervention, and then buried the resolution in other commentary that did not recognize what the resolution had accomplished in just peacemaking theory and intervention. I think there continues to be failure in several groups in the Presbyterian Church to recognize the Church’s role in teaching ethics for both the Church and society. It is not the Church’s vocation to settle for the ways of the City of Earth, nor is it called to pretend that the City of Earth can fully embody the life of the City of God. It had been the genius of Reinhold Niebuhr to express this truth, but neither the City of Earth nor the Church has yet understood the genius of his solution. I think the Presbyterian Church, with its affirmations of both just peacemaking actions and just war theory, expresses this truth, but it is only understood in the more learned centers in the Church. Further related work took me back to the Merrill House for a presentation on the relationship of Hans Morgenthau’s theory to Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought. The Merrill House was the center for the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Relations. A picture of Morgenthau graced its central wall. The council had been directed by a Congregationalist when I was studying in New York. Now a young Jewish scholar who had written his dissertation on Morgenthau was the director. Unfortunately, the council had changed its identification from religion to ethics just as the role of religion in international politics was becoming more visible. I interpreted Morgenthau in light of his Jewish origins and late-life contribution to Jewish causes. I objected to reading his American works completely in light of his German background, as he had made significant shifts in his thought once he became a political theorist for the American empire. In particular, I emphasized the mutual interdependence of Niebuhr and Morgenthau. My friend Robert Smylie invited me to join the team working for the National Council of Churches on the Six Pillars of Peacemaking, which John Foster Dulles and the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace had worked out in World War II. The work was to update and revise the document from an exceptional moment in the Church’s work in international affairs. So, with these invitations and work, I was returning to New York quite often. In my participation in the deliberation of the just peacemaking teams, I maintained the position of Christian realism, or, as I later called it, recognizing the contributions of the prophets and Judaism, prophetic realism. It was not that just peacemaking could stand alone, as it needed the Calvinist realism of the Presbyterian Church theology, but as a supplement to realist theory it showed how practical gains could be made toward peacemaking.

AMENDMENT B While I never undertook to teach a class on sexual ethics or even to include much on the topic in class work, I did chair several panels on Amendment B and discussions on homosexuality for East Liberty Presbyterian Church. I provided the theological rationale for this one church accepting homosexuals and ordaining them to office. The Covenant Network, which was trying to liberalize the Church’s teaching and rules in this area, asked me to join their advisory board, and I accepted. I never played a large role in the

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organization beyond annual financial contributions, but this at least put one Christian ethicist on their advisory board list on their correspondence. My prominence on their board resulted in alienating some of my colleagues at the seminary, who would complain about the organization to me and ask it to desist from its efforts to change Church policy. I helped with the development of Church policies regarding abortion, gender justice issues, and homosexuality with the Advisory Committee on Social Witness, but others were teaching in these areas at the seminary, and I felt no need to develop teaching expertise regarding the issues. I intervened more than once with the administration at the seminary to protect homosexuals from punishment or interrogation, but these were handled quietly. Yet, as one would suspect, resentment about my actions built up in some who remained hostile toward the acceptance of homosexuality. Another area in which my interest did not lead to much publication was ecological ethics. I neglected writing on the subject after my early publication in 1972 on the analysis of the “Limits to Growth Project.” My best writing on the subject was a chapter in my ethics textbook, The Ultimate Imperative. I participated in helping develop Presbyterian policy in the area, and I read widely in the subject, but I did not teach it as a full class until just before my retirement. Calvary Episcopal Church learned of my interest and invited me over for a series on the subject. They were a great group to present lectures to, and their responses were very helpful to me. My friends Bob Stivers in Tacoma and Larry Rasmussen in New York City were both producing texts that I found valuable. I used Bob Stivers’s case studies in various other presentations in Tacoma, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh.

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Chapter 61

Oxbridge Revisited Except for my visit to Cambridge as a visiting scholar in 1972 and to Oxford to present university lectures in 1981, I had visited England only in transit since my student years. In 1997 I had an opportunity to return. Abingdon Press asked me to write a book on John Wesley’s social ethics. I began the project with a visit to the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. This fiveyear gathering of over two hundred scholars of Methodism was the outstanding center for dialogue and conversation about Wesley’s ethics and their influence. I presented a paper on humanitarian intervention ethics that we had been developing in the Presbyterian Church and listened to several studies of Wesley. I also made contacts with Methodist historians in preparation for my return sabbatical to Oxford to write the book. Theologians representing the poor populations of Africa and Latin America and American missionaries who had served in Latin America interpreted Wesley as a liberation theologian. Asian theologians were more inclined to the traditional conservative interpretations of Wesley. The young Koreans were an exception, as they dreamed of a jubilee year to reunite their divided land. While I still had a lot of research to undertake, I was not inclined to either the liberation or the conservative interpretations. Except for the enthusiastic singing of the Methodists, religious life at Oxford seemed a bit muted, with Christianity pushed to the side by a glib secularism. A further reminder of years passing was my startled recognition of the plaque honoring Archbishop Michael Ramsey on the cloister wall of Canterbury Cathedral. The joining of Ramsey to those buried at Canterbury added a somber note to the journey as I remembered an aging dialogue partner from earlier conversations. I seemed far too young to myself to have known an archbishop honored on the walls of Canterbury.

PRINCESS DI While driving to Epworth, John Wesley’s parental home, the car radio announced the death of Princess Diana. From that point on the journey to Wesley’s home was marked by conversations about people’s appreciation and love for her. For many she was the most important woman in the world, and seemed to be the embodiment of Englishness. As Prime Minister Tony Blair said, she was “The People’s Princess,” and written recollections left for the family at Ely Cathedral addressed her as the “Queen of Hearts.” It seemed as if the great love that the Wesley movement had directed toward Jesus was now mirrored in the affection and sentiment the English people bestowed upon the dead princess.

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CAMBRIDGE While Oxford remained the crowded university-market-industrial city it had always been in modern times, Cambridge had changed. The new British prosperity, with the strongest currency in Europe, had increased the pressure of the market on fragile Cambridge. The Thatcher policies reduced the resources of the Cambridge colleges. The colleges were more expensive for students and less intellectually competitive than earlier. The combination of more shoppers in the streets, fewer college resources, and more cars in Britain produced a Cambridge of confusion. The free-flowing walks along the Cambridge College backs were no longer possible; each college wanted to collect its own tolls. An experimental traffic pattern for the city center was a disaster. The stupid design rivaled that in Pittsburgh, which had produced a race track–like boulevard around East Liberty and isolated the shopping center from its customers in the outskirts. Still, St. John’s Gardens and King’s Chapel are among the treasures of the island. Prayers were offered at St. Mary the Great Church in Cambridge, but at evening prayers only three worshippers joined the American at prayer while the nation mourned Diana. In a quick summary, England remained a beautiful island enjoying a good economy and a progressive government. It resisted religious enthusiasm, as it resisted Wesley’s enthusiasm, but it respected the Wesleyan traditions. The visit was the first of four visits I made to England before completing the Wesley book.

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Chapter 62

Church and State I declined the invitation from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to be the lead complainant in their case against the Christmas tree and crèche in front of the Court House on Grant Street in Pittsburgh. I explained over the phone that I had enough controversy in my life without seeming to object to Christmas. My colleague Professor Walter Wiest already had the honor of being notorious for his role in the case against prayers at school functions. But toward the end of 1997, one of my favorite, former students, Matthew Peterson, asked me to testify in a case in which he was the lead complainant for the ACLU in the state of Ohio. Before I left Columbia University I was scheduled to teach the “Church and State” course that Professor Joseph Blau had taught for years. The chair of my doctoral committee, John C. Bennett, had taught courses by the same name at Union, and he had published a major book on the subject. I never taught a course with that name, and my related writings and courses had always been on the broader subject of faith and politics. My own position on church-state issues generally corresponded to the rather strict separationist interpretation of the Presbyterian Church. Consequently, my longest discourse on church-state issues is recorded in the deposition I gave for the case of the American Civil Liberties Union against the State of Ohio, arguing that the state motto, “With God all things are possible. Matthew 19:26,” violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It was an endorsement of a particular judgment of Jesus in response to a disciple’s question, preserved by Matthew, on the question of how salvation is possible. The deposition ran for seventysix pages through many convoluted issues regarding religion and state and interpretation of texts. A federal judge in Ohio before whom I testified ruled in 1998 that the state could retain the motto if it dropped the reference to Matthew 19:26. The ACLU appealed this verdict to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals, in a 2–1 decision, ruled in 2000 that the text was an explicitly theological text, thereby favoring a particular religion—Christianity. Its ruling differentiated this text from “In God we trust,” which is a more neutral affirmation. The words from half the sentence in Matthew were said to have no secular purpose. This judgment ruled that the motto was a violation of the U.S. Constitution. The state appealed the decision to the full Court of Appeals, which in 2001 ruled 9–4 that the incomplete text was a general religious statement with no particular theological content. The dissenting opinion affirmed my general argument that the text was a particular answer to a theological issue that had important consequences for Christian believers, and therefore it should not be referred to as a general statement. The ACLU decided not to carry the case to the Supreme Court, so the Ohio motto of “With God all things are possible” continued as a state motto, and no decision by the Supreme Court was rendered. The motto had been chosen in a contest in which a nine-year-old boy had submitted it. Governor George V. Voinovich, who originated the search for a motto, had seen the

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words of Islamic inspiration on the capital of Karnataka: “The business of government is God’s business.” I was not impressed by the boy’s dividing the text in the middle or by the governor’s inspiration for Ohio from a not-so-well-administered state in India. I had often read the text over the building when I had state business in Bangalore, and I provided my interpretation as to why such a motto made sense in an Islamic state but probably not in a secular republic. The old argument that “a text taken out of context is a pretext,” as an implied part of my testimony, was not given weight; the misuse of religious texts by government was sanctioned by the decision. For me, we won the case at which I testified and lost on the final appeal. The attorney for the state was also a Presbyterian elder, and we had a wide-ranging dialogue before the court in Columbus. I thought he was quite fair, except for attempting to bring in facts surrounding my protests against the Vietnam War and against the overreliance on nuclear weapons. I asserted that my positions were both correct, as were the judgments of his church, and that he should agree with me that our government’s position in Vietnam had been mistaken and immoral. He provided other depositions from religious scholars arguing that the text in question was only a general affirmation, and that it had no particular religious theological significance. I think his position was finally approved by the U.S. Court of Appeals. That is another witness as to why government should leave religion alone, and not try to intervene in interpreting theological texts.

THIRD PRESBYTERIAN Bebb had a hard time adjusting to a new senior pastor after having been solely in charge of the church for two years. Her preaching skills were far superior to the new minister’s, and she was very serious about wanting to develop discipleship among the members. The mutual unease between the two ministers was perceived in the church and resented by some. She was developing an alternative plan with a former head of the trustees to found a partnership in a 501(c)-(3) organization to assist the poor from the brutality of the reform of welfare under President Clinton. But some thought she might still succeed to the position of head pastor, and her friend encouraged this direction. I was a little out of the loop, though I resented her friendship and partnership with this particular layman. In any case, the new arrangements in the ministry were hard for her. The governing session changed while she was away at Harvard on a ministerial-study fellowship. On her return the alliance against her was too strong, and she resigned. We had a wonderful farewell dinner for her in March 1998. I asked Phillip Wogaman, President Clinton’s pastor, to speak. He still believed the president to be innocent of sexual unfaithfulness, and he said so while lecturing on faith and politics. Bebb took a severance package and went back to work on her dissertation, which showed real promise. Still, those last months of ecclesiastical strain and her professional partnership in matters of which I was unaware, until I stumbled upon them later, reinforced my sense that the marriage would terminate soon.

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Meanwhile, she was pushing several justice causes as she served as co-moderator for the Committee on Women at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and as vice moderator of the Pittsburgh Presbytery. Later she would chair the Presbyterian Association for Health, Education, and Welfare, which provided education on those issues and lobbied for promoting justice within and by the Presbyterian Church.

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Chapter 63

Letters from Africa Patricia’s graduation from the University of Texas with honors was followed by waiting for the Peace Corps to accept her application. She volunteered with the Forest Service and performed the assignments enthusiastically. Reviewing her letters to me from various sites around the country and the world, I noted the enthusiasm for life and adventure that accompanied her everywhere. She was excited about the university from her first days on the campus. She had written her first week from Austin: I can’t get over how gorgeous this place is. Every day is bright sunlight and dappled shadows under the trees. When it rains it storms for hours and leaves everything fresh. At twilight or at dusk bats zig-zag outside our window. I am living in a constant state of inspiration. It’s amazing—I find myself wanting to go to class. I’ve got 4 at 8:00, too. Drawing is always new—the teacher is always telling us to experiment, try something different. Art history is wild. Her personal art projects, from the field of aluminum-rod wheat she planted in front of the art building to her project of hanging the leaves back up in the trees in net bags, through the faculty’s art show, surprised the university. She was an enthusiastic intern at Marfa, Texas, and her personal project of outlining a “Sand Angel” with candles in the desert aroused interest in visitors to Judd’s museum of steel projects. Her tour with the forest service counting turtles, peregrine falcons, and moving plants was an adventure in the desert for her. Her phone call to me announcing her acceptance to the Peace Corps reflected that same adventurous young woman. I was relieved to learn that her assignment would be to Benin rather than the earlier expectation of Mali. Timbuktu seemed a journey a little too far for me. She had so much to learn that I was anxious for her. But her pursuit of an opportunity to do good and travel seemed a synthesis of our family values. Her brother chose international relations and was researching in Eastern Europe, so both would be abroad. For the first three months in Benin she lived in Allada with a Fon-speaking family. She took classes in Fon, French, health, and rural development. She reported that all of her instructors were very good. She started sending film home. In October she learned she would be posted to Za-Kpota in December, and that she would have an opportunity to visit the village soon. There she met her local counterpart and learned they expected her to teach health at the local school. She found a friend in the capital, Cotonou, where she could receive phone calls (there were no phones in Za-Kpota, although there was a pay phone half an hour away by motorbike). Many of our letters were taken up by arrangements for phone calls or getting film back and forth. She maintained her health by eating vegetarian. Her house in Za-Kpota had a yard for a garden, but it was without furniture, which had to be made in a nearby village. By the end of November

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she was practicing presentations on making mud stoves, and reading to children. She would write: I go back and forth between extremely interested in everything around me that is new, and being homesick and wanting to just talk English. I guess that’s what transition is about. I am glad to have other volunteers around me. I’ve also met some volunteers who are posted in villages near Za-Kpota, a bike ride away. Did I tell you we each get a mountain bike? Very nice! We are also getting incredible training in bike maintenance. Fon proved very difficult to learn. Therefore, her participation in the baby-weighing program (where the surrounding villages check weights on one scale and the mothers receive oil and flour and some advice for their babies) was limited at first. By February she was visiting the Methodist Church and writing to Hugh about it. The local pastors were very interested in all the ordained members of her family. She looked into the university situation for me so that I might find academics to talk to about ending slavery, which inspired my project on John Wesley. Patricia spent her first New Year’s celebration in Africa in Ouidah, the witchcraft center. At first the night clubs were empty, but people showed up after midnight mass and the partying began. The next day the white woman she noticed walking on the beach turned out to be Eileen McNamara, Marilyn Schuab’s sister and a family friend, who was coming to visit Patricia in Za-Kpota. The visit from home was great. The dysentery had caught up with Patricia, and for a while the strong antibiotics were not clearing it up. She resolved that she had spent enough time fixing up her house and now it was time to get to work. Developing transportation for crippled children was first on her and her partner’s agenda. She asked me to file her income tax forms for her, and I generally tried to handle business for her. For example, she and a friend had been hit crossing the street in Austin, and my brother Roger was handling the case from Iowa and communicating through me. My friend Lydia Serrata Ledesma from Victoria, Texas, also assisted with Patricia’s case, though Roger did most of the work, forcing the insurance company to pay. The folks around Za-Kpota could not run a committee in a way that encouraged Patricia in her project development. But she was making some progress educating about AIDS. Being frustrated over acquiring funds from the Peace Corps for wheelchairs for crippled children, she began to investigate whether the chairs could be built and developed locally. She had finished her observation time and was expected to be developing a project for rural development, education, or health. She found herself working for the Women in Development Program involving taking children to the workplace and developing school scholarships to keep girls in school. The project involved biking to nearby villages and finding schools from which the girls could participate. School dropout rates were very high.

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In late February she learned from Randy that he and Martha would arrive on March 5, 1998. The development of the project for the crippled children was moving through the committee process very slowly, and Patricia’s role was still hindered by her limited ability to speak Fon. By spring the supply of electricity was running so low that the phones became quite unreliable. Her take was that most of the electricity came from Ghana’s lake, which was low due to dams upstream in Burkina Faso. Before the rains came she was experiencing infestations of swarms of insects. The visit by Randy and Martha was very successful, though transportation in an old car proved to be a stress. After their visit she was off to Cotonou to raise money for hygiene and water purification projects for the village. I visited in August. Meeting her at the airport in Cotonou was a great joy. We spent one evening in the city and then headed out for her village. The poverty of the village shocked me. The people had nothing in their homes. The medical clinic was bereft of supplies. Agriculture worked on a feudal model, with land loaned out by the chief for a cut of the crops. Electricity, when available, was from a local generator. Water for the village was scarce, available from a community pipe. Corn could be ground by a local resident who had a diesel-run generator. By the time I arrived she had acquired furniture, painted, and decorated her house and settled in quite well. Funeral parades, voodoo rituals, and such kept me awake, as did the noise of small varmints crawling in the thatched roof. The people were glad to meet Patricia’s papa, and they were always friendly. Spending 42 cents for dinner for both of us in the market seemed outrageously cheap, but one remembered the economy had so little. After a few days in the village and visiting the nearby school, we left to see the country. In a week we were able to explore the fort and museum at Dahomey, the capital of Cotonou, and the old capital of Porto-Novo. The encounters with voodoo at Ouidah and conversations with the people and Peace Corps volunteers revealed the cultural clashes the volunteers go through. The director of the Peace Corps in Benin was an Iowa State graduate from Burkina Faso who had received his U.S. citizenship through marriage. We discussed various forms of development strategies and agreed together that education was probably the most important resource the United States could share. A visit to the beach, where we observed the village pulling in the net of the day’s catch, provided a new experience, as did the feast of barracuda. We spent the second week in Ghana. My hopes for a trip to Kenya were thwarted by the cost. Ghana’s slave forts, guided jungle walks, animal sanctuaries and explorations of jungle treetops provided a wonderful introduction to the country’s ecology. Three days in Accra led to an encounter with the head of the Presbyterian seminary, whom I had met in an international debt-forgiveness project in New Mexico several years earlier. On one forest walk, as we crossed the swamp on a large water conduit, the guide said, “This water goes to Kumasi.” It reminded me of the scene in Out of Africa in which the worker says of the flood waters, “This water goes to Mombasa.” Our trip to Kumasi via car took us across the poor country to the capital of the Ashanti. The high point was in a festival of folk art when Patricia said, “Dad, I am an artist, not a social worker.” She had found her direction through less than a year’s work in Africa.

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She and I had both learned to follow our dreams. She had reported to me a few years earlier of her friend in Austin who majored in accounting at the insistence of her parents so she could earn money. I had told her that pushing our children to follow the money was similar to selling them into slavery. Of course, money has its appeal, and can provide even a sort of freedom, but if the child can manage, she should follow her dream. Patricia and I were discussing development strategies. She had found the Presbyterian documents on sustainable development, which I had a small role in guiding through the policy-making process, relevant and valuable. Her buddies in the Corps were endlessly engaged in discussing development and social work projects. But she was beginning to turn toward her art. She would work for a year in a social work project I had helped found and organize in Pittsburgh before she went out to California to art school. We would work together her last summer in Pittsburgh to raise church funds to replace the lost government money for youth work for the East End Cooperative Ministry. Furthermore, her artwork would usually be grounded in the urban reality in which she lived, whether that was Pittsburgh, Oakland, San Francisco, or San Diego. Her experience as a social or development worker grounded her urban-contextual art in a distinctive way. Her mother, Joan, was also very urban oriented in her work. The difference Patricia exhibited was to be less connected with the organized Church than either her mother or I. Her October letter listed the grad schools she wanted to pursue, and I began the search for catalogs and information on admission and financial matters. Her end-of-the-year card in December from Benin was dedicated to coming home for the Christmas holiday. She reported on her garden and her newsletter for the Women in Development project. She also was building more stoves, showing locals how to build them, and running the baby weighings. Anticipating the Pittsburgh cold, she asked about the hot tub and her beloved cat, Winter. She and I would take Winter to the vet for her shots during her Christmas vacation. Her return to her station in Za-Kpota letter of January 16, 1999, was revealing: Dear Dad, I’ve made the transition back to life in village as easy for myself as possible. I spent a couple of days in Cotonou writing reports then went to Ouidah to celebrate National Voodoo Day. Rami had a party at her house the night before, and then all day long on the tenth we watched the festivities taking place at the beach. It was fascinating. All the different sects were present drumming (the men) and the dancing (the women). Plus the King of Ouidah paraded to the ocean in order to place his foot (you remember the myth that he can walk on water). I also caught sight of the parade of virgins carrying the ocean water back to the Temple of the Pythons. At one point there was an uproar because someone had gotten bitten by a snake. He was taken to the hospital and the snake was burned out of the brush and thrown into the sea. The Mami Wata Temple we saw was in full ceremony and surrounded by women. Nearby I saw a 12-year-

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old boy wearing a T-shirt of the little Mermaid. I tried to explain to him the significance, but he was too shy to talk to me. It would have been difficult anyway because on his T-shirt she had human legs. We also got our picture taken with Angelique Kedjo, a Beninois singer, who is very popular in the states. My vacation was still not over because then I ran into Jenifer, who was giving a tour to her Dad and brother. They were heading off to GrandPopo so I took the opportunity to join them. So far their trip had been great. It was strikingly similar to ours, including a week of running around Ghana. (They made the trip to Kumasi and back to Accra in one exhausting day!) Eventually I got myself in a taxi and came home. My garden had survived the dry season with the help of Big Sister next door, and my cat is doing fine, although she looks so skinny. I finally put all the gifts Dad brought with him to good use, because I had only brought a few presents with me. The liquid scented soaps are incredibly popular, and the American-style towers are appreciated. It was fun also to give the cooking utensils to my rice and bean lady. I’ve spent the week visiting my friends letting them know I’m back and giving gifts. Not a bad way to pass the time. I went to the CPS once, and set a date with the Responsible to discuss projects for the year. It looks like we’ll try to start a garden with SPA funds and submit a proposal to the American Embassy to build furniture for the village baby-weighings. I want to thank you for an altogether satisfying and pleasant Christmas holidays. It’s hard to organize so many people, but we seemed to pull it off! It was nice to have time with Dad at the airport, despite the fact that I missed the plane. I made it to NY just in time to catch the Ghana Airways flight. And when I got home I had letters from you waiting for me! Love, Patricia The next few letters continued her discussions of frustrating bureaucracies, but by late February she had her money and tools for the village garden. Eventually she won the profits being used for the village children’s needs. Then the debates about what kind of fence and where it should be raised sprang up. One letter said, “They say in Peace Corps you spend your first year adjusting to life in your village and your second year planning your life back in the states. So far that seems to be right. I’m planning a close of Service date on Nov 1999.” Graduate school planning was taking over, but she was still launching projects and continuing searching for scholarships so children could go to school. Also, she was beginning to hold recuperation sessions for the families with the weakest babies. Her letter of April 24, 1999, shared self-searching and movement toward a goal. She reflected on a woman visitor to Marfa, Texas, who had shared her life story of

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abandoning a successful career in design to find a community of friends and to knit sweaters in Santa Fe. I took her life story to heart, thinking I could skip the career part and go straight into the alternate lifestyle that would be based around a loving community. Rather than thinking about my degree and what I could do with it, I focused on my friends and building lives with them. The problem I ran into again and again was that these groups of friends didn’t share my plans. You can dedicate yourself to groups of people, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they have dedicated themselves to you. I have found this again in the Peace Corps. I can dedicate myself to working for the poor, but that doesn’t mean that they will cooperate. The women I work with may not even be interested in improving their situation. And babies die anyway. I guess this is a disillusionment that many PCVs go through, and anyone working in social service. I’m very aware that I can’t really change anything by working on the grassroots level. And I’m certainly not saving the world. Which is not to say, that people shouldn’t try to make things better for others. It’s the good fight, after all, and you accomplish a little along the way. Where I’m going with this is that I haven’t found my community here or in the states. . . . So rather than try to live for other people I don’t know, I’m going to take the advice I give everyone else which is to figure out how to get your dream & then follow it. Art is still very important to me as cultural dialogue, education & critique, so I’m going to follow through with it. The next logical step for a career in the arts is to go to grad school, which is what I plan to do. I hope that as I move along a self-directed path, I will find friends there who will be my community. And I also hope that I will find a way to engage a wider community through arts service programs. . . . Love, Trish By spring, I was inviting her to visit me in England in the fall when I would be working on the John Wesley book, but given her departure date she couldn’t travel at that time. She was happy with two installation art pieces she had completed and believed pictures of them would serve her well in her graduate school applications. At the same time, she was working with undernourished babies and instructing mothers regarding good nutrition, but whether some of the babies would survive was in doubt. Her letter about dying babies crossed mine in the mail in late May. Dearest Patricia, Thank you for our letter announcing your plans. They sound good. Personally, I’ll always remember your statement at the art center in

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Kumasi, that you were an artist not a development person. I hope the letter does not hide too much pain; you sounded disappointed in people you had tried to build community with as well as with the difficult task of development. I’m going up to Alma next weekend. Alan is announcing that he’ll work one more year and then take a severance package of two years’ pay. He hopes to travel and spend more significant time in places that he has visited previously. Maybe we should get him to volunteer for the Peace Corps. He has had some opposition, and he is tired of fighting, I’ll know more after seeing him over Memorial Day. John comes home Sunday, and I go to the Library of Congress tomorrow, Friday the 21st of May. Classes are finished. I have a couple of more meetings, and then I’m free for research, travel, and writing until January. I really enjoy the teaching itself, the administration and politics of graduate-education are sometimes a drag. Congratulations on your big-game trip. I enjoyed the pictures, and I’m real glad you got to see the animals. The recent New Yorker had another Hemingway article about hunting in Africa. It was a wife’s lion kill story. The killing sounds so gross today. Why did we not learn to just go and look so many years ago. I miss you, but thoughts of what you are doing cheer me, and I’m so glad that I got to see where you dwell. Today is a retirement party for Don Gowan and Dick Oman. That leaves Bob Ezzell and me as the longest-time faulty at the seminary. Bob is recovering from a heart attack. These are real nice days here with a beautiful spring. It is also good to have this free time interlude. The faculty looked so tired at our last faculty meeting. I wonder how people actually put in those terribly long workdays that we read about or that some people still do, particularly in new nations. Let me say once more how proud I am of your service, and I know it is not easy. Randy is doing well too. He won some more grants and he is back from Bulgaria. I talked to Henry about his losing his second tooth. He lost it in a piece of chicken. He lost his first one on a chunk of pepperoni. But the point of this was to tell you how excited he is about his father returning home late that night. This father will be excited when his daughter returns too, at least as much as Henry was. Love, Dad By May, she had decided not to extend in Za-Kpota, though her Benin counterparts in the village urged her to remain. Put off by fears of the millennium, the Corps urged volunteers not to travel between December 12 and January 12. Her departure date had been December 12; recognizing that volunteers liked to travel on their return voyage, a departure date for October 12 was set.

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Her July letter admitted she had been distracted by her mom and Sid’s visit from writing a “real letter.” Their visit she regarded as a success, and they had packed off some clay for a contribution to the millennium display at the UN after it was turned into ceramics. She had been with some Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) off to Niger staying in a hostel and taking a three-day camel trip. She and returning PCVs were planning a return trip in November through Mali, Senegal, Morocco, Spain, and Paris. She was borrowing against the stipend from the Peace Corps that would arrive in December for her trip. In August, she wrote: This Afternoon I rested, leaving for the market as soon as it got dark. I found my rice & beans lady there and had dinner, splurging on a lukewarm Fizzi. She surprised me when she began talking to the man sitting next to me in English. Apparently he was Nigerian—“You speak English?” I asked the Mama. “Small, small” she replied. I’ve known this woman for two years. Then a neighbor of mine showed up selling dung/straw balls. I recognized them and her because she’s been drying them on my wall all summer. Occasionally one falls into my garden and her daughter will come get it. I get a kick out of the situation because this neighbor is using one half of my wall to dry dung while my other neighbor uses the other half to dry her laundry. Then I did my shopping, which didn’t consist of much: fish, akassa, tomato paste & oranges. It was fun to make a point of buying from the Mamas I knew. The market becomes such a different place when you know what you are doing as well as the people in it. The kids still get a big kick out of me, calling: “Tanti, Tanti!” Closing down her station left her with the mixed feelings of departure and new adventures. Her last letters from travels through Western Africa on her way to Europe would reach me in England. I was writing the book on John Wesley’s ethics in Oxford. I had been driven by my Methodist heritage and the strong sense that one dead white man had the correct take on slavery in his own day. The chapter in the book on slavery was the most important chapter. It was driven by memories of Patricia visiting African Methodist clergy who had been taught that Wesley’s condemnation was of the spiritual slavery to sin. This spiritual interpretation was contrary to the actual spirit and words of Wesley. We had walked around “the tree of forgetting” in Ouidah, by which slaves were condemned to leave Africa and urged to forget her. Our visits to the slave forts beside the Atlantic coast of Ghana dramatized in stone the harshness and brutality of the slave trade. Our conversations at the University of Ghana of their hopes for an African repentance of the slave trading for weapons and trinkets had fueled my passions for the writing. Her Peace Corps service not only heightened my sensitivity about slavery but also introduced the Stone family and its interconnections to Africa. The fruit of her experience in our lives is still to be discovered. Even my sensitivity to

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the African motifs in Picasso’s works is owed to that short visit I had with her, and I now spend much more time in the African art of the museums. The influence on her art is still to be realized. Years later she made clear to me that in following her dream to become an artist she also found community. Both in San Francisco and San Diego she and her partner (now husband), Michael Trigilio, gathered and supported artists around them to selfconsciously create communities of artists. Becoming an artist meant choosing a lifestyle with other artists. She noted that becoming immersed in a large research university (University of California, San Diego) complicated their search, but building community remained their agenda.

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Chapter 64

Against the Third Reich Richard Brown, the Westminster Press editor, promised to meet us at John’s Grill. Dr. Mutie Tillich Farris, the Reverend Mr. M. Lon Weaver, and I strolled across Union Square in downtown San Francisco. The monument to Admiral Dewey’s devastation of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay graced by a statue of Victory marked San Francisco’s opening role in the overseas American empire. Saks Fifth Avenue was on the left and Macy’s on the right as we walked across the square. Turning right on Stockton, we walked downhill to Ellis and turned right. The sign across the street from the O’Farrell Garage was obvious. As we opened the cut-glass door, Richard waved to us from the second table from the window. The waitress, a San Francisco native, told us of her serving and of her confiding to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle about her plans to write a book. She showed us table 21, where the star of The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart, had sat during the shooting of the film. A replica statue of the falcon stood over my shoulder by the dark-paneled bar as we walked back to our table by a photo of Dashiell Hammett and a bottle of Smirnoff. She pointed out the window-lit table where Sam Spade had dined in Hammett’s book. Vodka martinis and Mutie’s gimlet were ordered, and we settled down to negotiate our contract over sea bass and lamb chops. We agreed to publish 55 of the 110 speeches Paul Tillich addressed to occupied Europe from 1942 to 1944, which Lon had translated for the master of sacred theology thesis that I had supervised. We would choose them together, and we would write jointly an introduction for the volume. Mutie would add relevant memories and grant permission for the publication of the talks. Richard needed my assurance of the academic appropriateness of the speeches and judgment regarding which ones to include. I assured him we would emphasize the persecution of Judaism and present an enraged, existentialist, political Tillich that the academic world hardly knew. The story that Dashiell Hammett had partially written The Maltese Falcon here gave us hope for our book project. Earlier Richard had not accepted my edition of Paul Tillich’s Theology of Peace for Pilgrim Press. He had accepted it for Westminster in his new position, and our current book, Against the Third Reich, seemed to be particularly appropriate for Tillich. We agreed to split the advance and royalties—half for Mutie and half for Lon and me. After shaking hands we walked back to the North American Paul Tillich Society meeting feeling a little giddy from the drink, the restaurant, and San Francisco—the City by the Bay and the “stuff dreams are made of.” Lon and I knew that the book would change the way Tillich was perceived. No longer could he be regarded as only an abstract thinker out of touch with the real world. The speeches were full of blood and guts and wartime strategies. The first speech to “My German friends,” as Tillich began each of the Voice of America broadcasts, was against anti-Semitism. This address set the theme for our selection of the ones we published. It was logical for Tillich to begin his speeches with “the Jewish Question,” both existentially and intellectually. Nazi atrocities against the Jews had begun prior to his exit from Germany in 1933. They were a fact of life that had to be

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confronted. Further, the historic identity of the Jewish people had a significant place in Tillich’s theology. The Jews for him were the inspiration for his concept of the Protestant Principle, that element of perpetual critique that stands against the everpresent threats of idolatry and utopianism. Historically, Jewish prophetic speech is the vehicle for his argument for the dominance of time over space as the necessary prerequisite for justice. Tillich began his speeches at this point because the Jewish question was central to his thought. Before 1942 had finished, Tillich was speaking of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. In December 1942, he was telling Germans of the trains of death, of the machine gun executions of Jewish women and children, and of German physicians who joined in the slaughter in the camps. The Nazi guilt was a burden to the country. The essays from 1942 to May 1944 detail the guilt of all responsible Germans, and Tillich’s own guilt fuels the passion of his writing. He does not ignore guilt for the breakdown of German democracy, attributable to other nations, but he focuses the guilt for the horror of the war, the extermination campaigns, and the assault against humanity on the Germans themselves. The faults in Germany are deep, and he expounds on German character, myth, and history. Responsibility rests on those who allowed themselves to be enslaved by Hitler. The majority of the addresses urge Germans to act to liberate themselves from the Nazis. Resistance is a major theme of the essays we chose to publish. The essays were a combination of theology and war politics that took account of the Christian calendar of holidays as well as developments in diplomacy and battlefield. We made the point in the introduction that Tillich’s rank as lieutenant in World War I outranked Hitler, and we found his tactical judgments, which had been forged in that war, to be shrewd. It is political theology, but it is more than war theology. The essays were written to inform the political captives of the Nazi Leviathan of the deeper resources of Christian faith in the confrontation with historical evil. He called for the liberation of Europe and then for rebuilding toward a welfare federation of European peoples. His policy terms were drawn from his Frankfurt socialism and sounded very much like the policies of his friends at the Institute for Social Research at Columbia who had joined him in exile. The book was well reviewed and received. However, there has not been much evidence of its heavy use in classrooms. Similarly, the evidence we could find of the speeches being heard in Europe existed, but it was meager. To me it was important to reveal in English the passion of this good man for resistance to Hitler and to name and oppose anti-Semitism. I had covered this in my earlier book Paul Tillich’s Radical Social Thought, but it was crucial to me to let his voice be heard in his own words. Lon Weaver’s translation made this possible for English readers.

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Chapter 65

The Ultimate Imperative In 1999, my long-delayed textbook on ethics was published. I had begun The Ultimate Imperative in my inaugural lecture for the John Witherspoon Chair in 1992. Now, I was launching two other projects. Later that summer of 1999, a group of ethicists, the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness, met in Geneva, Switzerland, and Sommières, France, historic centers of Presbyterian formation and resistance. There it was easy to recall how, in the sixteenth century, forces of renewal were unleashed through resistance to an imperial Church and society. Our group of seminary and university professors discussed and ultimately concurred with the need for theologies and politics of resistance applicable to both church and society. We visited the prison for Huguenot women in Aigues-Mortes, France. We marveled at the courage of Marie Durand, who scratched with her fingernail the cry “Resistez” in the concrete of her tower cell. As we adapted the project of resistance to our vocation, we knew we were walking in very big shoes. Bob Stivers and I were commissioned by the group to edit the group’s reflection on the subject of resistance to religious pride, domination, greed, and violence. We joined the Stivers for a few days in Provence, before touring on our own. Bebb and I took advantage of our time in Europe for a hike in the Pyrenees and a quick trip to Bilbao to see the new Guggenheim museum. We were impressed. I regarded it as one of the few world-class buildings. Chartres and the Taj Mahal, of course, were at the top of the list, but in terms of modern structures the Guggenheim at Bilbao was unique. We were then fortunate to take the place of a no-show and tour the last painted cave that remained open to the public in southern France. This most enduring form of art impressed us with its lifelike quality. We proceeded through the wine country, staying in St. Emilion, visiting Tours, and eventually concluding in Paris for a few days. The second project begun in 1999 was writing the book on John Wesley’s ethics. I had been researching it earlier, but now I took a visiting scholar’s position at Trinity College Oxford to write the book. My old debate nemesis from my student days, Michael Beloff, now president of Trinity, welcomed me to the college. Bob Morgan, president of Linacre College, and his wife, Pruh, assisted me in finding a house in Sanford-onThames, a little village an hour’s walk along the Thames from Oxford, where he was curate of a small, historic village church. I stayed with them a few days until I could rent a furnished house in the village. Canon Trevor Williams, the Tillich scholar at Trinity, welcomed me to lead his class on Tillich for a session. That fall term was spent beside the Thames, as the leaves changed color, and in the Bodleian Library. John Macquarrie had previously hosted me at Christ Church for dinner, and I often came to the cathedral for Sunday evensong. I also visited Methodist historical sites, and worked in the collections in the Methodist Museum at Wesley’s House in London and at the Old

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Refectory in Epworth. It was very convenient to work in the museum at Wesley’s House and then take in a play in London before returning to Sanford-on-Thames for the night. I took lunches at Trinity College across Broad Street from the library, and though I usually cooked in Sanford, I sometimes stayed in for dinner at the High Table at Trinity for a feast. In between the two trips the textbook made its appearance. Patricia congratulated me on it but noted that it had been a long time coming. John Wilson’s commentary on The Ultimate Imperative noted that it was an ethics of common sense. It refused to introduce new method. Rather, it grew out of the predominant ethic of the New Testament: love. It dealt with how the church interpreted that ethic and how it could be applied through the social norm of justice to problems of economics, race, ecology, politics, and international peacemaking. It was self-consciously a church ethic and an ethic for social justice in the American republic. I explained that Christian ethics for the Church start with Jesus’ own ethic of love of God and neighbor. The rest is commentary, for better or worse. Jesus, as a Jew, presupposed the history of the moral traditions of Israel, and particularly the Ten Commandments. As we in the Church teach the Ten Commandments to our children in confirmation courses, we affirm their development of the requirements to love God and to love their neighbors. We attempt in the Church, by teaching, example, and practice, to influence the Christian conscience toward appropriate behavior in God’s world. Ethics, derived from the love commandments and the Ten Commandments, is expressed in principles that serve as moral guidelines for Christian life. Ethics is not a theory of human psychology or a theory of society, although it uses such theories. Ethics is different from politics. Christian ethics reflects on the moral traditions and practices of the Church and, from such reflection, suggests guidelines or moral principles for today. The ethics developed in my book were loyal to scripture and Church tradition, but its authority rests in its persuasiveness to those who honor these traditions and desire to live socially relevant Christian lives in the contemporary world. My involvement in writing and teaching emphasized the social dimensions of life more than the personal or biological, and so the bulk of the book focused on social issues. My seminary students were ecumenical, though they were mostly Presbyterians and Methodists, and I taught from both Reformed and Methodist sources. Though many interpretations of Christian ethics were woven into this particular version, the major emphases of John Calvin and Reinhold Niebuhr were obvious to readers. I mentioned in the preface that when I started teaching ethics in the summer school of Morningside College I arrived one day late. I had been delayed by my arrest in the South African consulate in New York City while arguing for leniency in the sentencing of Nelson Mandela. I hope the balance between action and teaching was maintained in the book. The book argued for the centrality of the love ethic in Christianity. It then proceeded to argue that it was an activist, realist type of love ethic grounded in Christian community and seeking justice. The Ten Commandments were discussed through chapters on “Loyalty to God” and “Concern for the Other,” and then interpreted through the

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essence of Jesus’ spirit. The second half of the book expressed this ethic in chapters on the distinction between personal and social morality, economics, racism, politics, ecology, and peacemaking. The reviews boded well for the book. I appreciated Larry Rasmussen’s blurb: The Ultimate Imperative is the distillation of a distinguished teaching career in Christian ethics backed with the savvy of practice. That would be enough. But Stone’s book is also the kind of text it has been difficult to write for a long while, one comprehensive and coherent enough to treat not only foundations and basic principles in Christian ethics, but the urgent issues of our present and foreseeable public life as well. Approximately half of the book was on the foundations of Christian ethics in the Bible and historical developments. The second half dealt with the social problems I had focused on in my teaching. The ratio of theory to practice reflected my own division of labor in my teaching. The problematic areas of economics, politics, international relations, and racism had been my steady fare. Ecology emerged in this volume, though my teaching of it had been only in sporadic lectures in my courses or in various church settings. As noted earlier, I had undertaken some writing from 1972 on limits to growth, exerted some political weight in protecting a forest and urban green space, and written local theological reflections for interdenominational church work. The trip to the Amazon and participation in developing Church policies on environmental ethics were moving my work in the area into deeper waters. From the thought of the book would come a new course, “Ecological Ethics,” in my last years of teaching at the seminary. Years later, when I asked editor Timothy Staveteig why the sales were low and it went out of print so quickly, he said, “There was no program to push it.” Still, in many ways it is the best summary of my introduction to ethics courses at the seminary from 1969 to 2003. The Michaelmas term at Oxford was only a little shorter than Term I at Pittsburgh, so I spent October through November in residence. All around me were the remnants and symbols of Wesley’s time at the university, in which he remained a member until his late-life marriage. Wesley’s father, Samuel, had studied at New Inn, where St. Peter’s College is now located, and the first Methodist Meeting House was founded in the same street. The Oxford Castle around the corner, now ruined, is where John first ministered to prisoners. Christ Church with its cathedral was the college home of both John and Charles. If one continues on to the High Street, St. Mary’s, the University Church reminds the visitor that Wesley preached there several times as a young don, and that from the pulpit he castigated the religious indifference of the university. Nearby Turl Street, where Wesley occupied rooms in the chapel quadrangle, has not changed much since Wesley taught there. The chapel where Wesley took part in services dates back to 1631. Richard Heitzenrater edited a description of a Wesley Walk around Oxford that I had used a couple of years earlier and that in 1999 served to remind me of the above sites.

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As a student thirty years earlier, I had thought of Oxford as a wonderful museum. Now it was the living site of the one I was writing about. In the Bodleian, and sometimes in obscure college libraries, I would seek out manuscripts of his that some of the best of the historians doubted were available. In his home in London, I could read his own books, which informed him of the state of the world in the 1700s. It was hard not to work in a condition of academic excitement. Sometimes when I would leave the old Bodleian to walk across Broad to lunch at Trinity, I would recall that Wesley had walked in the gardens of Trinity College on the day of his graduation. The day trip on the Thames on a cruise boat was reminiscent of all of the English history I had learned and much of what I had forgotten. Soon the fall passed, and as the leaves on my walks started to fall, I returned to Pittsburgh, family, and teaching duties for the Pittsburgh second term.

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Chapter 66

Religion in the New Millennium My speaking and writing returned to themes of religion and resistance to evil in the new millennium. The book title selected by Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick J. Parrella heads this chapter, and it included one of my essays on resistance. They had directed the millennium conference for Paul Tillich studies at New Harmony, the site of Paul Tillich’s ashes. It was particularly memorable for me, as Langdon Gilkey and I renewed our friendship established in 1986 when we were lecturing at some of the same colleges for the Tillich Centenary. He spoke on the religious situation at the millennium, and I spoke on the need for religious resistance to some of the trends developing as the century changed. I was developing with Bob Stivers the book we would publish on resistance, and my thought reflected the work of the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness meeting in Geneva the previous year. I discussed how often Tillich had written and spoken about theological resistance to forces that enslaved modern humanity, and then I analyzed four trends of the times that needed resistance: fundamentalism, greed, violence, and domination. My own activity showed as great a concern for the development of positive institutions on faith foundations as my writing on resistance. Our group of professors met in Louisville in 2000 and spent a considerable part of our visit dealing with changes in the national staff of the Church and its organization. I was very supportive of Robert Chesnut as he led East Liberty Presbyterian Church toward transformation. He reflects this in his book Transforming the Mainline Church. It also mentions where we had some disagreements, but in my mind those disagreements were to support the health of the Church. I served from 2000 for two more terms on the Session of the Church and for one on its Centenary Fund Trustees. Bob’s initiatives received opposition from some church members. I consciously took on the role of defending the pastor from criticism intended to drive him out. I also served a few terms on the East End Cooperative Ministry (EECM) board in this period. Patricia served on the youth team of EECM after her Peace Corps term and until she went off to San Francisco to the California College of Fine Arts. One of my fondest memories is sitting on the stairs with her leading to the Social Hall of the church where three hundred youth joined in worship that summer. The church really rocked. She alerted me to the need for funds for youth ministry when the government slashed its support for youth work. East Liberty Church, under my prodding, responded with a $10,000 emergency grant to the youth ministry. Far away from the pain of the inner city, I served six years on the Olmstead Manor board of directors. It was a Methodist retreat center in the northern part of the state. I served on the program committee there and helped to keep the Wesley lectures at a high level for those who would make the journey to the woods. As an ecumenical delegate, I was not the most important member, but I helped keep the center from harvesting any more timber for the time I served on the board. The trees fell, and the timber roads were gouged in the hills soon after I left the board. My resistance to

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deforestation there was similar to my efforts to prevent a warehouse being built on a green space in the inner city while I served on the board of directors of the East Liberty Development Corporation. I was elected by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 2000 and in 2003 to serve for five years on the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy. The work was similar to my terms on the Advisory Council for Church and Society in the 1980s. The committee had a little less power than the previous council, but our work was limited more by our lack of time, energy, and creativity than it was by the reduced budget allocations. With all of the above commitments to institutions, outside teaching, and my vocation as a professor, Bebb and I became more distant. I was finding fulfillment in vocation, lecturing, and moving the institutions, but I was neglecting home base. Bebb was serving the Presbyterian Church of Mount Washington. There she met Father Lou Vallone. He was able to set up a reception/dinner for us and representatives of the police department in his rectory to discuss a rough draft of a possible policy paper for the Presbyterian Church on police relations with the African American community. He served as chaplain to the police department, and he invited members of the Blue Angels police to meet with us after they had read the draft paper. The police officers were very critical of the paper and argued that it did not reflect their experience or street wisdom. Their response was generally hostile. The Catholic priest warned the officers that we were not the authors, adding, “Please don’t shoot the messengers.” One spouse who worked as a police dispatcher said, “Every day I pray that my husband will return, and that if he is killed, I will be able to forgive the killers.” There was real fear of the African American toughs by the police, and they reacted with aggressiveness toward us as bearers of this rough draft of a resolution. We passed the comments on to the drafting team for the Church, and Edward Long Jr. was brought in to rewrite the draft for the Social Witness Policy Committee. The concluding paragraphs of our report to the drafting committee said: One former officer recognized the moral concerns of the paper. Our recommendation would be that the paper’s emphasis be changed to emphasize police ethics and the brutality be seen as a problem within a wider discussion of police ethics. Also, more on the theological and moral support for the vocation of police work is needed. Finally the socially disastrous context for police work needs more emphasis. To these officers, they are in something like a war. From where we live in the city, working in urban churches and seminary, educating our children in urban schools, working in urban development and politics, one of the worst things that could happen would be for the police to become more disengaged, distressed, depressed and demoralized than they are. Finally, we note how far our social reality is from that of either the police officer or the victim of police brutality. In most cases the police do not

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attend liberal/socially critical churches. The police reject vehemently organizations like NAACP and ACLU which we support. We do not have the characteristics that lead us to be brutalized unless we are engaging in civil disobedience or public demonstrations. Walt Wiest had taught the “Introduction to Ethics” class while I was away on the Oxford sabbatical. In the winter–spring terms of 2000, I taught my favorite course, “Moral Issues in International Relations,” and, given that it was an election year, a regular course, “Christian Ethics and Politics.” I had taught a version of this course since my “Christian Ethics and Political Philosophy” at Union in 1967–1968 in tutorials based on my Oxford experiences. I also taught two doctorate of ministry courses, one in the winter term at Pittsburgh and one in summer school at Aberdeen University. I also had more outside lectures than usual. I taught four weeks at Bower Hill Community Church on “Christian Ethics in a Relativistic Age.” I had five weeks at East Liberty Presbyterian Church on “Contemporary Christian Ethics,” and my usual election-year talks on faith and politics at a Unitarian church and the Duquesne Presbyterian Church. In February, I went to hear Patricia give the sermon at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church. She had been confirmed in this church, in which her mother became a leader. Her sermon was a report on the human-interest aspects of her Peace Corps service in Benin. She spoke very well of the crying need there, and of the plight of the babies in particular. I was happy and proud of her and her causes. The First Presbyterian Church of Youngstown, Ohio, asked me to give two of the Schaff Lectures on “Faithful Opposition to the Mafia.” One of the chiefs of the Pittsburgh mafia had lived down the street from my first home in Pittsburgh, and he had been shot on Larimer Avenue a few blocks from my house, in front of a reputedly mafia tavern. The Youngstown congressman was indicted for his ties to the mob, and the town was agitated by the FBI-mafia conflicts. I took some precautions, staying in an obscure motel outside of the city on the days that I lectured on the mob and organizing to defeat it. Organizations against crime used my lectures and workshops as a focus for their efforts, and they brought expertise beyond that which I had garnered through study. I focused on what could be accomplished through religiously based voluntary organizations and the role of civic order in promoting justice. As discussion focused on certain people who deserved to be defeated in the coming elections, an assistant district attorney warned the participants in the discussion to avoid becoming overly specific. The warning confirmed for me that the meetings had been at the appropriate level of practical action as well as community organizing ethics.

ALAN JAY STONE In May 2000, Alan announced his resignation from the presidency of Alma College, to become effective in a few months. He had increased the endowment from $41 million to $124 million by that time, increased the student body, built several buildings, raised faculty salaries considerably, and generally professionalized the school’s administration. However, vague criticisms that the college was becoming too corporate, or that he was hard driving, had undercut his presidency. Though he won

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two votes of no confidence handily in the board, he decided to resign. We were both relatively hard driving, and a little critical of the meager work some faculty seemed to be satisfied with after achieving tenure. Neither of us was willing to stay too long at an institution if we were seen as a source of conflict that might hinder the institution’s mission. I was pleased to visit the campus and praise my brother’s obvious achievement in his twenty-three years as president. I had spoken more academically at his inauguration, and this time I was able to speak more personally. Alan’s father was a builder, a carpenter, a mason, and a contractor. His mother was a teacher. How utterly natural and fitting it has been that he became a builder of structures like this Heritage Center of the Performing Arts for educational institutions. The parent’s names on the back stage rooms of this Center symbolize their contribution through him and Jonieta to this college. As one born during World War II, his interest in international affairs has distanced him from the Baby Boomer generation which followed him. His personal origin in the mid-west of the war years gave him a deep security, though the world beyond our borders was insecure. So his world travels and commitments to lands beyond the sea reflect that heritage of a safe America at war. So does his middle name derived from Uncle Jay, his mother’s brother who was a sailor in the war. All of his other uncles and cousins of the appropriate age were warriors and all returned safely to the American heartland. Surrounded by three brothers, there was no escape from the rough and tumble of athletics. Baseball, football, and especially boxing drew upon his energies and he exhibited the sense of a young man to refuse the urging of coaches to turn professional after demonstrating extraordinary toughness in the ring. That same competiveness keeps him playing racquetball and running today. The most exciting place in his town, Humboldt, Iowa, the Methodist church and its youth fellowship, led by extraordinary laymen, was the place to be on Sunday evening. With brothers on either side who attended seminary, he went also, choosing the powerhouse of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The rationality of that type of theology could lead him into strenuous conversations with his younger brother’s Yale Divinity School neo-orthodox piety while he felt supported by his older brother’s Union Theological Seminary’s social theology. Alan’s experience of less than peace in his birth place has led him into the role of family glue that often sponsors family reunions or brothers’ meetings. As an older brother, I have often observed how it has been Alan who has maintained the contact with and support of the older members of the family or even distant relatives. His final building at Alma will be the student center, and deep down, that reflects a love for community and togetherness which is part of his need and his heritage.

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Our father, Hubert, observed our play and told me that it would be my younger brother, Alan, who would have the money. Dad did not dream at the time that he would be raising it for a Presbyterian college in Michigan. Our grandfather, Henry, a Presbyterian mayor who collected buildings, would not have been so surprised. The acorn fell pretty close to the oak tree and grew to outshine it, but Alan was always especially blessed by the love and radiance of that grandfather from the Iowa frontier. Grandfather told us stories of Indians on the front step of our Iowa house, and both to the north and south of our town were sites of Indian battles. In fact, our family inherited the log cabin of a man who fled the Iowa country after massacring Sioux. Certainly, Alan’s scholarly work on Native American history flowed deeply from those early family stories. These male influences would not have flourished without the female commitments from mother Bernice to faith, travel, and education. She not only nourished the boys, she inspired them. Alan’s role as educator is the fruit of his mother as teacher. The special love of grandmother and great grandmother provided the security for the inspiration to flourish. Commitments to economic justice, fair race relations, and international peace reflect Church teaching, family values, and growing up in the 1960s. I will spare you the story of the 60s but for your president, Alan Stone, they involved confrontation with educational authorities, draft board authorities, and racist authorities involving no small risks. The campaigners of the 1960s now lead for the common good many of the finest institutions of the land, including Alma. Scholar of history, especially Native American history, world citizen, educator with special reference to Korea, builder with special reference to our hall and student center, educational leader especially committed to the well-being of both student and faculty, good husband with special love for Jonieta, Alan has been a uniquely special brother to me, and I am glad to have shared him with you, Alma College, for these few years. Dominating the year of 2000 was the election race of Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman against George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. In my speeches I avoided advising the church listeners how to vote. I stayed with the issues of economic justice, ecological concerns, and concern for peace. I knew my hopes about racial justice would not be furthered by the Republican candidates, and sometimes I talked about Supreme Court appointments. While speaking for the Inter-Faith Alliance I stressed that the Roman Catholic bishops’ favoritism for one party was shortsighted, and that the bishops’ opinions on gender and sexual issues or right to choose did not reflect the faith judgments of the mainline Protestant communities. I feared the influence of oilmen in high places in the government and warned of dangerous energy policies by the Republican oilmen. All of the organizational causes discussed in this chapter would be impacted by a Republican victory.

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I genuinely believed Gore was the smarter, better man. The election-eve party at our home concluded about eleven o’clock with most of us sure that the results meant a Gore victory. The news the morning after produced a rude awakening for us. The following day’s TV pictures of Republicans preventing the vote recount in Florida counties were soon followed by the Supreme Court’s party-line vote, and Gore was left with a moral victory in a majority vote by the population, but an actual loss due to the mess in Florida and the Court’s intervention. We dreaded the following years’ governmental leadership, but we knew nothing about the coming wars. There was intelligence on terrorist threats, and there were muted voices demanding the new administration pay more attention to terrorist possibilities than to Star Wars defense, but the warnings went unheeded at the highest level of the new government administration.

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Chapter 67

John Wesley’s Ethics I dedicated John Wesley’s Life and Ethics (2001) to my brother Hugh, whose service in the Methodist Church and in academia was a fitting continuation of John Wesley’s ministry. His ministry and other services exhibited the energy that characterized Wesley, and his learning represented the best traditions of Wesley’s scholarly commitments. The three of us brothers who attended seminary all exhibited some of the strengths and weaknesses of John Wesley. The pushing of ourselves, and sometimes others, to excel through hard work was characteristic of Wesley. Our passion for religion’s connection to the reform of Church and nation had been Wesley’s specific agenda. Even our theological ethics of the pursuit of justice and the liberation of the oppressed through action flowing out of the love of a gracious God was learned in the Methodist Church when it still bore the marks of its founder. I think our serious churchmanship also came through a long line to us from Wesley. He is not to blame for the difficulty in our early marriages. Through divorce and change we settled our marriages better than he had, and our children were a blessing to us. As noted earlier, the commitment to the project flowed from my concern to present a portrait of Wesley’s drive to abolish slavery. Through the research I became very impressed with his ethic for society, education, economics, health, peace, and social reform. Through reading all of his writings I could find on ethics and society, I concluded that, in Wesley’s case, the Christian traditions provide a biblically informed, deontological ethic of love. This ethic is grounded in Christian community to form the individual, and in social reform, to transform the nation within the limits of Christian realism concerning human nature and social order. I appreciated his organic realism about society and concluded that his political theory was superior to that of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century whom we still read in college. I hope the book reinforced the conclusion that Christian ethics must be studied historically as well as analytically and that the historical context needs to be thoroughly investigated to understand the relativity and relevance of any Christian thinker about ethics. Weeks in the Bodleian Library and days in his London house and at Epworth were very worthwhile. The time I could spend in the Manchester library was too limited. I enjoyed arguing with other interpreters of Wesley, and I am certain that his ethic faithfully records the heart or essence of Christian ethics. The book sold well in Methodist circles for years, and I enjoyed presenting my interpretation of Wesley in a Methodist clergy book club, to the Methodist History section of the American Academy of Religion, to the Methodist Federation for Social Action in Iowa, and in some Methodist churches. The research and the book were both valuable resources for my course in Methodist social ethics at the seminary. I knew there were two errata by the time the book was published, and I enjoyed challenging my critics or respondents at academic assemblies to find them. One was that, due to the confusion among secondary sources, my book presented two different occasions on which Wesley volunteered to raise armed Methodists to defend

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England. In fact, there was only one such occasion. The other was confusion over Methodist Church history. I made a major error in confusing Evangelical United Brethren and Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A Methodist bishop forcefully noted the error. Somewhere in the text there is another error, but I’ve forgotten where it is or of what it consisted. There is no perfection in writing books. The concluding paragraph of my introduction to the book summarizes my findings regarding his ethics: Seven distinctive characteristics of his ethic are presented before the discussion of Wesley’s relating of Christian love to moral law. The ruleagapism, deontological nature of his ethic is argued for, and then I show how this dominates his presentation of Christian character. His social ethic is demonstrated to be of a reformist rather than a revolutionary character. His passionate concern for the poor and for the reform of church and society is contrasted with the more harmonious view of society of his Glasgow contemporary, Adam Smith. Finally his ethical theory is presented by a summarizing list of his moral practice for reform of church and society. Despite living through a transitional society usually at war and suffering from an inability to achieve a satisfactory married life, his ethic and his moral practice were very good. He remains a trustworthy guide when the eccentricities of his time are understood and relativized. His context is not our context, but it is important in understanding his particular Christian ethic. Those who follow his tradition or learn from his ethics have one of the wisest Christian ethicists from whom to draw moral wisdom. One other paragraph from the introduction risks an evaluation of his economic ethics and choices for the poor: In the fields of economic ethics and Christian practice of charity and empowerment of the poor there may not be his equal until the twentieth century within the ranks of church leaders. He regularly and systematically raised charity for the poor, he developed effective means of changing their situation, and he advocated policy changes on their behalf. This chapter is less critical of Wesley’s economic ethics than some recent studies guided by liberation theology. It concludes that he was really very good in his relations and writings on behalf of the poor.

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Chapter 68

Terrorism and Foreign Policy After 2001, the remaining years of autobiography are dominated by questions arising from the attacks of September 11. In the spring of 2001, I taught my usual courses of “Moral Issues in International Politics” and the seminar on Paul Tillich’s social thought. The plans under way for recognition of Sam Calian’s twenty-year presidency seemed too modest. I questioned the meager gift and recognition planned. The committee responded by organizing a board of directors and faculty dinner. Given that I had challenged the earlier plans and that I was the senior faculty member, the committee asked me to present the remarks to honor Sam, but to keep it light. I briefly remarked on his tenure and told a couple of stories with humorous twists. Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues and friends of the seminary, it is a special privilege to honor Sam and Doris Calian tonight for twenty years of service to our Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. We honor them both because without the love and support of Doris, plus her practical labors for the seminary, Sam could not have accomplished all he has for the seminary. I would like to emphasize that it has not been an easy task. One prospective faculty member said, just before Sam arrived, that we were a very disagreeable, quarrelsome group of old white men. Sam never said that, he said we were a diamond in the rough which needed polishing, and after twenty years of polishing this rough surface we do look considerably brighter. As a faculty and staff, we are not as old as we were then, nor are we so consistently male, and there are other dimensions of pluralism also. Sam is the longest serving president of this seminary since its creation from the two former schools. He is also the longest-serving president among our Presbyterian schools. This is an amazing accomplishment and it is witness to at least three outstanding qualities that Sam brought in abundance to the task. Before I mention these virtues that I perceive in Sam, let me say that in the first ten years I served this institution I served with six presidents or interim presidents who carried the heavy responsibilities of the office in the turbulent times of the 1970s. Sam brought stability to the school because he possessed financial sense in a practical way. He could run a tight ship and raise money from donors whom he persuaded to like the seminary and to trust him. That trust had been lacking in the previous ten years. Secondly, he is a master statesman; he had to be to survive. He has the requisite toughness, savvy, and persistence to accomplish the possible and not to be distracted by the impossible. Third and perhaps more important, his academic politics have been consistent with his theology; his theology has been centered on forgiveness.

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This is consistent with the Christian academic realism he has displayed. Reinhold Niebuhr put it, forgiveness based on atonement is: “The central truth of the Christian religion” [Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1, p. 148]. This has been so important because there is so much to forgive in a seminary (sin always haunts religious institutions, and the better they are or think they are, the more it slinks around the halls). Sam’s ability to forgive has meant he can fight with those of us in the seminary on any issue and support us the next day on another, because he really does not hold grudges. Not only does this help us all, it has helped Sam to survive in this tough leadership position for so long. Back in 1981, after we had experienced six to seven presidents, we learned that a new president was coming. We expected him about January 2, but actually he arrived in the dead of winter on February 1, 1981. In the spirit of the joke circulating about the new president of the U.S.A., George W., looking for a White House in Seattle, Washington, I want to share the tale of Sam C.’s arrival at his new post. We knew he was coming from Dubuque, and we had read his learned volume on Berdyaev, or at least some had, and we knew he had studied with Karl Barth and that reassured the conservatives. We knew he had written a bold book of social criticism and that reassured the liberals, but we really did not know him. The answer to what happened to that month when we expected a president and did not receive one rests in the annals of Kansas. Sam arrived from Dubuque to begin his new vocation, and he immediately organized the business men of the city in breakfast discussions of business, ethics, and education. Next, before they knew what they were doing, he had the students, the faculty, and some of the wealthiest women in Pittsburg washing the school’s windows and painting its walls. One of the school’s best supporters was overheard muttering that none of them would wash the windows at home, but they were doing it for Sam. Next Sam was pushing to increase the scholarly publications of the faculty and to make them more self-conscious of their teaching methods. Also the president was busy making calls with energy the school had never seen. The new president noted when he slowed down, however, for a moment to catch his breath at the end of the month that everyone was spelling the name of the town P-i-t-t-s-b-u-r-g. A phone call to Doris in Dubuque assured him the name was spelled Pittsburgh. He had thought the students were less interested in theology than they should be. Though he loved their Midwestern piety, in a few more moments of inquiry, he figured out that he was supposed to be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, not Pittsburg, Kansas. After a month, he was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It has never been the same; neither has Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and if you do not believe me, just ask any theologian you know from Pittsburg State.

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While Sam and Doris have been here in Pittsburgh their children have grown up before our very eyes, matured and launched their careers and families. We’ve watched with gratitude Sam’s combination of persuasion and force with the kids, which is not so different from how he has related to us. Son Philip wanted his own car. Sam took the occasion to talk to Philip about maturing. He told Philip he could have a car if he met three conditions. They were: He had to become a little more serious spiritually, for after all, he was the child of Presbyterian elders. He needed to get his grades up, and he really should improve his appearance by getting his hair cut. Philip came home with his straight A report card, and he reported he was reading a chapter of the Bible every day. Sam approved and then he asked about the long hair. Philip responded that in all the pictures in his Bible Jesus and the disciples all had long hair. Sam said that’s right, and you notice how they must walk wherever they go. Sam and Doris, Thank you for all you have done for this institution in which we find our vocations and whose bread and salt we eat. We celebrate your first score of years and pray God’s blessing on how ever many more of the second score you choose to serve. The nice event we held for Sam and Doris inspired a similar event for three of us, two staff members and me, who had served the seminary for many years. I had received a watch on my twenty-fifth anniversary at the school, and this event was for those of us with over thirty years of service. After a dinner for the board and the faculty, I received a plaque for faithful service to the seminary. Sam’s words were particularly lame, even though they were unrehearsed and off the cuff. He told everyone I was his favorite critic of his presidency; I thought the words were not helpful with the board. The year moved along with lectures to churches on social justice issues; a short trip to England for final revisions in the Wesley book, which was published that year; and a short trip to Geneva for the Advocacy Committee for Social Witness Policy with Bebb, who returned to the United States shortly before our meeting concluded. We had spent a week with the Nyle Harpers in the mountains at Wegen, Switzerland, before the meetings began. The train trip up to the terminus on the Jung Frau was particularly moving. I had admired this mountain since my first visit to Switzerland in 1961, and the trip through the mountain tunnels and over the ice fields was stirring. The taste of the butter and the cheeses on the mountain with a trace of the flowers the cows had consumed in their mountain pastures is still remembered.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 For September 11, I had prepared a chapel service to memorialize my teacher, Robert McAfee Brown. The halls swarmed with excited students as I exited the classroom where I had just concluded a lecture on politics and ethics. A student who had received a phone call from the National Guard met me and said, “Professor Stone, we are at

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war.” I went to a student lounge and watched the buildings fall in New York City. I then returned to my office and revised the service I had planned. I met the dean, John Wilson, in the front of the chapel and assured him I had the situation in hand. A young, new, brash professor of homiletics thought her experience would be better for the occasion, but Dean Wilson assured her he had confidence in my taking the service. He made an announcement of the events, and the service proceeded. I was surprised when I asked worshippers whose families were affected by the attacks on Wall Street and the Pentagon to stand; almost forty students and staff rose at each request. The hymns I had chosen from Brown’s service fit the occasion, and “For All the Saints” was particularly appropriate. Already I could suggest that the attack probably originated in the Middle East, and that the unresolved issues of the Holy Land were relevant. It seemed to me that the military response of the United States would be swift, and that while our response now was to pray and mourn, we would have opportunities to work on the peace, religious, and justice issues in the days ahead. Two weeks later, while in church meetings at the United Nations and the Church Center for the UN, we adjourned to make a pilgrimage to the World Trade Center site. There, by the smoldering ruins, breathing the remains of the victims, I vowed to deepen my work as an ethicist-theorist of international relations. The ruins confirmed my realism, but they also cried out for a revision of that realism in deeper consideration of the role of religion in international politics. My response began to shape up in October. The Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness met October 11–14 at Dubuque Theological Seminary in Iowa. Our primary emphasis under the leadership of the Drs. Jung was on responsibility for stewardship of the land, food, and agriculture. Soon, however, we drafted a plan to institute a study of religion, violence, and terrorism. It seemed that American understanding of the events was not giving proper place to the religious issues involved in terrorism, in general, and to the role of certain interpretations of Islam in this situation. We would take our concerns to the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, from there to a study process, and eventually to a resolution for the General Assembly on the crisis to guide Church response. Nyle Harper, chair of the Advisory Committee, and Edward L. Long Jr. were particularly enthusiastic and helpful, but the action was the consensus of the whole group in Dubuque. Peter Sulyok, coordinator of the Committee on Social Witness Policy, was glad to help us run in the direction we suggested. My own sense of the type of work needed by the Church had roots. I had studied and written on the issue of terrorism in the 1980s. Part of that work had been with Robert Smylie for the Council on Church and Society of the Presbyterian Church. I had also given about a dozen talks to Church and academic groups on the subject. My essay on terrorism in Christian Realism and Peacemaking in 1988 had emphasized defining terrorism, explaining a theological-ethical framework, and then making recommendations for Church and national policy, prioritizing study, dialogue, security, and eventual reconciliation with the forces undergirding Shia terrorism, particularly with Iran. Half of the essay focused on helping Americans understand Shiism and its

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particular relationship to terrorism. I was particularly concerned that Church policy be grounded in deep understanding of the religious forces in the conflicts. The Christian realism I advocated in the 1980s sought an eventual rapprochement with Iran, even if that could occur only after some of the leaders of the Iranian revolution had died. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had faltered in relation to Iran. The issues required learning about Iran, pursuing peace, and encouraging tendencies in Shiism toward peace, while taking measures to secure airports and place armed guards on airplanes. Military intervention in Arab countries was seen as basically counterproductive, even in the case of weakly governed countries like Lebanon. This was published in 1988, the year of Bush’s election—the Soviet Union had not yet collapsed, Iraq had not been invaded, and al Qaeda was not on the scene. The new factors of 2001 included a president and advisors anxious to pursue a war with some terrorists and to occupy an oil-producing state in the Middle East. The use of planes as weapons, not only as objects of hijacking, and a non-state actor in al Qaeda added further complications. The religious component of the current adversary now shifted from Shia to Sunni. The emergency inclined the United States to accept new security measures, domestically and internationally, that had previously been forbidden. The events of 9/11 were terrible in their consequences to New York City and Washington, D.C., but the response by the new administration, which had badly construed its foreign policy and military policy prior to the events, would cost many more American lives and much more wealth. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 2002 approved a working group with a budget of $81,000 for the years 2002–2004. Peter Sulyok and I recruited the group, hoping to form a distinguished group that could lead the Church on the issue of religion, violence, and terrorism. Anne Barstow, from the Peace Fellowship, ensured that the possibilities of nonviolent response to terrorism would be explored. She was a New Yorker and a peace activist. Cindy Combs, a professor from North Carolina, had written as a political scientist on terrorism. Ruy O. Costa, a director of a mission in Boston, provided a third-world perspective from Brazil, having served as chair of ACSWP. Sue Dickson, the vice chair of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, and a senior pastor, brought gravitas to the group. Ismael Garcia, professor of ethics at Austin Theological Seminary, brought expertise in political ethics and Hispanic ethics to the table. Barbara Green, director of a center for policy and theology in Washington, D.C., contributed her Washington contacts as well as years of experience in Germany. Don Kuespert, a member of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, ensured our relationship with the sponsoring body was in order and brought expertise on socially responsible investment to our deliberations. David Little, the professor of international conflict at the Divinity School of Harvard University and a former member of the U.S. Peace Institute, brought a lifetime of work on international relations and ethics to our group. Edward Leroy Long Jr., professor emeritus of Drew University, had written and advised on peace issues for the Church longer than any of us on the task force. He wrote a book on terrorism while working with our task force, and also was the major drafter of the group’s final product. Gary Paton, a former director of the ACSWP and a military officer, was now working on Presbyterian Church relations with

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Russia, and he brought Church organizational skills to our work as well as his experience in Russian matters. Scott Williamson, professor of ethics at Louisville Seminary, wrote a paper for the group on Christian ethical responses to violence, and he kept reminding the group of American minority interests in the subject. We also had the help of Presbyterian Church staff experts in international affairs positioned in the Church to carry forward the committee’s work: Peter A. Sulyok, coordinator of the ACSWP; Sara Lisherness, coordinator of the Peace Program; Victor Makari, coordinator of Middle East for World Wide Mission; Vernon Broyles, associate director of Social Justice for the National Ministry Division; and Catherine Gordon, associate for international issues in the Presbyterian Washington Office. Zaki L. Zaki from the Advisory Committee on Racial and Ethnic Concerns could not attend meetings because of schedule conflicts. I was very proud of the group and confident that they could guide the work of the Church in this area of peacemaking policy. The same year that the General Assembly funded the working group, it dismissed with thanks the Peacemaking Advisory Committee, which I had served as liaison with the ACSWP. At the time, I was chairing the working group; years later, I would try to establish an advisory group on international affairs and peacemaking in the Presbyterian Church to provide the expert advice the Church needed. Dysfunction in the bureaucracy and, in some, a fear of experts prevented this hope from being realized. Our first meeting was in San Francisco at the end of January in 2003. We met again in April in New York City, and finally in Washington, D.C., in December of 2003. There were presentations to the working group at all the meetings. In San Francisco, Stanford professors Robert Hammerton-Kelly and René Girard presented their findings on religion and violence. In New York City, the emphasis was on United Nations work on terrorism, and in Washington, D.C., the focus was on the civil liberty issues and nonviolent means of peacemaking. There was an additional drafting meeting in the summer of 2003 at Ghost Ranch, which pneumonia prevented me from attending. Most of the working group members contributed written resources to the committee and their active participation. There were, after our Washington, D.C., meeting, presentations of the report to the ACSWP and to the General Assembly in 2004, where it was adopted for the Church. During the period of 2001–2012 much of my work was on issues of the Middle East. I wrote a resolution for the Session of East Liberty Presbyterian Church, which was adopted on December 20, 2001, placed on the church website, and mailed to President Bush, Congressman Coyne, Senator Specter, Senator Santorum, Advisor on National Security Rice, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The covering letter was sent out under my name asking for consultations by a small number of the Session with those designated to receive the letter. None of them responded. The Peace Committee and the Session, of course, modified my words somewhat, but I found that most of the suggestions for word changes improved the piece. I regretted the one sentence congratulating the administration, which was added. I missed a few sentences of my original wording: “We foresee that a military response will not end the terror.” “We understand that violence begets more violence.” “Use direct military force only when other means over a period of time have not been effective.” Also, I would not on my

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own have celebrated “the liberation of Afghanistan,” but Session resolutions are part of a political as well as moral process. Unbeknownst to us, the administration was busy plotting a new war against Iraq beyond the war in Afghanistan, which our reflections covered. Response to Acts of Terrorism and Civil Liberties East Liberty Presbyterian Church Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania We reflect upon the profound loss that fell upon this nation and upon people from around the world on September 11, in New York City, Washington, D.C., and in the countryside of Pennsylvania. Thousands of people died in the horrible agony of a fiery incineration. Thousands of families have been tragically devastated and the consequences will be felt for decades to come. Thousands more have died in Afghanistan in this American-Afghanistan war among our allies, our enemies, and innocent civilians. The unspeakable carnage that resulted from the attacks goes beyond anything experienced by the American people in their homeland during the past century. The assault on American economic and military institutions goes beyond merely venting anger and rage. It is an attack on our nation and a direct challenge to the national sovereignty. We recognize and affirm the nation’s right of self-defense and the necessity for the use of force to restrain evil. We recognize that these acts of terrorism are evil and beyond justification. We also recognize that in our pain and wounded national pride, we must be thoughtful about what has happened. Careful not to react in a spirit of vengeance, prayerfully listening for the guidance of God through the word of the Holy Spirit within the community of faith, and attentive to our Reformed tradition with regard to the principles of just peacemaking and just war. The use of military force should be focused on the restraint of evildoers and the elimination of their capacity to create terror. Therefore, the Session of the East Liberty Presbyterian church commends the leadership in a time of crisis, President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and calls upon them to seek a measured response to the terrorist attack, with the focus on: • cooperation with the worldwide community of nations; • the use of non-lethal means of force as the first response; • seeking justice within the framework of domestic and international law;

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• recognition of the many calls for restraint coming from the Islamic nations; and • attention to the just war principles as they apply to defense of the nation. The confession of 1967 affirms, “The Church in its own life is called to practice forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations, as practical politics, the search for cooperation and peace. This search requires that nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at the risk to national security, to reduce areas of strife and to broaden international understanding.” The prophets continually remind God’s people of their responsibility “to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God,” (Micah 6.8) and to “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24) They do not hesitate to speak the word of God to the political and religious establishment. Specific warning is given to those who seek their own well-being and ignore the well-being of the marginalized and oppressed. (PCUSA, 1993 Minutes, 780 ff.) However, the prophets recognize the reality of evil and sanction defense of the righteousness of God (First Kings 18:1–40, Elijah, Second Samuel 7, 8, 9, David). In the New Testament the life and words of Jesus direct us to love our enemies as well as our neighbors and ourselves. We understand that love is not sentimental. It has structure and it makes demands that require sacrifice. Paul in his letter to the Romans brings together love and obedience in the civil society. We are instructed by Paul to obey lawful authority that is constituted by God to be an instrument both for good order and to punish evildoers. (Romans 13:1–7) The civil authority which directs the power of military force always stands under the sovereignty of God. Faith disciples are responsible to perceive the boundaries between faithful obedience and idolatry. Responsible leaders in the various Islamic communities have joined together in publically expressing their great shock and grief over the terrorist actions and have clearly stated that there is no justification within Islam for these evil acts. Peoples of the Islamic religion and of the Arabic world have already reported many acts of violence against their communities who are suffering the fallout of September 11, and encourage protection of their civil and human rights. The Session of East Liberty Presbyterian Church affirms the following: • We note that although the acts of terrorism of September 11 were aimed at the United States, people from 80 nations are counted among the victims.

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• We see that the tragedy of terrorism knows no national borders. • We affirm that the United States of America is a nation governed by laws under a constitution rooted in commitment to democracy, justice, and respect for human life. • We know that the United States has responsibilities and restraints in the conduct of its foreign policy within the context of international law and Geneva conventions. • We believe that all humanity stands under the sovereignty and the judgment of God. We seek a just peace through a just war. We think it is neither appropriate to speak of a “Christian crusade” nor to use the image of seeking “infinite justice” as some have declared. The spirit of triumph is to be avoided and a spirit of humility is to be counseled in this complex situation. • We welcome the liberation of Afghanistan and pray for the emergence of a more just order there. • We affirm our church efforts to study Islam in the Seekers Class, reflect on the daylong seminar on understanding Islam, and we have invited Muslim theologian Dr. Farid Esack to our pulpit on January 13, 2002. Regarding Civil Liberties The detaining of immigrants from the Middle East raised fears that echo the mistakes made in the forced incarcerations of the Japanese population in World War II and even of the “disappeared” victims of Latin American Security States. Times of national anxiety call for special concern for people who may be unjustly detained because their profile arouses concern. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has regularly called for the humane and careful treatment of immigrants. A few excerpts from the 1999 statement of policy are noted: • “Churches are called to ministry with refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, and to public witness on their behalf.” • “Love of neighbor requires Christians to seek justice for refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants.” • “Refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants should be treated humanely and justly in government policies and in our communities.”

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• “The United States government should ensure that the constitutional rights of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, to due process of law are protected,” and • “Reaffirms the consistent witness of General Assemblies on behalf of due process in legal proceedings and urges Presbyterians, presbyteries, and congregations to engage in advocacy efforts to ensure that foreigners in the United States have the same legal protections that citizens enjoy, including the right to legal counsel.” [Quoted from Presbyterian Social Witness Compilation (2000), pp. 63–64] Secret military tribunals for our national enemies seem to be a retreat from the high principles of the Nuremberg Trials after World War II and the International Court of Justice proceedings against accused war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. The U.S. Courts are quite adequate to try those accused of crimes against the nation and humanity in the attacks of September 11. There are many court proceedings that insure the appropriate standards of justice will be met in allied countries including Britain, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Countries can try the conspirators where they were arrested, or in the case of al Qaeda they can be tried in their own countries, the U.S. courts or the International Court of Justice. There is no need for secret military courts. The need is now for immediate justice, and in Afghanistan, executions need to be prevented, not expedited. Therefore the Session of the East Liberty Presbyterian Church: • Affirms the grant of $200.00 for the Southwestern Pennsylvania Chapter of Interfaith Alliance for its project on obtaining the names of the detainees related to September 11, and urges the indictment, judicial hearings, or release of all those jailed. • Notes the imprecise language of the Patriot Act and recommends to the representatives from Pittsburgh to Congress and to the U.S. Senators from Pennsylvania a revision of the legislation. • Recommends to the Advisory Council of Church and Society meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 24–27 the further consideration of the civil rights protection of the detainees. • Recommends to elected representatives the disavowal of military tribunals for international enemies. Adopted December 18, 2001

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Most members of the working group or task force for the ACSWP contributed research presented orally to the group. These presentations, along with the presentations of outside experts, provided the substance for our discussions. Several of these papers were provided to the drafters of the final resolution at the Ghost Ranch meeting in the summer of 2003. Several of the most useful of these papers were collected for an issue of Church and Society that I edited for publication prior to the report going to the General Assembly in 2004.

CHURCH AND SOCIETY I began my introduction to the volume with our group’s focus on the role of religion in contemporary terrorism, and religious interpretations of terrorism. However, the focus was shifted by the group toward consideration of appropriate Christian response to terrorism. During the study process the second war against Iraq was launched. Later the group would be asked to consider American Christian response to this war also, and with Edward Long’s leadership we produced a resolution on that war. We never regarded it as necessary to critique the war in Afghanistan, and we were amazed as resources were diverted from the war against terror to the war against Iraq. In our first meeting in San Francisco, the group examined the roots of violence in ancient religion, meeting with René Girard and Robert Hammerton-Kelly, whose paper was published in the issue. Mark Jurgensmeyer was unable to meet with us due to his wife’s ill health. Violence among humans is a long-standing issue, although modern technologies make it more complicated and destructive. The presenters made it clear that violence is connected with religion and religious ritual. I had hoped to do more with this perspective than the task force was inclined to do, and our work moved on to consultations with experts from the United Nations and Washington’s defense and civil liberty experts. We also listened to those whose lives had been directly affected by the attacks of 9/11. The group chose to reflect on the case studies of religious violence in Northern Ireland, Colombia, and Indonesia. Cindy Combs’s paper on terrorism was published here. The group had particularly valued her leading the discussion on defining terrorism. She carefully distinguished among many kinds of terrorism and other types of violence. The working definition adopted by the group was that contemporary terrorism was “a synthesis of war and theater, a dramatization of the most proscribed kind of violence—that which is perpetrated on innocent victims—played before an audience in the hope of creating a mood of fear, for political purposes.” Anne Barstow’s paper and her participation in the group kept the passions of the activist peacemaker before the group. She argued in her paper for the priority of nonviolent direct actions for peacemaking. The urgency of her paper called Presbyterians to carry out the work of peacemaking articulated by many General Assemblies. Most Presbyterian work on peace recognizes the need for the priority of peacemaking efforts and direct nonviolent action before any recourse to violence can

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be justified in extreme cases. Her paper echoes my own concerns for a more thoughtful peace program in the Church and more direct action with a priority for nonviolence. As Edward L. Long was the major drafter of the paper, Donald Shriver, a former head of ACSWP, was asked to review Long’s book, Facing Terrorism: Responding as Christians, which was developed during his service on the task force. Shriver caught Long’s contributions to the ethics of the report and book very well in his review. Peggy Shriver, also a resident of New York City, presented a poem reflecting on Christian response to the terror in her city. Ismael Garcia’s essay on globalization and terrorism helped to inform the committee on the shock of the globalization process to the world. The clash between modernity and traditional cultures is very disruptive, and protest against the disruption can often be given a religious meaning. Religious terrorists are also part of modern society: note the KKK, Christian Identity, and Jim Jones’s cult. However, it is not unusual for mainline world religions to spin off heretical movements, which combine religious identity with terrorism in unique ways. Traditional societies can be expected to react violently to some of the disruption directed at their ways of life and meaning. Both the destruction of the World Trade Center and the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City had their explicitly religious foundations. Both were motivated by religious interpretations foreign to the main teachings of the religious traditions out of which the terrorist actions grew. David Little’s essay was the longest included in the volume. As a member of the working group, he focused on the threat to civil liberties aroused by the declaration of a “war against terrorism.” He explained how, particularly in times of national emergencies, democratic safeguards of human rights and civil liberties are at risk. How many of the adopted security measures were really needed after 9/11, and how many were the work of forces that would limit messy democracy and its protection of civil liberties? My essay in the journal was written for a forthcoming book, Prophetic Realism, Peacemaking and Policy. It reflected the philosophical positions I had contributed to this policy development process from the beginning, and it recognized the merging of my own thought with the social thought of the ACSWP. “Al-Qaeda and U.S. Foreign Policy” was quite critical of the Bush foreign policy, which had neglected terrorism, focused on Star Wars, and then overreacted by announcing a “War against Terrorism.” The conflict was older than 9/11; Clinton’s policy for years had been to kill bin Laden. I defined terrorism a little more broadly than the task force: “Terrorism is understood to be an act of violence directed against noncombatants to influence politics through the promotion of fear, so many state actions may be regarded as terrorism.” I shared some of the references to many different kinds of terrorism in the Bible. The invasion of Iraq may have had terroristic implications. It was not undertaken to combat terrorism. It led to the strengthening of al Qaeda and the diversion away from 9/11, squandering the world’s sympathy and wasting forces needed in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq could not be justified morally. Justice could be promoted through different policies of supporting international law and organizations, development on behalf of

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the real poor, and worldwide ecologically sustainable programs. Meanwhile, of course, al Qaeda had to be pursued, captured, and tried with actions more like strong police action than war. The essay called forth recognition of the relevance of religious passion to international politics and recommended contemporary religion turn toward the realism of the biblical prophets, which all three great monotheistic traditions shared. The prophets were expert in both religion and politics, and such wisdom was sorely needed to undergird the patience required for the long, slow struggle with religious terrorists. Resources beyond current directions in political science were urged.

RESOLUTION ON VIOLENCE, RELIGION, AND TERRORISM Ed Long and I represented the working group at the General Assembly in Richmond. The resolution passed through committee with minor changes and was adopted by the General Assembly as advice to the Church, governance for the staff members, and a general word to the conscience of the larger Church. Ed had done most of the drafting, and Gary Paton had overseen the major additions from the Ghost Ranch drafting team. In the introduction I recommended in the words to the two Marys at the empty tomb, “Do not be afraid,” as the response of Christian people to terrorism. The immediate response to an attack of terrorism is to thwart it, and from 9/11 on many Americans gave their lives to overcome terrorism. Following our definitions of terrorism, war, and violence, we advised that after ministering to the victims, we ponder the messages of the terrorists, support our government in pursuing justice against the attackers within the limits of national and international law, and work for policies of justice in our relations with the nations of the world through sustainable development and wise diplomacy. The Church’s long history of peacemaking work, words, and policies was recalled. The theology of the resolution was in terms of Trinitarian affirmations of trust in God, Christ’s transformative work, and the Spirit’s counsel to the Church. Religion’s connection to violence was explicated, and our complicity with forces that provoked immoral terrorist activities was discussed. Finally, the recommendations for the Church and society were explained. The recommendations included the full development of the Church’s already affirmed peacemaking practices, and in a variety of ways urged the government to pursue justice for the poor as well as punishment for the attackers. The recommendations called for revision of the Patriot Act to protect civil liberties. The Church accepted the report’s condemnation of preemptive attack. An emphasis on the Church pursuing deeper relationships with Muslims was recommended. The rationale for the resolution was explained in Edward Long Jr.’s paper, which was recommended for study in the Church. The paper by Long was a little more optimistic than my own contributions to the study. This in part reflected our differing evaluations of the respective theologies of John C. Bennett and Reinhold Niebuhr. While Edward was not averse to my emphasis on patience and prudence, he had more confidence in transformative policy recommendations than I could affirm. Deep down I felt Muslims and Christians had usually throughout history been fighting somewhere in the world. Our mistaken responses to the terrorism of 9/11 condemned us to a long season of strife, and I was not optimistic about peace in the near future. There was too great a

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tendency toward chaos in the international order. Religion also easily fell prey to violence. Human nature was too sinful and ignorant, and too many of the Arab states were dictatorships and monarchies, to expect peacemaking efforts, if they came from the United States, to inspire much of a response. I would have a chance to push my own recommendations for just peacemaking in a forthcoming book and to stress diplomacy and interreligious dialogue as well as the responsibility of religion more strongly.

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Chapter 69

Semi-Retirement and Divorce I received the Lilly Faculty Fellowship for study in 2002. It provided funds for study at Union Theological Seminary as a visiting scholar and for short visits to Russia and France. The project was to write a book on religion and international politics exploring biblical resources in the prophets, theory of international relations, and U.S. foreign policy. My plan was to legally separate from Bebb when I went to New York City in March, but in personal matters my plans were often upset. The legal separation did not occur until the summer of 2002, after I returned from Russia. We agreed I would stay temporarily at the cabin, and I rented an apartment in Highland Park for the first of July. We both had our own reasons for the separation and divorce. We had agreed on the separation; legal divorce was my initiative. The whole procedure was difficult. Bebb resisted divorce for some months, and I wavered also. Many friends were shocked. My son Randy was traumatized by the harshness of the process, as were both Bebb and I. The lawyers managed to complicate the process and make it more bitter than it needed to be. The process dragged on until 2005. After some confusion and criticism at the seminary, I elected to retire from teaching at the seminary. I planned to finish my last class in Scotland in August, and the seminary agreed to continue my compensation in a separation agreement including my willingness to be available for counsel to the seminary until summer of 2005. This date coincided with my original Teachers Insurance and Annuity Plan agreement for retirement from Columbia University in 2005 at age sixty-six. I also continued supervising doctoral candidates in the Cooperative Graduate Program of the University of Pittsburgh and the seminary until they finished in 2005. I was absent from commencement, as I traveled through France to present a paper to the French Tillich Society in Toulouse. The return visits to Chartres and Carcassonne were especially welcome. The hospitality of the French was wholesome, and it was delightful to visit American friends again. Bob and Mary Anne Stenger were particularly gracious. Mary Ann and I had produced a book of our essays on Paul Tillich the previous year for Mercer Press titled The Dialogues of Paul Tillich. No one was surprised when we joined in our criticisms of one of the papers at the seminar for neglecting Tillich’s writings on power. The trip to the pope’s palace in Avignon was very sobering, but the trip back to Paris on the high-speed train and the delights of Paris almost made me forget the turmoil of Pittsburgh. My return visit to the chateau of Nostradamus outside Aix showed itself to be unfortunate, for the room in the older part of the house smelled of mold.

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PNEUMONIA Randy was helping me move my books out of my seminary office when I became very weak. I helped pack the boxes but allowed him and a couple of seminary students to carry them to the car and up to my apartment in Highland Park. Randy and I enjoyed supper in an Indian restaurant in the neighborhood, but I felt weaker as we returned home. I had been diagnosed with the flu by my doctor a few days earlier. The day after Randy left to return home to Rochester I suffered chills and shaking as my temperature shot up. A friend took me to the Shadyside Hospital emergency room as my doctor advised. The triage process in the emergency room took hours, and when I was finally attended to I was intubated and rushed to the intensive care unit. My friend phoned family and friends, and Randy returned to Pittsburgh. He remained with me throughout the critical parts of my therapy, as did Bebb. Alan arrived from Arizona. Eventually, as Alan left after a few days, Roger came to stay with me, but Randy was recognized as the one responsible for care decisions. I spent about a week in intensive care and then another week in a regular room while continuing tests were taken. In intensive care and even later in the hospital stay I had all sorts of delusions and incredible dreams that I could not differentiate from reality. I learned in a way that had escaped all of my education how thoroughly we are biological beings. Illness and drugs scrambled my mind. I imagined visitors who never came. I suspected one physician of intending homicide. I could not remember most of my visitors a few days later. The experience of my dependence upon my bodily chemistry drove out of my mind any traditional idea that something meaningfully reminiscent of a human life could survive death. We survive genetically through our descendants and in the memories of others for a while, but death is death. If we are fortunate, some of our work may survive for a few generations, but the passing of civilizations dooms it also to destruction. One night, probably the fourth or fifth in intensive care, I relaxed, said my prayers, and gave myself over to death, which I knew in Christ was not evil. The next morning I began to regain strength. One of my delusions was that only Patricia could interpret my mime play with the tube in my mouth and write on the blackboard my undiagnosed disease as “White Nile Disease.” Patricia had been advised that my sickness was not fatal, and she had not come from California, but in my mind she had been present. Several faculty visited again as I became stronger. Gonzalo was usually there after he returned to Pittsburgh. I spent the third week in a rehab facility across the street from Gonzalo’s home, and gradually I learned to walk again and to do exercises. After returning to my apartment, I could only walk to the first bench in Highland Park, which previously I would pass by quickly on my three- or four-mile runs. In a couple of weeks I traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona, with a woman friend I was seeing at the time pushing me in the airport wheelchairs. I recuperated there for a short time in Alan’s home in the high desert.

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The first few days while Alan was home, I saw tears in his eyes as his older brother could lift only minimal weight on his universal gym. I remembered how admiring he had been when I was training for the Golden Gloves, doing chinups with my fingers on the door jam in our shared bedroom. But gradually that summer, through extensive work, my health and strength returned. I missed the summer meeting at Ghost Ranch of the drafting team for our GA resolution, and the seminary asked Lon Weaver to substitute for my projected last class in Aberdeen, Scotland. After recovering a great deal in Arizona, I returned to my normal pace, traveling to Berlin to visit with Randy and family and for research in the Brandenburg archives on Paul Tillich. I felt strong enough to take in the American Academy of Religion in November and return to chair the violence and terrorism project with help, for the meetings in Washington, D.C., in December. Life changed. I had dreamed of starting a new vocation in Native American archaeology and of writing a book on the ethics of archaeology. I had bought mission furniture for my apartment expecting to transport it to my future home in New Mexico where I had undertaken some archaeology at Ghost Ranch. The course I took, at the University of Pittsburgh, “Introduction to Archaeology,” freed me from romantic notions of the science of archaeology. I realized how much of my time would be dedicated to fundraising and organizing others if I wanted to accomplish anything significant. The broader academic world kept asking me to review books, write essays, and speak on my subjects, as though I had not retired from teaching at the seminary and nearly died. I continued in my adjunct professor role at the university, as I had two doctoral students to advise and to chair their dissertation committees. So I resumed Christian social ethics in writing and speaking. My ways of raising children differed from my friend’s patterns. Confronting my all-tooapparent mortality, she needed more space to raise her children in her own way. They were her priority. We continued to see each other, but without a planned future. We drifted apart, and I dated others. Looking back from a perspective of ten years, my work and travels to Prague for a human rights conference, Berlin for family and Tillich research, and the conference at Toulouse seem a little frantic for 2003. In that year I settled into my new apartment, worked through a quarrelsome divorce, and retired from a position of thirty-four years. However, I still was expending research money from my grant, Social Security began early, and my settlement with the seminary was satisfactory. So at least I had adequate financial resources. My local church, in large part, supported me. Friends from the seminary gathered around me, and other friends were encouraging. The severity of the disease was related to the malignancy of the bacterial pneumonia, the complications of misdiagnosis, divorce procedures, and the weakness of my immune system during my final year at the seminary.

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Chapter 70

Christian Social Ethics as Vocation By the beginning of 2004, my early publications on terrorism, the Resolution of East Liberty Presbyterian Church, the Resolution for the Presbyterian Church General Assembly for 2004, and my new book Prophetic Realism were complete. I had recovered my full strength, and I was living as a single person. Life was normal, and both academia and the Church were calling me to continue my vocation as a Christian social ethicist. That year I had several meetings in northern Pennsylvania at the Olmstead Manor, where I helped the educational program, participated in board meetings, and argued against any more logging in the forest of the manor. Similarly, I had board meetings for the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy in Louisville and San Francisco. A new position with the Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) took me to New York City to interview bank executives about their procedures to keep funds from flowing through American banks to support terrorism or the families of suicidal terrorists from Palestine. At the same time, MRTI was engaged in heavy discussions with corporate leaders about divestment from their firms, which were profiting from military connections with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. I supported divestment strategies as a regular part of Christian social action. As in most important social actions, discussions with the corporations and ethical concerns are presented long before a divestment strategy is adopted. As one of the founders of the divestment from American banks over the apartheid crisis, I had worked through understanding divestment strategies long before it became an issue for the Presbyterian Church. There were lecturing opportunities in Iowa, Chicago, Long Island, and New York City. I counseled the General Assembly on terrorism and Church policy in Richmond, Virginia. Judge Justin Johnson and I took on the unwanted task of guiding the work on another resolution raised at the General Assembly regarding false allegations against school teachers. Our report stressed the priority of student safety, as previous General Assemblies had, and made some recommendations for assuring justice in the process of investigating teachers accused of harassment.

RESISTANCE REVISITED At the end of the twentieth century, I had again taken up the thesis of the need for the Church to actively resist evil. The product at this point would be a group of writings. The major piece was the edited work of Resistance and Theological Ethics in 2004. It was a project of the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness. Robert L. Stivers joined me in the project, and we met as we could at academic conferences and finally in San Francisco for the final editing of the book. Bob had been

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a close friend over the years, and we had supported each other in Church work and edited projects for academia. He had arranged my frequent visits to Pacific Lutheran University for summer-school teaching, and I had secured lecture opportunities for him in Pittsburgh. I had hoped to lure him to Pittsburgh Seminary, as discussed earlier in this book. He asked me to help him edit the volume for Roger Shinn’s Festschrift. We camped and hiked together in the Pacific Northwest whenever we could. We would often gather a few friends together for makeshift parties after academic meetings. From his cabin on Puget Sound we would explore the Olympic Peninsula, and he introduced me to Mt. Rainier. Acts of resistance to government policy or corporate policy had often been the most stimulating moments in Church life for me. The Church, to a degree, is not just society; it also transcends society and stands in tension with it. The Church finds itself in daring to resist society as an anticipation of the Kingdom of God. In moments of risky acts of resistance supported by clear, moral judgments, the Church participates in the Kingdom of God. We limited our work to nonviolent actions of resistance to evil. We chose four areas of structural evil to address: religious pride, greed, violence, and domination. All but two of the writers of the essays in the volume were members of TEPSW. Robert Stivers sought out the reasons for resisting trends in globalization, articulated ethical norms for resistance, and suggested possible means of resistance to corporate greed. Gordon Douglass, an economist, hesitated between reform and resistance to globalization and settled around reforms to resist domination and greed. Heidi Hadsell, seminary president, reflected on the union of environmental activism in Brazil and biblical insights as an example of resistance. Laura Stivers, university professor, addressed the increasing resistance to the structural adjustments forced on the poor world. Dana Wilbanks developed the theme of resistance to nationalism. F. E. Bonkovsky, a professor in medical schools, analyzed the need to resist certain trends in biological science and medical developments. I discussed resistance to militarism. Professor Brian Blount explained how the gospel worked to subvert the tyrannical forms of domination in the racism of America and the tyranny of the Roman Empire. John Raines, university professor and department chair, wrote out of his own long experience of radical resistance to racism and the Vietnam War. A longtime friend of both editors, he had gone to prison with me in New York City protesting against apartheid and the sentencing of Nelson Mandela. He and his wife, Bonnie, had joined in the Citizen’s Committee to investigate the FBI in the raid on FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania. Frances S. Adeney mined Augustine’s writings in search of a theory to correlate with her own long history of participating in demonstrations and protest movements. Scott C. Williams, a colleague of Adeney at Louisville Seminary, analyzed Frederick Douglass’s move from pacifism to support of violence against slavery. Young Lee Hertig developed the closest relationship to the example of Marie Durand when she wrote about Christian women martyrs in Korea resisting Japanese imperial domination. She sought out the implications of resistance for current Korean culture and for her theological students. Mark Douglas, a seminary professor of ethics, stressed

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the role of theological ethics, adding nuance and subtlety to the issues between the Jubilee 2000 Campaign and the International Monetary Fund. Robert L. Chesnut and Edward L. Long Jr. both focused on the dangers to the church of fundamentalism and malpraxis in religion. While most essays focused on the resources of critical religion to society, Chesnut and Long showed how the captured Church is itself part of the social problem. Ronald E. Peters, then a professor of urban ministry, criticized the failure of the Church to overcome racism in itself, and he urged participation in his “New Wine” project, which challenged the racism of the Presbyterian Church. Lora M. Gross used Lillian Hellman’s resistance to evil as an example of the spiritual resources outside of the Church allowing Christians to understand how non-Christians can ally with the Church’s resistance against domination. Matthew Lon Weaver, pastor, compared two seminal works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich in a theological search to understand how theology impacts history and history impacts theology in the development of different ways of Christian resistance. I would carry this theme of resistance to militarism over to my 2005 book. It is a necessary theme of the Christian life, I believe. The Church comes alive when it stands against some of the social evils in forceful ways. The opposition has to be based on a clear moral argument or it will not carry weight in the Church. The Church pays a price for its resistance to domination, greed, violence, and pride, as do individuals. Much of the Christian story revolves around Jesus’ own witness and suffering. Punishment for resistance to major social trends is to be expected. It often comes without warning. The ground between faith and politics is painful. Often the reward is only in the Christian community that forms around the resistance, but that is a very good reward. If the moral argument is very clear, society may come around to agreement in its major institutions. I have seen the world change regarding race relations, apartheid, relations with Communists, dialogue and partnerships among religions, attitudes toward sexuality of various expressions, and the wars in Vietnam, Central America, and Iraq. The world is changing on climate change, ecological responsibility, and gender relations. There is still a long way to go on economic rights, peace, and human solidarity. We can live somewhat in the Kingdom of God in this history that usually involves deep community and resistance in a meaningful way to evil. There are victories for the Kingdom and punishment for being actively within it. As 2004 drew to a close, I celebrated the views of the approaching snow from my apartment overlooking the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, anticipating with pleasure the fireplace in the cabin on Laurel Mountain and the approaching crosscountry skiing with friends. Hopefully Patricia would be home from California, and we would celebrate the Pennsylvania weather with our annual ski on the mountain or in a nearby park. She was still living on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco while directing the Media Center at the California College of Arts. It is interesting to me that I closed the Christmas letter that year with these words: “The local church, East Liberty Presbyterian Church, continues as a main focus of my life, though I dabble in local secular stuff by serving on the Allegheny County Accountability, Conduct, and Ethics

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Commission. My Session service will come to the end of eight years this spring, so my direct involvement in all the struggles of the urban-Cathedral of Hope will be reduced.”

CHURCH AND SOCIETY The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy dealt with several issues in preparation for the work of the General Assembly. I participated in the discussion and refinement of all of the policy and resolution development, often representing the committee to the General Assembly and advising the GA committees. I continued to assist the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness Policy in their planning for their annual meetings at a seminary and in their advice and counsel to the ACSWP. The work of these two groups reflected my involvement at East Liberty Presbyterian Church (ELPC) and the relationship was mutual, with insights and participation flowing both ways. This work continued until 2013, declining only as my last term on the ACSWP came to an end and the Theological Educators became less seminary oriented and changed their name to Social Ethics Network.

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS I served on the nine-month task force that prepared the Resolution on Just Globalization: Justice, Ownership, and Accountability for the 217th General Assembly (2006). The chair’s absence due to maternal responsibilities meant that I chaired the last meeting of the task force. The task force included a high-tech manager, a Boston director of inner-city missions, a couple of ethicists, an ecumenical theologian, a director of a program on labor justice, a retired chief executive officer, and a retired World Bank human development officer. It built its work upon the principles of the earlier Presbyterian policy Hope for the Future. It defined its theology as follows: The theological core of this work is Christian realism about sin, a particular gift of the Reformed tradition to the worldwide Christian community’s witness. Because no nation or people or king or pope or company or economic system is without sin, all need accountability. The recipe for this is still in our theological ethos as a church whose polity is rooted in democracy and representation. Democratic accountability is what all power needs, lest it overreach in selfishness or pride. The values of sharing, sufficiency, and sustainability make for a stewardship society more than an ownership society, the image of covenant still reflects both our accountability to God and, by God’s grace, the redeeming energy of the Holy Spirit that responds to our needs giving hope, imagination, new life—and even new institutions. The resolution did not regard globalization as just. It was too much controlled by the neoliberal Washington consensus of relatively unlimited acquisition of wealth, power, and influence by those who possessed them. Without rejecting mixed-economic theories, it called for more aggressive attention to the suffering of the worlds’ poor. It

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entertained dialogue with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and rejection of the American empire of capitalism. The resolutions that the GA voted on reflected the perspective of the third-world critique from the WARC statement in Accra. But it did not accept WARC’s analysis of the world’s reality totally, and the resolution itself leaned toward reform, not rejection of globalization in its agenda. Globalization of the world economy has promoted huge numbers of the world’s poor in India and China to economic sufficiency. It has encouraged the increase of the wealth of the top 1 percent, and it has eliminated many good jobs in the developed world. Labor standards and ecological responsibilities needed to be elevated to move the globalization process toward justice. The title of the resolution, “Just Globalization,” was the subject of intense debate at the last meeting of the group. Like the term “just war,” it was not intended to convey that any war was perfectly just. It intended to lay down criteria by which the justice could be judged and by which a system of war or globalization could be rejected if it proved unjust. The GA’s detailed resolutions calling to change the present reality toward a more just, sustainable, and less warlike system were very thorough and far reaching, while within the realm of the possible. Unfortunately, the Church has little machinery for expediting this vision. While there is one executive responsible for both the investments of the Church toward social reform and mission, he also has the portfolio for ecological justice. The Peacemaking Program has never had expertise in economics, and its staff has declined in numbers and expertise. The Washington, D.C., office has, in the past, had expertise in economics, but no widespread program has been able to make economic justice a major concern of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). When I have expressed my disappointment over this reality in ecumenical circles, others have laughed at my hopes for economic justice thinking and action in the Presbyterian Church. Obviously our wealth gets in the way, as does our overwhelming number of Republicans.

ON POLITICS While serving on the Advisory Council for Church and Society in the 1980s, I had drafted for GA “The Reformed View of Faith and Politics and of Church and State,” which it adopted. In the 1990s, I had written a short resolution on theological ethics and political participation, which passed through the Pittsburgh Presbytery to approval at the General Assembly. I had hoped to update the book published by the church in 1983, Reformed Faith and Politics. But this did not work, as it was overcome by the preference for a video production on the subject, which was never developed. I returned to this work in 2007, working on the task force that produced the resolution passed by the 218th General Assembly “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This work reaffirmed the direction of the 1983 statement that politics was ambiguous, but that the vocation of Reformed Christians included participation in the process. It hung its recommendations upon a theology of the sovereignty of God and the reality of human sinfulness, which would restrict the participation in politics of underprivileged minorities. This resolution was new in its urgency regarding the voting rights of minorities. The Voting Rights Act was extended before the task force met, but it

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continued to urge the enfranchisement of the minorities and proposed several possible reforms to increase the numbers voting. The voices of Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes, and Cornel West were added to the familiar ones of John Calvin and Reinhold Niebuhr, as well as the remembrance of Presbyterian contributions to democracy. On the Sunday following our final meeting in Denver, I presented the task force’s work to a predominantly African American Presbyterian church in the city. A member of the committee, Diane Briscoe, an elder of the congregation, introduced me to the forum. The joyous reception of the resolution and its recommendations was the most enthusiastic response I have ever received on behalf of a GA resolution in my years of work on social policy. As late as 2012, I was still working out the recommendations of the resolution by sponsoring Church School forums on political responsibility. In one event, the local councilman and the director of urban planning for the city, both members of our congregation, presented their perspectives on participation in politics in a panel I chaired as the chair of the Allegheny County Accountability, Care and Ethics Commission. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court directly opposed the statements of the Presbyterian Church on the issue. Republican attempts to restrict minority voting by purging voting lists and the new requirements for identification cards were both opposed by the resolution, which sought to increase voter participation in self-government. State after state controlled politically by Republicans introduced new laws to restrict voting, in direct opposition to the direction of this Church resolution. Our intent had been to assist in making voting easier by several reforms and protecting the voting franchise.

ENERGY POLICY The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy develops most of its work through task forces that then report to the full committee. There is reluctance to reject the work of the task forces, and though their reports may be modified by the committee, they are usually approved and forwarded to the General Assembly for adoption. I often urged that we not accept all reports, but that we work over the reports until we were truly satisfied with them. Just because a report came out of a task force did not ensure that it was ready to go to General Assembly. We had a problem with a report on energy policy in 2006. The report focused mostly on personal responsibility for reducing our own carbon footprints, asking for a covenant among Presbyterians to decrease their own pollution by reducing carbon uses and funding conservation projects to offset carbon use. The report was unable to propose a theology for its recommendations, so it suggested that the personal testimonies of three members of the task force be included in the report. The proposed policy promised no significant impact on the warming of the climate. It refused to consider the cost of defending our oil supplies or to deal with the war in Iraq, which seemed to be largely over oil supplies. The war at least corresponded to published reports about the desirability of seizing an oil-rich nation for exploitation.

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The resource person for the task force had resigned over the inadequacy of the report and its deviation from previous work on energy by the Church. Bob Stivers, the resource person, had participated in most of the ecological policy development for the denomination and had authored previous studies on energy. But his recommendations for significant social policy were overridden, and he left the task force. Even more significant, the report had little consideration for how to address the impact of the fossil fuel consumption on climate change. After debate, the committee set aside the task force report. It was brought to General Assembly later that year as a commissioner’s resolution and adopted without the support of the Advisory Committee. Meanwhile, the Advisory Committee provided guidelines and commissioned James B. Martin-Schram, a professor of religion at Decorah, Iowa, to produce a new background paper for recommendations the committee was developing for General Assembly in 2008. Martin-Schram, who had been a student of Bob Stivers and Larry Rasmussen, produced a paper titled “The Power to Change” in the tradition of the Church’s work with a developed theology and an incorporation of the eco-justice ethical norms adopted previously by the Church. The paper called for significant changes away from our dependence upon fossil fuels, particularly gas, oil, and coal, to relieve the pressure on the atmosphere and to reduce the onslaught of climate change, which would disrupt life on the planet. This paper adopted in 2008 became the basis of the committee’s ongoing work and a guide for the Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee. It called for bold changes in personal use of polluting materials, change in Church institutional practices, and advocacy of policies to change the energy system of the United States toward a sustainable system. It emphasized that climate warming is alarming enough to insist that all Christian ethics take account of the developing risk to human life. The policy finally completed in 2008 fulfilled the mandate of the 2002 General Assembly to review the energy policy of the United States in light of climate change. It built on a paper from 1980, “The Power to Speak Truth to Power,” and the study guide from 1990, “Restoring Creation for Ecology and Justice.” So the Church has affirmed norms of sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity with the poor for energy policy and developed energy guidelines of equity, efficiency, adequacy, renewability, appropriateness, risk, peace, cost, employment, flexibility, and aesthetics. From these guidelines traditional forms of energy production and alternative forms were evaluated. The policy came down on the side of transitioning to alternative fuels from the traditional by 2050 in order to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent from the 1990 levels.

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Chapter 71

On Speaking to Hezbollah A challenge to speak to those called terrorists was laid down at the Stony Point, New York, Peacemaking Conference in the fall of 2004: “Professor Stone, since you have written on terrorism, why not go and talk with the terrorists?” Actually, events were moving toward that encounter. The Advisory Council on Social Witness of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. was planning a fact-finding mission to inform itself about the Middle East as it sought to advise the General Assembly of the Church about social policy. I had chaired the task force on terrorism, whose work had been approved by the General Assembly. The report, of course, condemned terrorism for attacking civilians and laid down strategies for combating it in two categories of suppressive and transformative strategies. Terrorism, as the attack on noncombatant civilians for political ends, was immoral and had to be overcome. The irenic coordinator of the Social Witness Policy Committee, Peter Sulyok, forewarned a group of theologians of the complications of the trip. After a confrontational discussion with Chicago rabbis over the proposal to divest Presbyterian stockholdings from some companies supporting violence and oppression in Palestine/ Israel, he led the Theological Educators for Presbyterian Social Witness in a debriefing. One of his questions was “In a few weeks, Professor Stone will be talking across a table with Chairman Yassir Arafat; what would you advise him to say?” I had, in the Chicago dialogue with the rabbis, made it clear the Presbyterian Church USA’s oppositions to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and Palestine and our long-standing commitment to defend Israel. Furthermore, I defended divestment from selected corporations as a viable means of social change and, in this case, as a movement for Israel’s own good. The rabbis objected vociferously to the Presbyterian-proposed policy of divestment. On arrival in Lebanon, meetings were held with the Near East School of Theology and Executive Committee and the administrative council members of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon. With the encouragement of the Synod and the Middle East Council of Churches, the group traveled to Southern Lebanon, worshipped on Sunday with the Presbyterian Church Ebel Al-Saki, sang the hymn “Amazing Grace” for the church, enjoyed a reception, and continued conversations with Hezbollah representatives who had joined them before the church service. The advisory group noticed as they came into Southern Lebanon that they passed through a Lebanese army checkpoint and through a Hezbollah checkpoint. Their bus was provided with a Hezbollah car escort throughout the trip to Southern Lebanon, a courtesy extended in several countries by governments. The group was aware that the divestment decisions of their General Assembly provided a new context for discussions in the Arab world. We did not realize how well informed Arab leaders would be about the General Assembly’s action. The government of Lebanon was falling, the prime minister resigned the next day, Israeli forces were bombing in Gaza, and the visit was bracketed by Palestinian suicide

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bombings in Israel. The Israeli Knesset was proceeding with debates over disengagement in Gaza, and the United States was successfully leading a coalition to pass a United Nations resolution to pressure Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. The war in Iraq was continuing amid the turmoil of occupation of that country. Our visit was a very small event in the context of ecclesiastical and secular politics in the region. The group had read the last two issues of the journal Church and Society and was well informed of General Assembly policy against terrorism, against the Israeli occupation, for human rights, for secure borders for Israel, and for peace. Some understood that the Jewish criticism of the divestment issue was causing a lot of concern in Louisville. At Khiam Detention Center, a former French barracks, later an Israeli prison, and now a museum, the group met Sheik Nabil Quaq. He expressed warm greetings to the church group and criticized very forcefully U.S. policy in Iraq and with Israel. The comments that follow both from the sheik and from me are from notes reconstructed by memory, and they suffer from incompleteness. The sheik said: Blessings upon you from our Holy Fathers Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. I greet you with the most compassionate, warm greetings, our land is blessed by your visit and in the name of Jesus Christ who walked in our land we greet you all. We have suffered grievously from aggression by Israel which was given a green light and still is given a green light by the U.S.A. We have waited for a word of justice from the U.S., but we have heard only silence. The U.S. covered over the massacre at the camps. It condemned us and judged us. The U.S. has been negative about Lebanon. It has stirred up sectarian conflict and you are aware of this. Today, the U.S. pressures us and our neighbor Syria to stand alongside Israel and its power. In Lebanon we have known freedom and we have known democracy. We have sympathy for the American voters who have to choose between two candidates who both will support Israel to win the support of the American people. Our argument is not with the American people, but with the political administration, which in its arrogance is imposing through force its ideology upon the world. The U.S. policy is one of supporting Sharon’s policies of occupation and assassination which are the worst form of terrorism in the world. The U.S. permits it. The U.S. seems like a bad owl that brings only bad news to Lebanon, and is suspicious of everyone. Muslims and Christians are together in the same trenches resisting the imposition of an ideology upon both our houses by the U.S.A. Hezbollah is not on a collision course with the people of America. We hold great esteem for the American people. We are shocked by the interference the American government puts in the way of dialogue with the American people.

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We want you to know that we honor both Jesus and Mary in our land. Mary is revered in every household as the mother of Jesus. As you know, Jesus Christ is part of our land’s spiritual heritage. He walked here. We regard you as people of faith. You are of a church following the teaching of Christ who had to drive out of the temple the money changers. We must not have a small political group, the religious Zionists, with their political religion interfering with conversation. As Hezbollah, we welcome you to our land and assure you that we are fully aware of your concern for truth and justice which support your mission. [According to my memory this is most of what he said, though he had a few more phrases denouncing U.S. foreign policy early in his remarks.] I responded: May the peace of God be with you. In the name of Jesus Christ, and your prophet Mohammed whom we respect, may peace be upon you and your beautiful land. We are a committee, a group of twenty-four people from the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. whose task it is to listen to you, to learn of your message, and to take our learnings back to the Church so that we can better advise our General Assembly to formulate policy. That policy will be decided upon through a democratic process within our Assembly. It will guide our Church of two and a half million people regarding the Middle East. Our Church is committed to just peacemaking actions (which include human rights, racial justice, peacemaking initiatives, working through the UN, aid for sustainable human development, a preference for nonviolent strategies, and other practices). But we do not totally forsake the need for force for self-defense or the defense of others. Let me share with you two biblical stories that both occurred within a hundred kilometers of this place. The first is from our Bible, the Book of II Kings. The King of Damascus wanted to invade Israel. He was thwarted at every turn because the Israel forces knew his intentions. His advisors told him that Elisha the prophet foresaw his plans and informed the King of Israel. So the King of Damascus sent a force to seize Elisha, but this political prophet prayed, and the armed forces of Damascus were blinded by God. Elisha then led them into the city of Samaria and they were surrounded. The King of Samaria wanted to put the forces of Damascus to death, but Elisha said, “No, give them a feast.” They were restored to sight and they feasted in Samaria. They were then freed to leave. The story concludes the King of Aram never invaded Israel again. May it be so. The second story is from Acts in the New Testament. Paul was a religious persecutor as have been many religious leaders. He was present at the death of Stephen. He was on his way to Damascus when an appearance of the risen Christ confronted him and blinded him. Jesus the Christ accused

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Paul of persecuting him. Paul was ordered to proceed to Damascus where the early Christians feared him, but he gave up the way of violence, and by giving up violence he became an Apostle. True religion gives up violence and finds other ways to resolve conflicts. Paul’s story needs to be a story for all religion. We accept the compassionate words from Hezbollah of welcome, esteem, and good wishes. We respect the call to dialogue from Hezbollah. I want to say that from my own recent personal experience, dialogue with Muslim leaders has been easier than with Jewish leaders. Because our theology is grounded in the Hebrew prophets we know how difficult it is in this history to achieve peace. We have heard from you that the American intervention in Lebanon was a disaster, and that it did not contribute to peace. We have heard that resolution 1599 is a sore problem for you. You have told us that sectarian conflicts have been deepened by American interference. We have heard of your hopes for our visit. As a Church we say clearly that the occupation of the West Bank must be ended. We have criticized the invasion of Iraq as “immoral, unwise, and illegal.” We are a Church of great economic power and political influence and we are trying to use that power to influence the American people. Let me finish, so that the dialogue can begin, with a few points of things that make for peace: 1. Without peace among the religions there is no chance for world peace. 2. It is difficult to achieve peace, but social work, education, toleration, and good government all contribute to the realities of society that provide a chance for peace. In conclusion, our Church has and will struggle for aid for human development, resistance to militarism, and support of institutions of international order that can limit national power and reduce any nation’s attempt to control other nations. Peace be with you, and may the conversation continue. Another forty-five minutes of discussion through translators continued. Much of it was on the theological understanding of the relationship of forgiveness to justice. Human rights were extensively discussed in this context; animal rights were mentioned by the sheik. In my response to the sheik I emphasized that in the Christian perspective God’s grace and forgiveness preceded the achievement of justice, enriched it, and followed the incompleteness of justice. A question about U.S. elections prompted the sheik to suggest that regarding the Middle East, there was not much of a choice, but that he

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hoped American Christians would read the gospels, look into their hearts, and follow Jesus. Hezbollah participates in the Lebanese Parliament and governs Southern Lebanon, where six of our churches are located. On entering Southern Lebanon we passed beyond the Lebanon government’s control as we cleared the army’s checkpoint. On clearing the Hezbollah checkpoint, our safety depended on Hezbollah; throughout the trip they provided a military escort. Along the border we were sometimes between Israeli and Hezbollah border posts, but we felt no insecurity as Presbyterians on a peacemaking trip. Furthermore, the trip carried with it several of the Presbyterian experts on peacemaking and the Middle East. Mr. John Detterick, the director of the General Assembly Council, had appointed a six-member project team on the Middle East, and half of them were traveling with us. We had no idea at the time of how this would play out, and certainly we were completely unaware of how Church leadership would respond to this visit that they had sponsored. I had written on Shiite terrorism in 1984 arguing for armed guards on American Middle Eastern airplane flights and condemning the U.S. practice of inadequately protecting U.S. Marines in Lebanon. Since that time I had written again on militant Islamic terrorism, and al Qaeda in particular, in Church and Society, an official Presbyterian journal. Everyone who had read my essay or the report of the task force on terrorism to the General Assembly, which I chaired, understood that I advocated a Christian realist approach to respond to terrorist acts. This approach uses soft diplomacy of correcting offensive U.S. policies where possible, inter-religious dialogue, respectful diplomacy, humanitarian and development aid, multilateral cooperation, and other such efforts. It also affirms suppression and punishment of those who commit terrorist acts. It prefers international legal means, but it also recognizes the need for the use of national military force for the protection of the nation. No nation-state can be expected to passively accept terrorist acts that murder its citizens. A nation must also be careful to observe just war criteria and international law standards in its use of military force, even in self-defense. So I, after refusing twice, reluctantly agreed to speak to Hezbollah. Previous dialogue sessions with Muslims in India, Kashmir, Israel, the West Bank, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and East Liberty Presbyterian Church had all had ambiguous results, and no more was expected from this encounter. But as a Christian, you try to accept responsibilities the Church asks you to undertake, and the practices of just peacemaking include taking some risks in initiating peacemaking actions. Our whole trip, from dialogue with the sheik at Kahim Detention Center to conversation with the grand imam in Cairo, was such an initiative. The next day in Beirut, we learned that our visit had become a Middle East media event. Our wide-ranging discussion of forty-five minutes about forgiveness, justice and politics, terrorism, peacemaking, divestment, and social change was edited down to a sound bite. Television produced a one-minute segment of the sheik condemning President Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East, the war in Iraq, and American policy with Lebanon and two sentences of mine, thanking the sheik for his generous greeting of our church committee and the aside to him of finding it personally easier to dialogue

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with Muslim leaders than Jewish leaders in the present situation. Al Jazeera broadcast the piece over the Middle East. A variety of Arabic and English newspapers also printed different accounts. Generally, the newspaper versions were more fulsome and accurate, and they omitted the sentences that caused so much uproar in the United States. The Al Jazeera interpretation found its way through CNN to the United States. Those familiar with the Middle East know that local newspapers and television there are politically controlled, serving national or partisan purposes. Hundreds of complaints about our visit to Southern Lebanon were received at Church headquarters, and the Church executives responded. They claimed we were told not to go to Southern Lebanon, and the words reported were “reprehensible.” On returning to the United States, two of the Church executives on the trip were fired. Various Church executives who had only Al Jazeera’s interpretation of the meeting, and who had no idea what was actually said, demanded the resignation of two of us committee members on the trip. We understood the long-standing practice (both religious and secular) of trying to hush turmoil by means of resignations and firings. But this storm was basically a media event caused by Arab propaganda and Christian overreaction. The government of Israel canceled official meetings with our group, so we met with nongovernmental Israelis. While our Church leadership was denouncing us, we continued the trip, meeting presidents, nongovernmental peace organizations, the Jordanian advisor to the king, the grand imam in Cairo, academic leaders, refugees, civil rights activists, churches, social welfare workers, Muslim-Christian dialogue leaders, missionaries, Jews, children in a refugee camp, and a former hostage of Hezbollah. Before interviewing me, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review urged in an editorial that I be stoned and kicked into the gutter. At that point, though the newspaper had not phoned me, it reportedly phoned both the government and the Church urging my arrest or disciplinary action. While we are all suspicious of Middle East reporting, no newspaper source in the Middle East had been so prejudicial. The Tribune Review’s editorial attributed statements never said, and at the time of publication it had little idea of what had been discussed. After the damage had been done and strangers from Pittsburgh were attacking me, a follow-up interview corrected some of the misperceptions. But they also secured a rabbi, unknown to me, to comment on the interview and to dismiss me as naïve. An anonymous letter from Brooklyn to the Church headquarters threatened arson against Presbyterian churches. The threat was to bomb them while they were full of worshippers unless the Presbyterian Church changed its policy toward Israel. One wag commented, “If they think our churches are full, they don’t know our churches.” The writer of the bomb-threatening letter was later arrested. So while those seeking more justice for the Palestinians, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, supported the visit, others found it a dreadful mistake. Church officials supporting pressure on Israel to moderate its position through selective and phased

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divestment policies were subjected to severe pressures, and their attempts at dialogue with Jewish leaders were rendered even more difficult.

APOLOGIES The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy apologized to Church leadership for the pain and difficulties caused by the broadcasts of the visit to Hezbollah, aknowledging that, given the religious and political tensions within the United States, it had been unwise. The moderator, executive director, and stated clerk acknowledged that their letter concerning the visit was hurtful, and they said they were sorry for the pain they caused. Both groups pledged to work together on policy issues pursuing peace and justice in the Middle East and to conduct a full and fair review of the firing of the coordinator of the Advisory Committee. The executive committee of the General Assembly Committee ultimately approved the actions of the executive director in firing the two executives who shared leadership for the trip with many others in the Church bureaucracy. Others who planned the details of the trip, including the visit to Hezbollah, continued in office. In over forty years of travel, often to controversial groups (Soviet officials, Cuban Communists, East European Communists, Liberation movements), I had never seen a study trip as productive of sustained conversations with philosophers, organizers, presidents, rabbis, priests, ministers, foreign ministers, imams, refugees, church members, members of Parliament, peace activists, and militants as on this study trip. The attempt to meet with people perceived as terrorists by the U.S. government in an effort to understand and speak with them was in this case and this time too threatening to the Church for it to be supported in a time of conflict. Visits by other churches to the same group are sometimes not noticed by the media. The pain in the Presbyterian Church implied that conversations with controversial groups must be handled with more care or even avoided. New leadership in the Church now means that such overreactions by Church hierarchy can be avoided. Peter Sulyok’s question in Chicago over what I should say to President Arafat was answered by a phone call to our van while we traveled to his compound in Ramallah. Arafat regretted to inform us that he was too ill to receive us; he hoped for a visit in the future. Peace, following Arafat’s death, will require a lot of conversations with various groups. It is to be wished that the U.S. government and nongovernmental agencies can play the role of honest mediator in these talks toward whatever peace can be sustained in the region. Such a role of independent mediation will require substantial changes in U.S. policy. As of the concluding of this writing in 2013, U.S. policy of uncritical support for Israel thwarts Secretary Kerry’s diplomatic attempts at mediation. Movement toward peace will require that Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secular people talk with a lot of people with whom they disagree. Many of those talked with on all sides will have taken lives in combat or have even taken civilian lives. This is the nature of the conflict that involves no major players who are innocent.

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I hope that the dialogue participants and negotiators can increasingly find their common religious grounds in peacemaking and not war making. Ten years after the visit, some U.S. leaders in international affairs are suggesting we should include enemies in dialogue about the occupation of Iraq and the civil war in Syria. Israel has invaded Lebanon with U.S. support, destroyed villages, fought with Hezbollah, and withdrawn. Media propaganda during the invasion pretty consistently referred to the inhabitants of Southern Lebanon and Hezbollah as our enemies. I was in Rome in the summer of 2006 when the U.S. secretary of state hurriedly assembled foreign ministers from Europe there to disengage Israel from Lebanon. The United States supported Israel’s attack with weapons and diplomatic support until it appeared to be slowing down and accomplishing nothing but destroying villages and Lebanese citizens. As usual in modern war, most of the victims were children and women. No major U.S. leader suggested talking with Hezbollah. Awareness of the United States’ own religious traditions will some time in the future incline Americans to dialogue with this religious/ political/military party in Southern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley, and south Beirut. When such a dialogue occurs, striving to lay the groundwork for peace, I pray that the Church leaders who condemned our dialogue without knowing what was said, and the newspapers that vilified us, will be supportive of conversation. Perhaps then the coordinator of the trip, who was dismissed from his Church position irregularly, will be honored as a precursor of many who have taken the aspirations of Hezbollah into account in these conflicts.

FALLOUT The fallout from the event continued for a couple of years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed me over the incident. A couple of Jewish professional acquaintances complained to me about the news reports, but most just rolled with the event, understanding something about Al Jazera’s reporting. A few clergy complained to me about it and about the Advisory Committee on Social Witness in general. The leadership of ACSWP pled the case for Peter Sulyok’s reinstatement for months, but our meetings produced no change. Some members of our delegation who were staff continued in office and to advise on Middle East policy, but most of the work on the Middle East was temporarily taken out of the hands of ACSWP, which had learned quite a bit from the trip and the controversy. I took the warning about action against our churches seriously enough to tail one stranger who entered our sanctuary carrying a bag. He walked around the church with his bag, and I followed until he left. My local church received quite a few complaining calls, and the Peace Committee and the Session both supported the trip after discussion. One associate minister who was leaving the congregation asked me to resign from the Session at a meeting, but that action received no support. After I refused the General Assembly moderator’s request that I resign from the Advisory Committee on Social Witness, I heard no more of those suggestions. The seminary also received a lot of complaining phone calls, which resulted from the Tribune Review’s coverage of the issue. President Calian seemed to appreciate the fact that I had retired prior to the trip when he told me about the calls.

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In retrospect, I should not have let my previous encounter with Jewish criticism of the Presbyterian Church’s policies affect my remarks when press was present. The sentence about it being easier to talk with Muslim leaders than Jewish leaders added nothing to my message to Hezbollah. It was not a diplomatic sound bite, and without understanding the context it caused a furor. I wish that wiser Church leaders in Louisville could have said something like “Presbyterian elders are known for individual expressions, and Professor Stone’s remarks do not represent Presbyterian policy,” and let it go at that. But the controversy around divestment from firms profiting from occupation of the West Bank was too hot to be dampened by a few words. Previously I had advised the top leadership of the Church not to discuss divestment with Jewish political organizations until the procedures of the Committee for Mission Responsibility Through Investment had been established.

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Chapter 72

Prophetic Realism The book Prophetic Realism: Beyond Militarism and Pacifism in an Age of Terror originated in my sabbatical project of 2002 when I was in residence at Union Theological Seminary in New York City thanks to the Lilly Faculty Fellowship. My divorce, retirement, pneumonia, and two other books added to the normal publication delays to postpone its publication to 2005. In part it drew upon my earlier studies in Christian and Jewish realism and included some reedited essays from earlier writings. It included new chapters on biblical realism and historical realism to deepen my reflections on American political philosophy. The center of the book was on power and its relationship to morality. After arguing that the political philosophy of Morgenthau and Niebuhr was dedicated to struggling for peace, I criticized aspects of just peacemaking theory and pacifist theory as inadequate responses in their neglect of traditional means of winning and preserving peace. The long chapter on realism and human rights I had shared, in part, in dialogues at Charles University in Prague after the Cold War. It stressed the practical politics of human rights policy more than most of the other presentations at the international conference on human rights. My position as an American there was unique, because I had been at the same university and its theological school during the Cold War in dialogue with Communists. After discussing the general direction of realism and policy for the Middle East, attacking the presuppositions of the neoconservatives around President Bush, I returned to the theme of peacemaking and realism. In the conclusion I brought together classical realism, peacemaking themes, and the difficulty of achieving peace, or even a governmental orientation toward peace. Soft diplomacy, religious dialogue, the value of peacemaking, and a realistic understanding of power interpreting just peacemaking theory could avoid some wars. Yet there was a need for various forms of resistance to North American militarism, which would challenge policy makers to move toward a proper humility in the use of American power on the international scene. We were a superpower, even the only superpower. Still, the world belonged to no one nation, and it was shared by many nations, empires, religions, ideologies, corporations, tribes, and nongovernmental organizations. Niebuhr had put it well in his last essay on international politics as he wrestled with avoiding nuclear catastrophe, ecological disaster, and overcoming racial bitterness: “Our overwhelming foreign and domestic problems must finally convince us that the childish illusions of our infant days have come to an end.” The critique of just peacemaking theory was in part an argument with Glen Stassen, with whom I mostly agreed. He needed more confidence in diplomacy as a peacemaking tool and particularly in the soft diplomacy as articulated by Hillary Clinton in Foreign Affairs. A little less confidence in his ten practices of peacemaking would have helped his argument. No scheme can eliminate wars, though we can prevent many. The argument against pacifism was mainly with Stanley Hauerwas because of his

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misunderstandings and unfair criticisms of realism. His lack of resolution between Mennonite and Catholic approaches to peacemaking resulted in unresolved contradictions in his Gifford lectures. The book, with its biblical basis in the prophets and Jesus and a long list of contributors from Western history, moved through Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau in particular, while noting other writers of international relations. Much of the argument of the book hangs on the reality that many of the prophets were experts in both international relations and religion. Contemporary peacemakers should consult these prophets and the classical realist tradition. The disciplines of both religious studies and international relations are called to change to recognize their interconnections. The book criticizes the neoconservatives for their failures in the Middle East and Donald Kagan for his assumption that American political leaders should be pagans. Religion and American politics are inevitably interrelated. Wisdom is needed in both realms to make the American system work. This is particularly true when dealing with a reality such as Islamist politics. Because resistance to national authority was characteristic of the biblical prophets, but not necessarily of classical realist theory, more emphasis is needed here. Resistance consists of organizing for peacemaking, nonviolent direct actions, raising funds for peacemaking causes, demonstrating to the point of accepting arrest, speaking, preaching, and writing. The strengths of Clergy and Laity Concerned for Vietnam were discussed. Hopes for the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program and its weaknesses were noted. Several necessary changes in U.S. policies were taken up where resistance was called for: neo-imperialism, Full-Spectrum Dominance, National Missile Defense (Star Wars), biological and chemical weapons, and export of weapons. The United States has awesome responsibilities, but its imperial reach and overreliance on weapons must be overcome. In presenting the book to the Society of Christian Ethics, I was criticized by Professor Long for not developing the biblical basis of the argument more. I accepted the criticism, and only point to my previous work The Ultimate Imperative as having included more biblical work. The late Roger L. Shinn, my former professor, wrote a generous blurb for the back cover: Ronald Stone is that rare intellectual who is at home in the discussions both of Christian theology and of international relations. This book, with its persistent intersection between the two realms, is a double challenge: to churches who are often naive and dogmatic in moral judgments about world affairs, and to those politicians and political scientists who ignore the ethical meaning of their judgments. It is particularly relevant in the post 9/11 era, when many past certainties are insecure. The volume was the third of my small books on international politics. My semiretirement would present an opportunity to write one more. The articulation of realism characterizes them, and my dependence upon the tradition is evident in all four. While

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each criticizes some aspects of realism, the reforming of it while arguing for it is a constant. Themes from this book continued to provide issues for essay writing, as I published several essays on power, on Tillich’s social thought, and on Reinhold Niebuhr. The other issue providing lectures and essays was the relationship of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, as I worked on their partnership from the end of my contract with Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 2005 through my last book on them published in 2013. I was fortunate to be able to take two significant trips in 2005. The first was as a guest of my brother Alan on a lecture cruise he was hosting from Chile through the Panama Canal to Miami. The short visits to Santiago and Peru renewed my acquaintance with these lands, which I had studied with Gonzalo Castillo in 1990. I could see the ferment from a Communist funeral in Santiago, Chinese influence in Lima, and the antiAmerican spirit in Ecuador. The indigenous people of Panama contrasted with the wreckage from World War II over which we snorkeled in Aruba; one symbolized a sort of pre-civilization innocence and the other civilized evil. Like the American press, my commitments to Latin America had lagged during the Clinton presidency and the shock of the aftermath of 9/11, and I was glad to be back.

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Chapter 73

Visit to China The second adventure of 2005 was a two-week trip to China. I had taught two students from China, and a few from Hong Kong and Taiwan, but here I was a novice. I had lectured on Communism in China and supervised one dissertation by a Korean on Mao’s revolution and cultural change, and I remembered a little from teaching Chinese religion at Columbia, but mostly the trip was an introduction to Chinese history and culture. It was supervised by the official Chinese tourist service; consequently, it stayed at a superficial level regarding current issues. China’s Communist rule is relatively new. It shook the empire in its 1949 victory with the expulsion of the Nationalist government. It sought renewal in the Cultural Revolution of 1965–1967. In 1989 the revolt of Tiananmen Square threatened the old oligarchy. The explosion of the state-capitalist economy in a laissez-faire world provides new opportunities and new ambiguities. Our Chinese students and guests spoke of squalid corruption and refrained from more subversive critical analysis. The Communist rule is on shaky foundations, and no Chinese dynasty lasts forever. The tour provided by the government stressed religious edifices and ethnic pluralism more than political confidence. Unfortunately, the functional atheism of Chinese guides renders them unable to interpret the depths of religious symbolism that survived the iconoclastic Cultural Revolution. The cultural guide for the tour wore a cross, but it was only jewelry, as the temples and symbols are only gems in the economic cauldron. Squalor is hidden, suffering is to be overcome in the future, and the East is Red. But that Red is only for now, unless radical change and reinterpreted symbolism reaches more deeply into the Chinese mind. After observing the morning tai chi in the park, we processed into Tiananmen Square. The square is empty except for Mao’s portrait on the Ming Dynasty Gate, his mausoleum, and thousands of tourists. His attempt to absorb the community into his ego is obvious to any student of religion. He became the totem that unifies. How ironic that Communism, more than other ideologies in the contemporary age, celebrates the whole in the individual. Tyranny and divinization are combined in the square. The brief 1989 episode of youthful, democratic revolt was suppressed here in the center of the Chinese Communist cult, but it is hard to imagine those Communist oligarchs ruling longer than their elder brothers in Russia who lasted less than three-fourths of a century. The distance between the Cultural Revolution and the present is less than the years between Stalin’s purge of the army and Communism’s fall in 1989–1990. Unfortunately for me, my preparation for China was less than my studies for Russia, India, Islam, and Latin America. The tour was indeed a tour rather than study. The material I had reviewed was mostly on Chinese religion and history, and I was surprised to see its sites so emphasized on a state tour.

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From the square of oppression we walked to the Forbidden City, the site of imperial rule for half a millennium. Six hundred years of centralized rule flowed out of this most magnificent palace, now treated as a museum. Our afternoon there replaced the week needed to explore its variety of palaces, fortifications, and museums. My ruminations on recent Chinese history were interrupted by the call of Mike Louik: “Ron!” He was another member of the Allegheny Accountability, Care, and Ethics Commission. We had spoken in the courthouse hall of our respective trips to China. He and Mrs. Louik were on another trip, and we shared our first impressions in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony before moving on with our respective groups. His photo memorializes the improbable meeting there. Perhaps the one word for the palace structure is harmony. Its red-tiled roofs join the harmony of Chinese numerology, of yin and yang holding the palace together. The history inside and out was tumultuous, but order was honored and loved on the inside. During the dominant dynasties of the Ming and Qing the order was maintained by the Arrow Towers and by the sacrifices carried out by the emperors at the altars. The ornate throne in the Hall of Harmony testifies to the power and authority of the emperor. The Hall and the five bridges over the stream refer to the five Confucian virtues symbolized by the jade belts worn by palace officials trained in Confucian government. Nearby, the Temple of Heaven represents astral science and agricultural religion woven into the imperial cult. It is one of the largest temple structures in China erected in the Ming dynasty. The humanist interpretation of the Chinese ethos, learned at Columbia University, was becoming more divinized in my understanding as I walked around and within the temples. The next day marvelous symbols of the Buddha were mixed with tales of the Dowager Empress Cixi at the Summer Palace. Her impulses were satisfied by the large opera company, her nearly eight hundred acres of palace grounds, the strange Marble Boat, and her throne in the spectacular Hall of Remembrance and Longevity. Emperor Qianlong, eighteenth century, had built the Summer Palace, but the contemporary structures are interpreted through Cixi’s domination of its grounds and the failure of the Boxer Rebellion. The boat tour of the palace grounds restored some of the sense of peace and harmony that had escaped her rule. A final day outside Beijing focused on the large area of the Ming Tombs where twelve of sixteen emperors of that dynasty are entombed. The tombs have not yet been excavated except for that of Ding Ling, whose treasures are displayed in the Hall of Eminent Favor. The day concluded with a walk on the Great Wall. Near Beijing, it is restored. We would encounter it later in its unrestored state in the Western desert. The westernmost point of the trip was Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The migration of the majority Han into Xinjiang and the resultant repressed revolts had reduced the autonomy of this ancient Silk Road trading center. The food and the hotels declined drastically in quality from Beijing in the typical periphery-center fashion. The visit to Tian Chi Lake in the highlands stood in such

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contrast to Beijing that our orientation to the smog-filled city may have dulled our insertion into the beautiful mountain-lake area. The contrasts of the Silk Road towns were almost too extreme. Jiashe was a deserted mud ruin explored on foot and by donkey cart. The Napa Valley–like setting of Putao Gou introduced Chinese wine and outdoor dining and drinking. Here in the west within a few miles were lush grape vineyards; a modernizing city; mosques; a small, deserted garrison town; deserts; and Han and Uighur tensions. China has poured great resources into retrofitting regional airports. Dunhuang, in western China, was especially startling in its sophistication for a small city airport. The attractions in Dunhuang were the Buddhist painting and sculpture in the nearby Mogao Caves. Here on the Silk Road, Buddhism entered China. The great powers competed for control, and many of the caves were looted by Western explorers. Some of the best works were destroyed by Allied bombs hitting Berlin. The surviving works in the caves, and the research center, supply the Western tourist with more than is absorbable. Flying spirits and a one-hundred-foot-tall Buddha provide testimony in art to a nonWestern authentic spirituality. The return to Eastern China stops at Xi’an in the “Heart of China.” It served many dynasties as the imperial capital. It prospered as a terminus of the Silk Road, growing to the world’s largest city in the ninth century with over a million inhabitants. My interests as a historian were best served by the Stele Forest Museum, which contained over one thousand steles preserving the writings of Confucius, Nestorian Christians, Chinese poets, and illustrations of the founder of Zen Buddhism. The walls of Xi’an guarding the city center are the grandest walls I have walked upon. My amateur archaeological mind was overwhelmed by the park and reconstruction of the terracotta army of the usurping emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. The army is splendid, but, as in much of China, the greater part of the mausoleum remains unexcavated. The two Goose Pagodas were built to store sutras (scriptures) and to serve as sites for translating the works from Sanskrit to Chinese. Over thirteen hundred years old, the pagodas, understood as great religious libraries, indicate the sophistication and power of Buddhist-Chinese scholarship. Corresponding in time to the fire pit of about AD 700 that I excavated at Ghost Ranch, the sophistication of the East over North America at that time in human achievement is very evident. One hundred fifty years ago my great-grandfather, serving as prosecuting attorney for Kossuth County, lived in a log cabin. Confucian scholars in China lived in or near palaces. Our politics and scholarship are so young compared to the Chinese. Reinhold Niebuhr used to hope we were arriving at a political maturity. Relatively speaking, compared to China, we have not yet reached adolescence in temporal terms. Chongqing serves tourists as the docking station for the Yangtze River cruise. The former wartime house of General Stilwell contains a modest museum of American assistance to China through the “Flying Tigers” in World War II. A few miles away at

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Hongyan Cun are the remains of the governmental buildings of the United Front Government of Nationalists and Communists during the war. By this time, the flow of the Yangtze River Three Gorge trip was somewhat reduced by the development of the Three Gorge Dam at Yichang scheduled for completion in 2009. The ecological and human suffering promised by the dam dampened the enthusiasm for the trip, as millions of people had been forced to relocate. The waters have risen greatly since the time I took the trip, flooding over four hundred miles. The beauty of the gorges makes the trip almost a requirement for tourists in China. The wilderness magnificence is complemented by the island monastery of Lanruo Dian. There, the twelve-story pagoda clings to the cliff. It will be spared the rising waters, but the ancient village beneath it now is under the flood. The climb through the pagoda to the summit exhausted me more than normal. The next day I came down with a fever. Soon symptoms of respiratory distress were evident. I spent the rest of the cruise alternating between resting on deck and receiving antibacterial drip solutions in the infirmary. The dust of exploring ancient tombs in Western China was identified as the probable culprit. I saw the dam as we sailed through its great locks. But, on doctor’s advice, I avoided the tour of the dam itself. This was my second adult pneumonia in three years. Another case followed in six years. As I have become acquainted with the “old person’s friend,” I have reduced my exposure to dust and mold. Shanghai can never be regarded as anticlimactic, but the wonders of ancient China, underground and above the ground, had been extraordinary. The river walk along the Bund, a waterfront collection of European banks and commercial buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was outshone by the new Shanghai being built across the Huangpu River by an army of workers. I visited sites honoring Sun Yat Sen, but the sites of Communist heroes outrank the home of the Congregational revolutionary and the first president of China. The energy of the new China is felt as strongly in Shanghai as anywhere in the empire. Elsewhere one encounters the ruins of the colonial and especially British interventions. The Bund may be the most important example of that colonial period. But, except for the importance of the English language, colonialism is over. The Christian churches, exclusive of Roman Catholicism, are autonomous and growing in strength. If Communism is unable to renew itself morally in government, the original revolutionary thrust recognized in Sun Yat Sen may still have a future. It may, of course, come in a synthesis with Confucian traditions in a new, truly Chinese ideology beyond the old European forms of Marxism or the idolatry surrounding Mao and his heirs. If, in the Communist oligarchy’s loss of collectivism and justice in economics, China needs a new social morality, a synthesis of Jesus and Confucius, both demythologized, could provide a way forward to illusive social health.

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Chapter 74

Return to Rome In the summer of 2006, I hosted Patricia and friend for a few days in Rome, and then Randy and Martha and their three children joined us for another week. The visit to St. Peter’s Cathedral with Patricia was particularly memorable, as it had been forty years since her mother and I had visited the Vatican II Council. Patricia’s artistic sensibilities enriched the time in Rome for me. We followed Dan Brown’s clues from the Vatican fountain around Rome, enjoying his tale again through our own experiences. The goodness of the family was enjoyed deeply. Randy, Henry, and I took a memorable walk through the Forum, which I had been studying before they arrived. The hours in the antiquities of church and state recalled the deeper roots of our civilization and us. After the children left Rome, I joined Alan for a cruise on the Mediterranean. As a lecturer on cruise ships, he was entitled to bring another guest. When Jonieta could not accompany him, I often took the opportunity. We enjoyed reaching for memories from the classical parts of our education and discussing Greek civilization and the Roman Empire. We had a couple of days back in Rome at the end of the cruise, and I was pleased to share with him my new knowledge of the “Eternal City.” The intellectual importance to me of the time with family in Rome and on the sea with Alan was that it sharpened my thinking about empire. Patricia had given me the volume Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri years earlier. I had found its neo-Marxist economic analysis interesting, but I remained unconvinced of its central theses. It seemed to me that while superb in writing style, the economics and geopolitics were dubious. But many in the ecumenical church-conference world were taking it seriously. I focused thought on the Roman Empire, knowing that there were other empires in the world coinciding with the Roman period, and that at least the Chinese Empire was larger and more important, even if not to Western scholarship. I was able later to publish some of these reflections in a chapter on Niebuhr and empire in a book Daniel F. Rice edited. That summer, while I was staying between the Roman Forum of the Republic and the Imperial Forum, I was able to revisit a great book. Christopher Niebuhr had given me his father’s copy of Charles Norris Cochrane’s 1939 work, Christianity and Classical Culture. It contained my teacher’s marginal markings. Cochrane’s work had a major impact on Niebuhr. In his 1941 review of the book he had said, “This volume has given me more pleasure than anything I have read in the past decade.” He was especially delighted in how the book showed the influence of ideas upon politics. Niebuhr thought the book was convincing in the argument that a return to classical thinking would not equip the democracies for the crises they were facing in the 1930s. It also showed how republics could tumble into imperialism. It was particularly strong in explaining the role arrogance and pride could play in the downfall of an empire. Cochrane understood imperial overreach, and Niebuhr feared it as a danger for America.

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Cochrane’s tale of religion and politics from the Emperor Augustus to theologian Augustine showed how the emperors turned away from republican ideas to imperial ideology. Not understanding that power came from one God, Rome became arrogant and repressed dissent. Its peace was accomplished through terror and torture, and influence became centered in the rich and powerful, while tending to reduce the population toward slavery and irrelevance. Christian thought rejected the notion that peace could be achieved by putting trust in any central political power. It all needed critique. Rome, in Cochrane’s estimate, failed because its ideas failed. Both Cochrane and Niebuhr stressed that evil and illusion are within us, as well as within our opponents. We are not our only enemy, but we are one of our enemies. We must learn self-critique and provide countervailing powers and institutions. Cochrane put it that Rome fell because it turned toward love of power, while Christianity at its truest represented the power of love. Augustine’s distinction between Rome and the Church as symbolized in the City of God and the City of Earth was fundamental to Cochrane and to Niebuhr. The Church had a role influencing the state, but it could not be captured by the state and remain true to its God. By becoming official, the Church lost its independence and its zest. Niebuhr, using Cochrane, insisted on a strong separation of church and state for the good of both institutions and purposes. The dangers of plutocracy, totalitarianism, imperial overreach, and established Christianity, all exposed by Cochrane in his book on Rome, were tendencies that Niebuhr resisted in his writing and political activity. My conclusions from my experience of Rome, Cochrane’s book, and Niebuhr’s reflections are that, of course, the United States is an empire and much more important than Rome. In part, our country/empire is modeled on Roman politics and Greek thought. But we have resources of thought from the Enlightenment and science that those nations lacked. We also have experience with a democratic/Christian synthesis of political philosophy, which can strengthen the country while remaining critical of national pretensions and illusions. We are tempted by pride. Arrogance, pride, and mistaken illusions concerning American power tend toward imperial overreach. There are other important empires and smaller countries and movements that have power to resist the United States. Much of our military power can never be morally used. The very use of our total arsenal would defeat our purposes and destroy us. In particular, both Greece (under Alexander) and Roman emperors overextended themselves into Asia. Geopolitically, in power terms, U.S. security rests in having no hostile power dominate Europe and in strength in the Pacific. The NATO alliance and a partnership with Japan guarantee American security with prudent U.S. management of its resources. Good relationships in Latin America can tolerate much-needed social experimentation there. The relations with Africa and the Middle East require a rational rebalancing of the U.S. relationship with Israel while still guaranteeing its security under appropriate borders. Islam must be dealt with, but the military contest is a foolish enterprise. The war in Korea under UN auspices was unavoidable given the context, but our other wars

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in Asia were wars of choice or preemption, and unnecessary. Asian wars should be avoided. Asian partnerships can be strengthened without militarism.

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Chapter 75

Marriage and Family Linda Haddad and I married on July 1, 2008, in Duck, North Carolina. The Sanderling Resort had been a favorite summer vacation place for her family for years. We stayed there and had our rehearsal dinner there with fourteen Stones present and a slightly larger number of Haddads. The marriage took place at a beach house Linda rented for her family. Martha provided music, and Hugh performed the ceremony on the balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. We stayed a few more days, but at the end the fires in North Carolina were providing a haze and a light smell of burning vegetation, shortening our honeymoon on the beach. She was a bright, beautiful health lawyer with Horty, Springer and Mattern, a firm located between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh on Fifth Avenue. She had grown up in Chippewa, Pennsylvania, and she took her law degree from the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Though the law firm was located in the Oakland district of Pittsburgh, its education work and consulting responsibilities took her across the country from Hawaii to Massachusetts and Alaska to Florida. We looked for a new home, but we concluded by selling my furniture, giving some of it to Randall, and vacating my apartment. A few years later I would sell my cabin on Laurel Mountain. I moved without very much hassle into her home in Point Breeze, and we have lived there ever since. Actually, I live there more than she does, as I work at home in my third-floor study while she goes into the office on Fifth Avenue. In my semiretirement, I travel with her about ten times a year, and I have three or four academic trips for lectures or conferences, so I am traveling for a period of about two months a year. Additionally, we have vacationed each year back at Duck, North Carolina, and we have been to France twice. In 2013, we took a luxurious around-theworld flight with adventures from Japan to Portugal. Dialogues with monks in Bhutan and visits to gorillas in Rwanda were among the high points for me. The theft of her iPad in Vietnam was a low point for Linda, but recovery in luxury was easy. Particularly noteworthy were the forest lodge in Bali and the royal palace in Jodhpur. It was my first return visit to India, and it whetted my appetite for more study of that empire. The marriage has involved me deeply with her family, and family connections are very important to her. She is determined to maintain the family now that both of her parents have died since we have been together. While I resist attending the ballgames of her nephews, she does when she can. I enjoy playing catch, chess, and electric trains with the gang of younger relatives, whom I love. Her sisters are teachers; one of whom, Nancy, has retired to adopt four international children. Her other sister, Dianne, has adopted two. Her brother Bob has three biological children and three adopted children. We are sometimes all together for the holidays, but we always take a week together for the beach at Duck. Listening at her meetings to star physicians and lawyers teach leaders in health care about new procedures and the Affordable Health Care Act has turned my attention to

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the ethics of health care as never before. As health care was becoming a prominent issue in ethics, I asked my colleague Walter Wiest to take the lead in that area, and he did. He produced a book on health care ethics for the Presbyterian Church and led in various health care discussions in the city. His successor, Ronald Cole-Turner, has continued that emphasis at the seminary. I am reading in the area, and I intend to try my hand at some writing about the ethics and the controversies of health care. The image of Jesus as providing health care free to all who approached him haunts my ethical imagination. I’m for universal health care for all, while conceding that the rich rulers will want some special services they can obtain privately. The image of congressmen enjoying free health care for themselves and their families while railing against subsidies for the poor’s modest health insurance seems ironic at best, and a national scandal as well. If the costs and lack of service of the health care system continue to follow current trends, they will leave the country less healthy than it should be. The data show that the U.S. health system is one of the weaker ones in the industrial world, but the opponents of health care for all keep crying it is number one in the world. There is a notable lack of worldly experience among the opponents who think the United States is somehow tops in health. Health care for my family has been better in Britain, Canada, and Germany than in the United States. My own experience informs me that U.S. health care is better than that of Jamaica, though in my son’s case Jamaica was adequate. It is also better than that of India, Russia, or Africa. The presence of the Church institutions in the health care system and the reality that most of the patients in the United States are Christian make me think this is an important area for Christian social ethics. Patricia moved to California after the Peace Corps, and she has stayed there. I often visited her while she studied at the California College of Arts and, later, worked there in audiovisual services. Our short trips as father and adult daughter to the Napa Valley, Yosemite, and the Big Sur are among my best memories of us together. She moved to San Diego, and there we have visited together at La Quinta, the Mission in San Diego, her art projects in La Jolla, and Oceanside. I usually get out there twice a year, and she makes it home about once a year. In 2013, on September 27, she married Michael Trigilio, an associate professor in the art school of the University of California at San Diego. She works in technology and art as the curator of the Art and Technology Museum of the university, and she is the tour guide for the virtual reality center. She displays her own works in shows in California, as well as one in Mexico and one in Poland. I dedicated one of my books to her and Randall as peacemakers. She has fulfilled that by putting on grand shows regarding land mines and drones as she walks the boundary between art and technology. Michael was drawn into Buddhism under the influence of Thich Nhat Hanh. On one Saturday morning we were delighted to hear Michael on NPR as he was interviewed in a story about his show at the biennial of the Whitney Museum in New York City. Their radical politics and art communities are central to their lives, and conversations with them are always helpful. Randall developed into a leading scholar in international relations. His prize-winning books earned him membership on the Council of Foreign Relations and a consulting role to the International Monetary Fund. One of our better trips was when we were

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lecturing in Brussels on the same weekend. He was lecturing on international organization to a seminar of political scientists which I attended for a while. My main reason for being in Brussels was to read a paper on Paul Tillich’s concept of kairos and its trajectory through history. The idea has been used by many Christian movements seeking fundamental change, from the Presbyterian Church to the movement against apartheid. Randy and I teamed up to tour the battlefield of Waterloo with the historian brother of one of his seminar members. We then continued to Oxford, where he was lecturing. We stayed in Nuffield College, home to my professor, the late John Plamenatz. We dined in my college, Trinity, and met my old friend Bob Morgan for tea at the Randolph Hotel, which turned into a cocktail hour. Then we proceeded to Krakow, Poland, where Randy was running a seminar on foreign direct investment. He started it brilliantly with an afternoon at Auschwitz Work Camp, and finished it with a dinner and music at a Jewish restaurant in the former ghetto. As a retiree feeling the aging process, I can slip into eternity knowing that my genetic immortality carries on in both Randy and Patricia in their concern and brilliant peacemaking work. Randy married Martha Koenig, a beautiful preacher of the United Church of Christ. She met Randall when he was attending First Church in Cambridge, where she was working as a student intern. We only learned later that some of our pioneer ancestors were buried in the historic churchyard of that congregation, which now belongs to First Parish in Cambridge. Her first congregation was at the Woburn Church while he was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown, before they moved to Rochester. Their three children have delighted their grandfather all of their lives. Henry will graduate from the University of Chicago in 2015, Sophia graduated from Brighton High School in 2014, and Will entered the same high school. All are musically gifted, speak fluent German, and learn by taking as many advanced courses as they are able to carry. They, individually and as a family, spend a lot of time in Europe. Randy commutes to Russia for his national security seminar and to Poland to recruit faculty for his Institute; the kids go as exchange students to Germany, and Martha returns to Germany to represent the United Church of Christ in its ecumenical relationships.

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Chapter 76

Eber: Pioneer in Iowa My book on my great-grandfather appeared the year that Linda and I married. It originated in the gift to me by my cousin, Donald Dyvig, of family papers his mother, my aunt Mary, had collected from grandfather’s house. On one of my visits to his farm, he had led me to a shed where the papers were in storage. Together we loaded my Volvo’s “wayback” to a depth of one foot, and I drove the papers to Pittsburgh. For years they lay dormant, though Donald had given them to me because I was the one in the family who wrote. In my retirement I undertook to organize them beyond the farm boxes in which they were kept. Eber had settled in Humboldt County at least by 1854, when the area was still listed officially as uninhabited. My father thought he had been out there as early as 1852, but the documentation only supports his arrival in 1854. He was a neighbor to Sioux, some of whom were responsible for the Spirit Lake massacre of 1857 and some of whom were related to those massacred in Humboldt County on the nearby river bank of the Des Moines River in 1854. Eventually Eber lived in the log cabin that the murderer of those Sioux, Henry Lott, had built before he fled ahead of the U.S. Cavalry and the Sioux’s pursuing parties. Eber was a writer. His writing for the Iowa agricultural journals, a history of Humboldt County, and many letters provided the substance for the book. Much of the volume is the story of correspondence with family in upper New York State around the Finger Lakes, where they had settled fifty years earlier. In New York the family had lived for a while on the Universal Friend’s early settlement farm before they moved to Milo Township. The Universal Friend had been a sectarian leader of an evangelical Quaker group who had moved into the wilderness from New England and Philadelphia ten years before the Stone migration to the Finger Lake region. Our branch of the Stone tree merged with Quakers when Eber married Lois Knowles, whose Quaker family had left Wisconsin for Humboldt County due to opposition to their abolitionist convictions. Beyond Donald’s collection of family papers and other papers I had inherited from my father, research took me to the records in the State Capitol in Des Moines and to the fields and records of Humboldt County. I walked the homestead site with Humboldt historians, and tried to recall where the foundations of the cabins had been, which I had seen as a boy. With Pat Baker, I descended into the Dakota City ravine to locate the original dugouts the founders of Dakota city had inhabited in the winter of 1854. My cousin Larry Tilton rescued me when I caught my boot in barbed wire and tumbled over a fence searching for the remains of Hands’ Settlement. We walked the site of the graves of those first pioneers to the Humboldt area. Hours in the Humboldt Library informed me, through newspapers, of Eber’s nineteenth-century time. The collection of nineteenth-century books was small. Early records were nonexistent. The County Court House records were an excellent source, as Eber and his father-in-law both served on the County Supervisors and Eber served as chairman. His service as superintendent of schools provided fewer records. His papers

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had payrolls and correspondence regarding schools, but the bulk of the records had been shipped out of the county. His papers provided details about the Humboldt County Fair, which he served for years as secretary. His correspondence, published in the state’s agricultural records, provided details of livestock, farming conditions, crops, and the weather for his two-decade frontier life in Iowa. Henry, his son, had started an essay on his father titled “What Makes Iowa Great.” No record of its publication was ever found. But Henry’s genealogical searches led me back to visits to Yates County, New York, and beyond that to Pleasant Valley in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, for family roots. The Yates County Historical Society and Museum were helpful regarding Eber’s growing to maturity and serving there as county superintendent of schools. Shortly after Linda and I married, Randall and Martha sponsored a family reunion in New York. I was able to take the family to sites in New York where the Stones had lived and from which Eber had migrated to Iowa. We visited graves of people whose correspondence is recorded in the book. One cemetery on Stone Road was filled mostly with cousins of Eber and their descendants. Eber’s grandfather was buried in a small funeral plot that has been plowed over and turned into a field. Eber’s father and mother had migrated to Iowa, following him, and their grave sites are north of Livermore, Iowa, near the homestead and the town Henry served as mayor. There is a Veteran of the War of 1812 flag at the grave of Eber’s father, Samuel Stone. That war preceded the early settlement of Humboldt County by four decades. I had hoped to finance a monument to the Sioux (Lakota) who had been massacred near the homestead. Further research revealed the horrible ambiguities of the strife among the settlers and the natives. The assassin of Sintominduta and his family may have lost two members of his own family earlier to depredations by the chief. I visited the Humboldt Historical Society, and we discussed a site for the monument and the need to win understanding of it in the town. Given that the leader of the band, Sintominduta, was an effective opponent of the settlers, and I lived so far away, my aspirations in this project remain unfulfilled. I discussed it with the archaeologists of the Iowa State Historical Society. The complications of dealing with Native American history from afar made the project seem unlikely under only my sponsorship. Alan, as a historian of Native Americans, was interested, but I couldn’t generate passion for the project, so I let it rest. Maybe another generation will take it up. The book was well reviewed in the Humboldt paper and less favorably in the Annals of Iowa History. Research for the book has enjoyed further life in the writings of Iowa historians. It has been a favorite among Humboldt County readers, and it still has a commercial life through Amazon.com, the Humboldt County Museum, and the Fort Dodge Museum. My presentation of the book at the Humboldt County Historical Society was enjoyable; the presence of aunts and cousins made it particularly memorable for me. Nadine, the wife of my late cousin Gary Porter, brought my favorite aunt, Blanche Porter, to the event from Belmond, Iowa. It was the last time I saw Blanche, as my mother’s younger sister died the next year.

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Often the research had been conducted while on trips to Iowa to speak on peace or John Wesley, in events that Hugh had arranged for me. Hugh’s leadership in the social action of the Iowa Methodist Church has been part of his ministry as well as his regular teaching of religion, philosophy, and history in various Iowa colleges within and within range of Des Moines. I’ve benefited from his influence in social action causes to appear in Iowa many times over the years. Another bonus of the book is that I’ve become an unofficial record keeper for the family. Various cousins have surfaced asking questions. Often I would not have been in touch with them except for the fortunate coincidence of their learning of the book. My grandnieces, Calista and Payton, have built miniature cabins and reported on the Iowa frontier using the book in their schools in Mesa, Arizona.

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Chapter 77

Moral Reflections on Foreign Policy in a Religious War The book I published in 2008 grew out of my lectures in 2005 at the Longwood Retirement Center outside of Pittsburgh in the rolling foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. The audience was sharp and well informed about foreign policy and our wars. Mary Pardee, a partner from the Believer’s Calling and our collaborator in securing the investment of half a million dollars from my church in micro-financing for the poor world, issued the invitation to me. She coordinated the continuing education program at the center, and she served as hostess for the lectures at the center until she became too ill to continue. I visited this brave woman who was refusing to take nourishment as she prepared for death. She sat in her wheelchair in her gracious apartment wearing a beautiful red blouse before a scene from nature in which the dominant color was red. Bill, her beloved husband, absented himself as we discussed religion and peacemaking, micro-loan financing, her approaching death, and her hopes for my work. We both thanked God for her life, which was approaching its terminus. Twenty-five years earlier this woman, who had served as president of Presbyterian Women, helped the committee to find a consensus to launch the Peacemaking Program, which I had proposed. She had also written a peacemaking poem that became part of the policy that the committee sent on to General Assembly. It had utilized the concept of kairos, which I had introduced to the committee from Paul Tillich. The concept of a pregnant time when historical forces are moving toward a potential new time has come to have a life of its own in ecumenical Christian social action. I would not use it now for the United States, and it was premature to use it in 1980, but it is a rich concept. The thesis of the book was that foreign policy thinkers in the United States must take religion seriously in their accounts of policy conflicts in the Middle East. Secular analysis focusing on only national interest and power politics cannot comprehend the tragedy into which the United States fell. Western analyses focusing on democracy miss the point. Suicide bombers and sectarian conflicts between Shia and Sunni forces in Iraq are rooted in religious convictions. Contemporary Middle Easterners, in many cases, regard wars as carrying religious significance in a way similar to the wars recorded in the same region in the scriptures of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Western participants are more secular than Middle Eastern Muslims. To ignore how religion functions personally or socially is to neglect a major factor in any Middle East conflict. In 2007, after five years of war, the U.S. government admitted it was confronting a civil war in Iraq. It recognized that it had insufficient forces to quell the struggle and that the Iraqis themselves had to resolve their war. This shift in American foreign policy thinking was an advance beyond the previous stubborn disregard of issues internal to Iraq. But as late as the winter of 2007–2008, the U.S. administration did not recognize the religious nature of the conflict. The United States was so determined to deny deep Islamic tendencies toward jihad that it could not articulate the obvious religious aspects of the war.

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Most wars have religious dimensions in that religious claims are made by participants in the war. Most people including warriors pray about their deepest concerns regarding life and death. But to say a war is religious is to recognize that high religious authorities sanction it, and that people include their enemies’ religion in their description of their enemy. It is not necessary that all religious authorities sanction, nor is it necessary that all combatants or policy makers recognize its religious nature. Other factors than religion may be involved, such as gold, oil, national interest, other economic interests, national pride, and so on. Gradually, after the book was published, other writers, including former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, took up the theme of religion and international politics, and the tide has turned away from the dominance of purely secular readings of these conflicts. The book argued for two changes in international relations thinking: first, the recognition of the importance of religion in international politics, and second, the recognition of the helpfulness of Reinhold Niebuhr’s perspective on the politics of the American empire. Ed Long caught the relevance of these points when he wrote in his blurb on the back cover of the book: Ronald Stone had done as much or more than anyone else to utilize the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr to deal with the conflicts of the twenty-first century. In this book he devotes special and perceptive attention to the role of religion in these conflicts. Chapters on jihad, just peacemaking, responsive moral reflection, and just war theory added the necessary moral reflections to the recognition of the force of religion in international politics. The chapter on speaking to Hezbollah discussed above dealt with the potentiality and risks of interreligious dialogue in international politics. The book concluded with an analysis of violence in current theories and criticism of the continuing U.S. contributions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gary Dorrien used the book at Union Theological Seminary and invited me to the class. The class meeting, where I had taught half a century earlier, was a good experience. The critique of the book from a hostile, former staff member of the World Council of Churches reminded me how far my arguments for responsible use of U.S. power were from the more leftist perspectives of some third-world theologians. The debates would continue between me and those in the Church who believed the Bush administration’s claims to dominate the world. I saw such claims as boasts rather than analysis, and I would oppose, in all possible forums, U.S. wars in Asia, while seeking responsive, realist critique of U.S. policy. I accepted the United States as an empire among other empires and sought religious ethics for the proper advising of the reality we had inherited though World War II and its Cold War aftermath.

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Niebuhr and Tillich My banquet lecture to the North American Paul Tillich Society on the partnership between Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr evolved into journal publications on the theme and headed toward the largest of my books, Politics and Faith: Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Seminary in New York. Though a previous book on foreign policy was dedicated to Linda Haddad, this was the first book written during our marriage. She was immensely helpful with her lawyer precision in language and proofreading. Our preoccupations with my writing and her travel, at the peak of her career, complemented each other, as we both had more than full-time responsibilities. The times I could travel with her were partially my vacation and introduction to the area of health care ethics. However, for me the first four years of our marriage focused on my career-long research and writing on these two philosopher-theologians. The plans for publishing the book with Pilgrim Press had been sealed by a handshake at the American Academy of Religion. However, changes at the press led to the editor’s resignation and the neglect of my book. Repeated inquiries were ignored for a while, until they told me they had filled their future list with prospects. So, as I had previously, I turned toward other publishers. The editor at Columbia University Press thought it was too theological, but Mercer University Press adopted the book enthusiastically and produced a particularly beautiful edition. Mercer expressed interest in the book at the American Academy of Religion in 2011 and brought it out by the time of the same meeting in 2012. This success in bringing it out so quickly was despite the loss of the corrected galleys in the mail. I checked frantically with various centers of the postal service, but to no avail. A month after I had recorrected the galleys, an empty carton was returned to me by the postal service. Early sales and reviews indicate that Politics and Faith may be as successful as my first book on Reinhold Niebuhr or my book on John Wesley. I was moved by both theologian-philosophers. Their combinations of radicalness, realism, and thoroughness appealed to my sense of intellectual integrity within the Christian faith. Their understanding of the power of symbolism in both politics and religion and their ability to relate these two human constructions while respecting each in its own arena was persuasive. The book incorporated three of the causes of my career: encouraging of the use of Paul Tillich’s social philosophy, defending the wisdom of Niebuhr’s political philosophy, and (as in previous books) arguing for the relevance of both morals and religion to politics. New in this volume was the emphasis upon their wartime experiences from World War I into the Cold War. They never lived as adults without wars, their preparation, or their consequences. My life from 1939 until now in 2013 has always been in the context of wartime, political struggles, the hope for peace, and the seeking of methods of peacemaking. My son, Randall, quotes one of his Harvard professors to the effect that political realism, though useful in understanding wartime, may not be so helpful in understanding international relations in times of

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peace. I am still praying for that time of peace so that I can test that hypothesis. I turned toward Tillich, in part, so that I could avoid being labeled only a Niebuhrian. Now I find them essentially aligned in politics and complementary in theology, though different. Also, the best description of their primary works as theology-philosophyethics also fits my own work. In their thought, I found my own thought. The finding of the book of Augustine’s political writing led me to write my own book on the political philosophy and theology of these two in my own perspective. As I review my vocation, the continuity is obvious from the first book I edited for Reinhold Niebuhr, titled Faith and Politics to my final book on them, titled Politics and Faith. The apple had not fallen far from the trees of Riverside Drive in New York City in the 1960s where Reinie and I walked, talking about Paul Tillich’s thought. Though this is a large book, there is much it does not accomplish. As Guy Hammond mentioned in his review, it does not really compare the contrasting and debated perspectives of Niebuhr and Tillich on sin or alienation. This is a sore oversight, but many others have worked on those issues. It did not discuss in any detail the content of Paul Tillich’s courses at Union Theological Seminary, nor explore his teaching at Harvard, at the University of Chicago, and in Germany after the war. My discussion of Niebuhr’s classes at Union was undertaken in my earlier book, Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, and I have not completed this study on Tillich. The various academic societies on Niebuhr and Tillich are continually producing new studies on each, and I have not dealt extensively with that literature or with the newer dissertations on their thought. Fuller studies of them may go more deeply into Reinhold’s practical political life, though I have said that which I know, and there is always room to explore more deeply their friendships and collegial relations with others in New York. I have appreciated Daniel Rice’s exploration of their influential intellectual relationships in Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence. Further work on their students’ use of their thought will be relevant for a more complete picture. One thinks quickly of Langdon Gilkey, John Smith, John Raines, Roger Shinn, and scores of others. Another new feature of the book is a relatively thorough examination of both thinkers from their feminist critics. The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion continued the discussion in 2012 at the American Academy of Religion in a very spirited session on Reinhold Niebuhr. Here I had the opportunity to respond to the critiques of these theologians whom I had earlier recommended for publication by the University Press of America. James Cone improved the discussion in the book on Reinhold Niebuhr by our frequent discussions of Niebuhr on racism. I even extended the discussion of racism into the section on their legacies beyond my original plans because of Professor Cone’s knowledge and passion on the subject. James Cone thought Niebuhr contributed more on this subject than other white theologians. However, his greater passions were given to politics, foreign policy and fighting anti-Semitism rather than to the racism he deplored against African Americans. Cone’s use of sources in his The Lynching Tree, which he shared with me and others before publishing, is outstanding, and he provided the most complete critique I know. I had one more reference Cone did not mention: Reinie’s 1971 letter to the Bicentennial Commission when he was nearing death.

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Therein he mentioned three problems he hoped the commission would focus upon: managing of the nuclear threat, overcoming the environmental crisis, and righting historical wrongs that the African American had suffered.

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Chapter 79

Concluding Reflections On my way toward my seventy-fifth birthday, I note that I am becoming more removed from practical work to reform church and society. Opportunities since my retirement from the seminary ten years ago are not as frequent as when I was institutionally more identified. My last attempt to strengthen the Peacemaking Program of the Presbyterian Church was partially accepted by the General Assembly and then diverted into a process of peacemaking discernment about which I am less than enthusiastic. Closing this book, I acknowledge an ongoing role in advising the ACSWP on peacemaking, and that I am looking forward to helping host the Social Ethics Network in Pittsburgh next year. The local church still engages me in its peacemaking work, Sunday school teaching on social issues, and its race relations conference. Since Moral Reflections on Foreign Policy (2008), I have been publishing an essay or two each year. They have been mostly on the politics of Niebuhr or Tillich or on problems of peace and war in the Middle East. The list of books I want to write is getting shorter. I am very happy that my children and my wife, Linda, continue on in the struggle to achieve more health and lesser strife within the country and foreign policy. As I review my years of Christian social action, I note that my presidential candidates have won half the elections. The work in speaking, organizing, and writing in race relations shows some successes, but our failures to achieve more justice in economic relations leaves that a very ambiguous conclusion. Gains have been made against apartheid. The critique of wars in Asia has produced only mixed results as we continue the futile practice. The American policies of counterrevolution in Latin America have subsided, partially, I believe, because of Church opposition. Gains against American militarism have been meager, and the proliferation of atomic weapons has increased. The ecological concerns have risen to the level of public debate, but the prognosis is not good. Approximate justice is being achieved in gender relations, and the discrimination over sexual orientation is declining in the United States. The churches I love have become more socially acute on many issues, but their power in society has declined. As a Christian realist, I have never expected unambiguous victories. I never saw the justice I pray for realized, but it has been a good race, and I found tastes of fulfillment in the struggles. During the calendar year of 2013, a major cause for me was critiquing the use of unmanned aerial vehicles with Hellfire missiles to pursue our enemies or peoples that appear to be enemies. I’ve spoken in a significant Episcopalian conference on the issue and written a paper used for legal education in Pittsburgh, and by the Iowa Methodist Conference Federation for Social Action. I am still revising it for another publication as the practice and debate evolves. President Obama’s May 2013 announcement on the policy promises to reduce their use, and particularly the signature attacks on suspicious group behavior. As I conclude this book, I learn of another case of possible corruption that comes before the Allegheny County Accountability and Ethics Commission. Its significance (or

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lack thereof) will be known before this book is published. My term ends next year, and at this time I do not intend to seek reelection. Four years of service as chair was sufficient, and as someone younger could benefit from the experience in the chair, I resigned the position. God willing, I will teach once more in the Program of Lifelong Learning at Carnegie Mellon University in the spring. It will be a course on Reinhold Niebuhr in the political science department. The discussions at those seminars are fulfilling for me, and they satisfy the need for intellectual stimulation, which I noted at the beginning of this book my father lacked. The opportunity to lecture in Berlin in 2015, again at Humboldt University, has inspired me to review my study of German, in which I have never become proficient. Linda, my wife, I regard as at the peak of her career, and I support her in it as I am able. I don’t know whether she will be chosen as a model again as she was for her gymnasium’s advertisements in several Pittsburgh magazines four years ago, but she serves as a mentor for young lawyers and the hundreds of health care professionals she lectures to annually. Her short service to Saudi Arabia’s medical service last year reminds me of how focused on that region we have become. At about the same time Patricia was driving Saudi princes around San Diego as they considered buying a virtual reality center like the one she interprets. Though she is a very cautious driver, the princes thought she drove a bit too fast. Supporting Linda does not require any sacrifices on my part. I travel with her to splendid resort locations where she undertakes her teaching. This year, 2013–2014, she added to her lawyer duties teaching at Carnegie Mellon as an adjunct faculty member and learned about the new technology of online instruction. She expanded my worldview by treating me, for my birthday, to an around-the-world trip for three weeks. Without her I never would have sat amid the gorillas of Rwanda or dialogued with Buddhist monks in Bhutan or swum in a pool in Bali. We are planning a cruise on the Rhine with Alan and Jonieta in the summer of 2014, God willing. Spiritually, since retirement I have been reading books of sermons, reading theology, and attending church services. I find the biblical insights come through to me better in respected sermons than in reading the Bible. I find the most meaning in the sermons by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and sometimes they situate me in the chapel of Union Seminary, where I first heard them. Martin Luther would understand what I mean in the encounter with the word of God preached. Reinhold Niebuhr would understand my priority in religion for the seeking of justice. John Calvin closed his theological work with the principles of politics, and so do I. Paul Tillich knew very well what I mean by religious symbolism and the need for it to be alive. Some of the religious symbols that nurtured me are less relevant, and I have become more impatient with some of the dead symbolism from the Roman Empire or the British Empire. The Church has done better in updating its ethics than it has the theology contained in its hymns, creeds, confirmation classes, and pious proclamations. I have been blessed in my local congregation by forty years of excellent preaching by Charles Robshaw, Robert Hewitt, Bob Chesnut, and Randy Bush.

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Though I have had profound religious experiences of awe, repentance, deep voices, and even a few visions, my religious awakening is best discovered in movements of action that reflect the Kingdom of God. Communal action for justice or against injustice founded in ignorance and greed has been the most frequent nourishment of my awareness of the God of love and justice. Modern life and secular pursuits distract, but the meaning of life for me has been found in Christian social action and in human relationships. In my deeper thoughts about theology, I turn, using Christian symbolism, toward model building, which I glimpsed in the philosophy of Ian Ramsey in my Oxford school days. The references in Paul Tillich’s Love, Power and Justice formulated in a rational/ symbolic model of John Macquarrie’s existential-theological concept of the meaning of God as the union of power and love hold promise. I contributed a small essay to Robert Morgan’s In Search of Humanity and Deity: A Celebration of John Macquarrie’s Theology in 2006, and I need to follow it up. Beyond Macquarrie, earlier work with Langdon Gilkey on symbolism in Tillich, and model language from Ian Ramsey, I have found Ian G. Barbour’s Myths, Models and Paradigms very insightful. If God is, as I believe, the spirit of the union of love and power expressed by the universe of billions of light-years in the transcendence of the human mind from the brain, I can pray for my brain to last long enough to find the words to express this reality. Augustine, I think, would understand my hope and regard it as faithful.

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Bibliography BOOKS Edited and introduced essays by Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and Politics: Essays on Religion, Social and Political Thought in a Technological Age. New York: Braziller, 1968. Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1972; University Press of America, 1981; WIPF and Stock Publishers, 2001. Realism and Hope. Washington, DC: The University Press of America, 1977. Edited and introduced lectures by Gustavo Gutierrez and Richard M. Shaull, Liberation and Change. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977. Paul Tillich’s Radical Social Thought. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1980. Edited and introduced Reformed Faith and Politics. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983. Edited and introduced with Dana Wilbanks, The Peacemaking Struggle: Militarism and Resistance. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. Edited with Beverly Harrison and Robert Stivers, The Public Vocation of Christian Ethics. New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1986. Christian Realism and Peacemaking: Issues in U.S. Foreign Policy. Nashville: Abingdon, 1988. Edited and introduced Theology of Peace, by Paul Tillich. Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1990. Reformed Urban Ethics: Case Study of Pittsburgh. San Francisco: Mellen Research Press, 1991. Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the Twentieth Century. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. Edited and introduced with Mathew Lon Weaver, Against the Third Reich: Paul Tillich’s Radio Broadcasts into Nazi Germany. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1998. The Ultimate Imperative. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1999. John Wesley: Life and Ethics. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001.

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Dialogues of Paul Tillich with Mary Ann Stenger. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002. Edited and introduced with Robert L. Stivers, Resistance and Theological Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Prophetic Realism. New York: T & T Clark, 2005. Eber: Pioneer in Iowa. Iowa City, IA: Camp Pope Publisher, 2008. Moral Reflections on Foreign Policy in a Religious War. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2008. Politics and Faith: Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Seminary in New York. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2012.

SELECTED ESSAYS “The Essence of Education: Alfred North Whitehead.” Union Seminary Quarterly (Fall 1963). The Church in International Affairs. (Pamphlet by the Council for Christian Social Action of the United Church of Christ). New York: 1964. “Political Realism and Christian Ethics.” Religion and Life (Fall 1965). “Saul Alinsky and Ethics of Social Change.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review (January 1967). “Power and Purpose.” Social Action (January 1967). “Karl Marx and End of Religion.” Social Action (November 1968). Editorials, Social Action (March–December 1968). “Ethics in Policy Making and the Implications for Theological Education.” Christian Century (April 23, 1969). “John C. Bennett: Christian Theologian in an Age of Crisis.” Religious Book Guide (January–February 1971). “The Politics of the Kingdom of God.” The Christian Century (May 12, 1971). “The Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, 1953–1971.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Fall 1971). “A Proposal for General Amnesty.” The Christian Century (April 12, 1972). “The Berrigans et al.” The Commonweal 96, no. 6 (April 14, 1972).

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“Ethics and Growth.” South East Asia Journal of Theology 14, no. l (1972). “The Realists and Their Critics.” Worldview (June 1973). “The Responsibility of the Saints.” Christian Century (September 12, 1973). “The Writings on Reinhold Niebuhr 1972–73.” Fund for the Reinhold Niebuhr Award 1973 (Reprinted in Congressional Record [February 25, 1974]). “A Black Liberation Theology from Jamaica.” Christian Century (July 31, 1974). “Tillich’s Socialist Vision.” Tillich Studies (1975). “Ethics and Nuclear Politics.” Worldview (January 1976). “Tillich: Radical Political Theologian.” Religion in Life (Spring 1977). “Tillich’s Critical Use of Marx and Freud in Social Context of the Frankfort School.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Fall 1977). “Reinhold Niebuhr.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1978). “Response to Liberation Theology.” Theological Education (Fall 1979). “The Zionism of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.” In Tantur Yearbook. Jerusalem: Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Theological Study, 1980–1981. “Christian Realism and Peacemaking.” Review and Expositor (Fall 1982). “Reformed Faith and Politics.” (Background paper for General Assembly UPCUSA, 1983). “The Contribution of Reinhold Niebuhr to the Late 20th Century.” Charles Kegley, editor Reinhold Niebuhr. New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1984. “1984 Follows 1983.” The Presbyterian Outlook (January 30, 1984). “The U.S.S. Pittsburgh.” The Presbyterian Outlook (December 17, 1984). “The Justifiable War Tradition.” In The Peacemaking Struggle. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. “A Realist Encounters Russia.” In The Public Vocation of Christian Ethics. New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1986. With Dana Wilbanks, Presbyterians and Peacemaking: Are We Now Called to Resistance? New York: Advisory Council on Church and Society of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 1986. “The Correlation of Politics and Culture in Paul Tillich’s Thought.” Soundings (Winter 1986).

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“The Ethos of the Urban Setting for Theological Education.” In Dieter Hessel, ed., Theological Education for Social Ministry. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1988. “Paulus and Gustavo: Religious Socialism and Liberation Theology.” Laval theologique et philosophique (June 1988). “The Struggle against Militarism, Part of Our Global Responsibility.” In Fate of This One World. Prague: Christian Peace Conference, 1988. “The Reformed Economic Ethics of John Calvin.” In Robert Stivers, ed., Reformed Faith and Economics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989. “The Distinction between Personal and Public Morality.” Horizons in Biblical Theology (December 1988, published 1989). “Paul Tillich: On the Boundary between Protestantism and Marxism.” Laval theologique et philosophique (October 1989). “Paul Tillich on Peace.” Papers from the Annual Meeting of the North American Paul Tillich Society (September 1990). “Kairos Circle.” Papers from the Annual Meeting of the North American Paul Tillich Society (September 1990). “Peace/Peacemaking.” In Donald W. Musser and Joseph L. Price, eds., A New Handbook of Christian Theology. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992, 2003. “Paulus, Reinie und die Judenfrage.” Papers from the Annual Meeting of the North American Paul Tillich Society (April 1994). “Truth and the CIA.” The Ecumenist (April–June 1995). “Contract for the Rulers of the United States of America.” Monday Morning (February 20, 1995). “Some Observations on Religion and Politics.” The Living Pulpit (April/June 1996). “Theological Ethics and Political Participation.” General Assembly, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (July 1996). “Pittsburgh Professors Visit Cuban Seminary.” Panorama (Spring 1997). “Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention.” Paper for Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Study (August 1997). “Oxbridge Revisited.” Panorama (Fall 1997). “Reflections on Christian Love for Justice.” In Daniel Chetti, ed., Ethical Issues in the Struggles for Justice. Tiruvalla, Kerala, India: Christava Sahitya Samati, 1998.

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“21st Century Trends: Resist or Correlate?” Church and Society (November–December 1999). “The Religious Situation and Resistance in 2001.” In Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick J. Parrella, eds., Religion in the New Millennium. Atlanta, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001. “Response to Terrorism and Civil Liberties.” Reaching Out (January 13 and 20, 2002). “Dialogues of Paul Tillich.” The North American Paul Tillich Society Newsletter (Winter 2003). “Realist Critique of Just Peacemaking.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (March 2003). “Prophetic Realism, Human Rights and Foreign Policy.” In The Idea of Human Rights: Traditions and Presence. Prague: The Charles University Press, 2003. “Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich in New York: Political Conversations” in Marc Boss, ed., Ethique sociale et socialism. Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2003. Edited and Introduced, “Religion, Violence and Terrorism.” Church and Society (May/ June 2004). “Ontology of Power in Niebuhr, Morgenthau and Tillich.” In Marc Dumas, ed., Theologie et Culture. Quebec: Les Presses de L’Universite Laval, 2004. “The Ontology of Power in Morgenthau and Niebuhr.” In G. O. Mazur, ed., Twenty-Five Year Memorial Commemoration to the Life of Hans Morgenthau (1904–2005). New York: Semenenko Foundation, 2006. “John Macquarrie at Union Theological Seminary in New York.” In Robert Morgan, ed., In Search of Humanity and Deity. London: SCM Press, 2006. “Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich as Allied Public Theologians.” The Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society (Summer 2006). Also in Political Theology (October 2008). “To Live So That All Human and Natural Life Can Flourish.” In Christian Iosso and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, eds., Prayers for the New Social Awakening. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008. “On the Boundary of Utopia and Politics.” In Russell Re Manning, ed., Paul Tillich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Also in Christian Danz, ed., Religion und Poltik. “Reinhold Niebuhr and Perspectives on Middle East Foreign Policy.” In Daniel F. Rice, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans, 2009.

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“Tillich’s Kairos and Its Trajectory.” The Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society (Summer 2011). “Scenes from Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.” The Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society (Spring 2012). “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Feminist Critique of Original Sin.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Spring 2012). “Tillich on Power in the Context of the American Empire.” International Yearbook for Tillich Research, Vol. 9. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. “Afterword,” “Drones and Christian Morality,” and “Life and Practice of an Ethicist.” In Matthew Lon Weaver, ed., Applied Christian Ethics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.

SELECTED REVIEWS Violence in the Streets, Shalom Endleman, ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968) in Social Action (February 1969), 35–36. Three Essays in Ethics, John Macquarrie (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) in Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Fall 1970), 93–94. Theology and Church in Times of Crisis: Essays in Honor of John Coleman Bennett, Edward L. Long Jr. and Robert T. Handy, eds. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press) in Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Spring 1973), 312–15. Social Responsibility and Investments, Charles Powers (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1971). Journal of the American Academy of Religion (June 1973), 315–16. Civil Disobedience and Political Obligation: A Study in Christian Social Ethics, James B. Childress (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972) in Commonweal (May 1973), 268–69. Wars and Rumors of War, Roger L. Shinn (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1972) in Religion in Life (Summer 1973), 270–71. Young Reinhold Niebuhr: His Early Writing, 1911–1931, William G. Chrystal, ed. (Saint Louis: Eden Publishing House, 1977) in Journal of Presbyterian History (Fall 1978), 273–74. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Works: A Bibliography, D. B. Robertson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979) in Contemporary Theology (June 1981), 323–24. A Father’s Mantle: The Legacy of Gustav Niebuhr, William C. Chrystal (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1982) in Christianity and Crisis (July 12, 1982), 222.

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The Thought of Paul Tillich, James Luther Adams, Wilhelm Pauck, and Roger Lincoln Shinn, eds. (New York: Harper and Row, 1985) in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 41, no. 2 (1987), 65–69. Justice in an Unjust World: Foundations for a Christian Approach to Justice, Karen Lebacqz (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1987) in Theology Today (October 1988), 379–80. Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey, Daniel R. Rice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) in Theology Today (June 1994), 306–7. Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, D. B. Robertson, ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992) in Religious Studies Review (April 1997), 157. Hopeful Realism: Reclaiming the Poetry of Theology, Douglas F. Ottati (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1999) in Interpretation (July 1999), 320–22. The Piety of John Witherspoon: Pew, Pulpit, and Public Forum, L. Gordon Tait (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2001) in Panorama (Fall 2001), 15. Reinhold Niebuhr and Non-Utopian Liberalism: Beyond Illusion and Despair, Naveh Eyal (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2002) in Journal of Religion (October 2004), 638–39. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950, Gary Dorrien (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003) in The Christian Century (October 2003), 53–58. The Socialist Émigré: Marxism and the Later Tillich, Bernard Patrick Donnelly (Decatur, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004) in Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society (Spring 2004), 24–26. Do No Harm: Social Sin and Christian Responsibility, Stephen G. Ray Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), and Original Sin: Origins, Development, Contemporary Meanings, Tatha Wiley (New York: Paulist, 2002) in Theology Today (July 2004), 266–70.

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