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#Smith

I first met Huston Smith, 1919-2016, in 1969 or 1970 at the Div School at the University of Chicago where he had studied and had returned to report on a second trip to Tibet. We kept running into each other at various meetings and became friends. I have never met anyone who more appropriately can be termed a "gentleman." Born in China, in this 2005 photo at the Kansas City Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, he looks very like a Taoist immortal! Author of the all-time best-selling The World's Religions, he consented to being interviewed for my Kansas City Star columns repeatedly. I cherish taking him to his parents' graves in Marshall, MO. I collected some other photos as a remembrance when he died in 2016, aged 97.

Joseph Campbell,1904-1987, had retired when I met and studied with him, first at a week-long seminar in Santa Barbara. Long familiar with his Hero with a Thousand Faces, I asked him about adpating the three-part sequence he theorizes for the individual's spiritual journey into a four-part liturgical pattern for groups. The Kansas City Friends of Jung brought him here several times after that. In 1988 Campbell became known to a wider audience through the Bill Moyers PBS "Power of Myth" six-hour poorly edited and sometimes inaccurate interview series. He was trained in literature, and his study of religion was without much scholarly expertise, which led him to flawed assumptions. In my view, Campbell was a convincing story-teller, a bit if the charlatan, elitist, proto-fascist, crypo-anti-Semite, a great spiritual entertainer. Perhaps there is no better indication of his self-absorption and scorn for social structures (from which he himself benefited) than his facile advice, "follow your bliss." Still, I learned much from him and value the way he was able to show a large audience hungry for spiritual fare how myths are powerful paths to the sacred in our secularistic age.

#Gendlin

Eugene Gendlin (1917-), who studied under Carl Rogers and influenced Rogers, was a celebrity at the University of Chicago. He had appointments in both Philosophy and Comparative Human Development (I thought it was Psychology) departments. From him I learned that the success of psychotherapist had little to do with the theory or tradition (Freud, Jung, Rogers, Skinner, Frankl, Perls, etc) claimed by the therapist.
     While I studied with Gendlin in the late 60s, he distributed a "Focusing Manual" to his students and taught us to become aware of a "felt sense," a bodily sensation related to psychological processes. He developed a kind of quiz that predicted whether a person would benefit from therapy. His book, Focusing, was published in 1978. He discovered people can learn to "focus." His emphasis on the body may distinguish this method from meditation and other spiritual practices.
     It is fun to recall his attempt to use a behavioral technique to end his smoking habit. It was failing to work by the end of the term. 

#Tapp  97

Elaine Pagels

Forrest Church, 1948-2009

#Bass

Amy-Jill Levine

Professor Al Truesdale, a marvelous friend from a conservative tradition. He taught at the  taught at the Nazarene Theological Seminary. One time I asked him to be my guest at a class I was teaching at Ottawa University. He happened to say he was working on a book responding to the most vexing of all problems Christianity faces, the problem of evil, and he was confident -- I forget exactly how he put it -- that his treatment of the problem -- in theological terms, theodicy -- would be conclusive. I was surprised by the confidence he expressed in dealing with such an intractable problem.
     Then his book, If God Is God . . . Then Why? appeared.* Although it is theology, it is not technical. It was a written as an exchange of letters. I was amazed as I read it, almost like a thriller page-turner. To my mind, he completely and methodically demolishes every major answer Christians have given to explain why an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God would permit unmerited suffering in the world. And the conclusion is all the more powerful and inevitable.

*The first edition's subtitle was Letters from Oklahoma City, following the horror of the 1995 bombing. The 2002 edition's subtitle is Letters from New York City, following the 911 terrorist attacks. I like to pair Tuesdale's book with God's Problem: How te Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Importat Question -- Why We Suffer by Bart Ehrman.

Marcus Borg

The Rev Don H Compier, PhD, dean of the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry. He served as president of the Socierty of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians. 

Pulitzer-prize poetry winner Karl Shapiro taught writing poetry at the University of Nebraska. 

His was a memorably free-wheeling graduate seminar which ironically helped me understand form. He supported the wildest literary experiments from the students in such a way as to demonstrate that poetry generates an extraordinary range of reactions and interpretations. He never said: Here's how I write; he said: Find out how you write. You can see how others do it, and imitation can be a good exercize. But write as you.

And, personally, when I got into a bit of a jam as a graduate teaching assistant in the philosophy department, he helped get things resolved the right way. 

I think I learned not only something about how I write but maybe also learned some things from him about how to teach.

She was not only brilliant but also a bit crazy, and I cannot forget a time just the two of us were in the chaplain's office. She went off on her views of the afterlife which she kept hidden from the public for some time until her reputation as a thanatologist was established. I was really uncomfortable. It felt like an intellectual assault and I was the victim. How could I argue with Dr Ross? but silence felt like I was conveying agreement.

Her "five stages" -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- have pretty well been disputed, but she moved our culture forward dramatically in dealing with the realities of dying and death. She was, in all, a great teacher.

The first term, as I remember, we used Huston Smith's The Religions of Man (later The World's Religions) supplemented with Chang's rigorous comments, and the second term we focused on varieties of Hinduism and particularly Buddhism. I cherish my notes, especially his own translation of portions of the Vimalakirti Sutra (now available in several English translations) which is one of my most prized of all the world's scriptures, along with the Heart Sutra and the utmost prize of the Hwa Yen Sutra, about which Chang later wrote in his The Buddhist Teaching of Totality. I loved learning about Fa Tsang (Fazang), the Golden Lion, and the room of mirrors for the Empress Wu Zhao (Wu Zetian).  Perhaps best known among his other books are The Practice of Zen and The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa.

I happened to visit his apartment one time and was amazed at how spare -- empty -- his space was. Somehow to me that was a demonstration of the void, and a few years later, while a student at the University of Chicago Divinity School and an affiliated seminary, I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Voidism: A Theology for the Practice of the Liberal Ministry. 

#Ehrman