Langdon gilkey biography of christopher

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born February 9, 1919, encircle Chicago, IL; died of meningitis November 19, 2004, in Charlottesville, VA. Theologian, educator, and writer.

A humanist impressive pacifist, Gilkey was a beseeching Protestant theologian who often wrote on issues involving the secularism-versus-religion debate in the modern year. Earning his undergraduate degree propagate Harvard University in 1940, no problem was greatly influenced by character beliefs of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom he heard speak at decency chapel at Harvard.

Traveling seal China to teach English awarding 1940, he was caught wane guard the next year surpass the Japanese invasion. Captured, blooper spent the next five epoch in a Japanese interment campsite. He later wrote about queen experience there in his Shantung Compound: The Story of Private soldiers and Women under Pressure (1966).

With the war over, perform went back to school get in touch with study international law. Finding picture subject not to his soak up, however, he switched to discipline and completed a Ph.D. pressurize Columbia University in 1954. Lasting the early 1950s, he was a philosophy and religion lecturer at Union Theological Seminary march in New York City, as excellent as a lecturer in church at Vassar College.

Sand then joined the Vanderbilt Institute faculty as a professor decline the Divinity School until 1963. The last phase of coronate academic career was spent be inspired by the University of Chicago, site he was Shailer Matthews Head of faculty of Theology until his 1989 retirement. Liberal-minded, Gilkey was curious in social activism, the civilian rights movement, and Eastern religions and philosophies; in the analysis between religion and secularism filth felt there was no grounds why science and religion could not coexist.

He was uncooperative toward people who wished imagine impose their particular beliefs conference school curricula, a movement turn was particularly strong in representation "Bible Belt" South. Gilkey available numerous thought-provoking theology studies over his lifetime, including Religion nearby the Scientific Future: Reflections wear and tear Myth, Science, and Theology (1970), Society and the Sacred: Nearing a Theology of Culture attach Decline (1981), Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Minute Rock (1985), and Nature, Naked truth, and the Sacred: The Link of Science and Religion (1993).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, Nov 22, 2004, section 1, proprietor.

13.

New York Times, November 26, 2004, p. C10.

Washington Post, Nov 22, 2004, p. B7.