Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In an alumnae publication, I read this week that Tom Chappell, founder of Tom’s of Maine, has endowed a professor’s chair at Harvard Divinity School. Chappell received a Masters in Theological Studies from HDS in 1991, the year I entered my MDiv program. The Chair is to be named The Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professorship of Divinity and will focus on values and ethics. Richard R. Niebuhr is a member of perhaps the most distinguished theological family in America. His father was H. Richard Niebuhr and his uncle, Reinhold Niebuhr. But despite or perhaps in spite of this heritage of intellectual giants, Richard distinguished himself apart.

I celebrate this endowment by Tom Chappell because I celebrate the life of Richard Niebuhr, my teacher.

 

Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza gave me the tools to deconstruct patriarchal religion; she encouraged a strategy for biblical interpretation based on liberation; she provided me with scholarly content that greatly informs my own teaching and course material; she was my advisor, my mentor and my model.

 

Ralph Potter introduced me to Aristotle and encouraged my reflection and writing on forgiveness and Christian social ethics.

 

Elizabeth Spellman gave me the opportunity to study and ask the questions of suffering.

 

Francis Fiorenza filled the void in my understanding of Catholic theology.

 

Carter Heyward expanded my understanding of Christology.

 

But Richard Niebuhr fed my soul.

He was the teacher I loved.

He was intrigued by the same “big ideas” that intrigue me; the dignity and value of human life; virtue and nobility; good and evil; the nature of beauty and the questions of ethics.

In his class, we read beautiful books; Moby Dick and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Nature of True Virtue by Jonathan Edwards, The Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant.

 

In his class we were exposed not only to the ideas he loved to explore, but to the man himself. His intellectual honesty in the classroom became so intimate at times, that those of us who were privileged to be witness to it, often felt that he left himself too vulnerable; that he bared his mind and soul on the carpet for all to see. In his class my imagination soared, my intellect was stretched, my humanity was touched.

 

In one of the courses I took with him, I had the opportunity to be a part of his weekly class discussion group, which immediately followed his one hour lecture. That semester these were the only classes I had on that day. I commuted from Northern Rhode Island to Cambridge and utilized four modes of transportation; I’d drive my car to the nearest MBTA train station, ride the train for an hour to Boston, get on the subway at South Station and ride underground and across the Charles to Harvard Square and then walk the rest of the way to the Divinity School. Total time, one way, was approximately two hours. On those days when Richard’s class met I’d commute a total of four hours for two hours of class. In the last year of my program (’93-’94) Boston broke their 100 year-old record for snowfall with 96 inches in one season. One week, when a particularly nasty storm was predicted, I suggested to my son that perhaps I could crash in his dorm for the night (he was a freshman at Harvard that year and lived on the perimeter of Harvard Yard). In the end, I stayed with a classmate (no doubt to my son’s unexpressed relief), but so unwilling was I to miss one of Richard’s classes, that I would have been willing to camp out in a freshmen dorm. Instead, I trudged through the snow in Porter Square to make it to class on time.

 

Richard’s intellectual integrity was matched by his unfailing generosity in the classroom. He honored every student comment, every contribution and every thought.  One day when we were discussing Coleridge’s ideas on the primary and secondary imagination and the task of the poet, I raised my hand and asked a question. Richard paused, looked at me pointedly and said, “What a good question.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot and said, “That’s such a good question.” Yet again, he stroked his chin thoughtfully, “What…a…wonderful…question. I’ll have to think about that.” And in that moment, he made me feel as if I was the most intelligent person in the room, simply by asking a question. On the way out of class that day, fellow students actually slapped me on the back and said, “Wow. Way to go,” the academic equivalent of a pat on the backside on the football field.  

 

In a paper I wrote on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, his concluding comments included the statement that I had a “perspicacious mind.” I ran to my dictionary. I was grateful for this much needed affirmation and I treasure the remark. 

 

When it came time to choose my faculty reader for my MDiv Senior paper I did not hesitate to request Richard Niebuhr. I highlight the word “request” here. Students must ask a professor to be their reader, but the professor has the right to approve or deny the request. When Richard agreed to be my reader for the year, I was overjoyed and terrified at once. When we met in his overstuffed and rather dark office to discuss my paper, he’d ask if I’d mind if he smoked his pipe. I never did. He asked difficult questions, he demanded clarification; he expressed concern over this paragraph or that.  One day after meeting with Richard, I also met with the ThD candidate who served as my second reader. I related to Cynthia (with some exasperation) how tireless he was in pushing my thinking and my writing and complained a little about his demand for perfection. Cynthia said, “And I suspect that’s exactly why you asked for him.” And she was right.

 

Richard Niebuhr is the only professor to whom I have written in the years following graduation. Six years ago, following his retirement, I sent him a rather long email through which I shared the experience of having been his student. I placed myself in context, told him what courses I’d taken with him and that he had been my reader but followed all that by telling him that whether he remembered me or not was irrelevant. Let me be a faceless student, but let me share with him what he and his classroom had meant to me. I received no response for over a week and thought that perhaps he was away, or feared that he was ill. Then his response arrived. In his reply, he apologized for having waited so long, but admitted that he waited because he could not think how to respond to “your impulse to write with such generosity of spirit and magnanimity of heart.”  It was so like him. There I was sitting at my computer, reading his email, my intention only to have recognized him as teacher, scholar and gentleman and he, in his fashion, was giving honor to me. Ever true to his nature.

 

So, thank you Tom Chappell for ensuring that this famous man’s humane and scholarly legacy will live on. And thank you Richard Niebuhr for being that man.