May 2001
To Alumni and Friends of the Department of Philosophy and Religion:
The happiest and most important function of this annual letter is to brag about our students. They continue to be worth bragging about. Let me start with numbers. In this year's senior class, we had 14 religion majors and 15 religion minors, 4 philosophy majors and 5 philosophy minors. This year's junior class has 16 religion majors and 16 minors, 6 philosophy majors and 10 minors. The sophomore class has 16 religion majors and 14 minors, 11 philosophy majors and 18 minors. (We usually pick up some more along the way.) If I've done the math properly, it continues to be the case that about one-fourth of each Wabash class either majors or minors in philosophy or religion, and with the beginnings of a particularly interesting increase in philosophy.
We can talk about quality as well as quantity. This year's Butler Prize for outstanding senior and Salter Award for outstanding junior both went to religion majors. Of the twenty-three Wabash students elected to Phi Beta Kappa this year, six (including the only junior) were majors in our department. In addition to our own departmental awards, our majors won one of the two Daniels Awards in Philosophy of Law, both the Edwards Awards in Creative Writing, the Glee Club Senior Award, several journalism awards, a Mackintosh Fellowship, and the Stephens-Hall Senior Scholarship.
Next year two will be attending IU Medical School, two Harvard Divinity School, one each the Divinity Schools at Vanderbilt and Duke. Several (some decisions haven't quite been made yet) will be going to law school, and many on to some very interesting jobs--in a couple of cases thanks to generous help from alumni of our department.
More than usual this year, I wish I could get beyond statistics to tell individual stories. Our majors this year seemed to have more than the usual share of stories of individual accomplishments and triumphs over adversity. But where to stop once one started? And in any event some of those stories are very private ones.
Therefore, let me turn to the equally happy task of talking about my colleagues. Hall Peebles, in his third year of retirement, continues to be a presence on campus in a variety of ways, working in his office every day he's in town, giving occasional lectures in Cultures and Traditions, and so on. His absences of course have to do with travel: just before commencement this year he and Emmy returned from a trip to Cyprus, Crete, and Rome.
Raymond Williams continued to serve as Director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, whose impact in improving teaching in colleges, universities, and seminaries continues to grow. In addition to that administrative work and some teaching, he published two books: An Introduction to Swaminarayan Hinduism (Cambridge University Press) and The South Asian Religious Diaspora in Britain, Canada, and the United States (SUNY Press), of which he was one of three co-editors. He is also one of three co-editors of Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in the United States, which will be published later this year. The only bad news I have to report in this letter, really, is that Raymond has announced his plan to retire at the end of June, 2002, so we will have his astonishing energy and vision fully available to us for only one more year.
Like me, Glen Helman will be on sabbatical next year, staying in Crawfordsville and hoping to finish up a long-term project in logic. He taught the senior philosophy seminar this year--on Hume, the first time we'd done Hume there, I think, since Eric Dean did him many years ago.
Steve Webb's new book, Taking Religion to School: Christian Theology and Secular Education (Brazos Press), has already received wide attention. He's dealing with important issues about the place of religion in education in a religiously plural society. One of the chapters, I will immodestly note, consists of a dialogue between Steve and me in which we fight through some of these issues in a friendly way; some of you may remember seeing an excerpt from that chapter in a recent issue of the Wabash magazine. Steve's new book, Good Eating: The Bible, Diet, and the Proper Love of Animals, will come out in the fall. This year Steve taught a freshman tutorial for the first time, and found it such a rich experience that he's determined to offer tutorials regularly now. I'm sure those tutorials will generate a lot of majors for our department.
Cheryl Hughes has been on sabbatical this year. Last summer she attended an NEH Summer Seminar on Bioethics at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She is the editor of a series entitled Social Philosophy Today. One volume, Cultural Integrity and World Community, was published in December; the next, Race, Social Identity, Human Dignity will shortly appear.
David Blix returned this fall after his second straight summer intensively studying Chinese, this time at the University of Michigan. He currently chairs the "Sacred Texts" section of the Midwest American Academy of Religion and serves as one of the important faculty members in Cultures and Traditions as well as all-purpose college organist. He and Bob Royalty were part of a faculty group that travelled to Mexico to prepare for teaching a new Cultures and Traditions unit on Mexican history and culture.
On that trip and in many other contexts, Bob serves as a key figure in the college's thinking about the use of technology in teaching. This spring he received special support to develop an innovative course on the cities of early Christianity, in which students not only learned the substantive material but also learned how to make websites, hyperlinks, and other things beyond my capacity even to describe. Bob gave a paper at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting convention this year.
Richard Lynch has done such a good job as Cheryl's sabbatical replacement this year that we're juggling courses around to make it possible to keep him next year as my sabbatical replacement. In addition to his contributions to the department and the college, he has published several articles this year, organized a new group within the American Philosophical Association, and received the quite prestigious opportunity to translate one of Michel Foucault's lecture courses at the Collge de France into English.
As already noted, I will be on sabbatical next year, hanging out around the University of Chicago and reading and trying to write. We shall see. I've already finished a couple of projects. Westminster John Knox Press will publish my Jesus the Savior this coming fall, along with a book on the authority of Scripture co-authored by Walter Brueggemann, Brian Blount, and me. I'm grateful for Cheryl Hughes' willingness to serve as Acting Chair of the department next year, so that Glen and I can both skip town.
As I look over this letter I realize that, if I cheat a little, I can claim that members of our department have written, co-authored, edited, or co-edited nine volumes that have been published this year or will be published next year. What makes me particularly proud of that remarkable number is that I'm confident all our students would recognize that our primary commitment is to excellent teaching.
Commencement this year was a magical day. To start with, the weather was as perfect as I can remember--temperature about 70 and literally not a cloud in the sky. Steve Webb preached a fine baccalaureate sermon, speaking eloquently of sacred space and the importance of place. And Zach Hoover, senior religion major, gave the best student commencement speech I can remember hearing. All in all, a fitting end to a wonderful year.
Sincerely,
William C. Placher
LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities
and Chair, Department of Philosophy and Religion