Rev. Danny Fisher

I’ve just found out that my friend William C. Placher, a well-known Christian theologian and scholar, passed away suddenly over the weekend. Bill was only 60, and there’s no information about the cause of death at this time.

Bill spent his entire career at Wabash College in my hometown of Crawfordsville, IN, where my dad taught for nearly thirty years. Among his many books are A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction, Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 1: From Its Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation, Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 2: From the Reformation to the Present, Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation, The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology, and Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation. In 2002, the American Academy of Religion honored him with their Excellence in Teaching Award, effectively naming him the best religion professor in the country for that year.

I knew Bill my whole life, and he was always kind to me. In particular, when I began studying religion in college, he made time to meet and talk with me when I would come home for breaks. (As a sometimes volunteer at Indiana prisons, he was especially helpful to me when I did a summer research project on Buddhist prison ministry.) Last year, during the 2007 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Diego, Bill took me out to lunch and we had a lovely chat and peaceful stroll around the harbor.

I am saddened by his loss, and will miss him a lot. The world has less wisdom and compassion in it without him.

The press release about his death includes a quote from one of his books. It’s a bit of Bill’s own sagacity born out of his religious tradition, and I’d like to end with it:

“We human persons are always failing to be fully personal. As persons, we are shaped by our relations with other persons. Yet we always deliberately raise barriers or cannot figure out how to overcome the barriers we confront. When those we most love come to die, or in the dementia of old age are no longer able to understand what we may most want to say to them, we realize how much there was in our hearts that we never shared with them. When we best articulate our ideas, we cannot escape the feeling that there was something there we never quite captured. When we most rejoice in sharing with someone different from ourselves, difference nevertheless scares us. The doctrine of the Trinity, however, proclaims that true personhood, however impossible its character may be for us to imagine, involves acknowledging real difference in a way that causes not fear but joy.”

Read Children and AIDS: Third Stocktaking Report, 2008 online here.

A little something from PBS’s Second Opinion–a program that healthcare chaplains would do well to take note of.

Our friend and future interviewee Mikel Ryuho Monnett offers a powerful, chaplain’s-eye-view of Proposition 8 over at The Buddhist Channel. This you don’t want to miss. Here’s an especially strong excerpt:

Given that our culture has an overwhelming interest in the promulgation of persons in committed relationships for the stability of the society as a whole, the state had to prove that they had a reason for singling out a minority within the society for special treatment. And that the state could not do—like the laws against interracial marriage that were still on the books in some states until the late 1960s, the court found that the laws against gay marriage did not hold up under the harsh light of reason. Indeed, such laws, which singled out a group of people solely on the basis of bigotry, were found to lack a just cause. From a legal viewpoint, such laws are immoral because they lead to a corruption of the basic tenet that our country was founded on: that “all men are created equal.”

As for the religious viewpoint, our Constitution provides that each creed is free to decide the issue for themselves and that the government may not interfere. Those who find their interpretations of the message of their founders (Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha or whomever) prohibits these unions are free to bar them from taking place within their houses of worship: those who interpret their traditions otherwise are free to have them in theirs. And while people are free to try and persuade others that their view is the righteous one, so too are others free to persuade them otherwise. They just are not allowed to use the coercive power of the state to impose that belief upon others without compelling and just reasons.