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  • A Keeper of the Flame
  • Gerard S. Sloyan (bio)
Keywords

TUDOR (Temple University Dept. of Religion), Oberammergau, Indonesia, Vatican CDF, ARCC, St. Xavier College Symposium, Leonard Swidler

An account of the major influences on Professor Leonard Swidler as an ecumenist and protagonist of interreligious dialogue and his long-term membership in TUDOR, the Temple University Department of Religion (1966–), is very much in order.

When the chair of TUDOR offered me a position as a full professor there, a title I had been awarded at the Catholic University of America some three years before, I knew that if I accepted the offer I would know only two of my new academic colleagues. One was Swidler, a layperson with a university degree in theology from the Catholic state faculty of the University of Tübingen. I knew from the grapevine and a few of his publications that there was such a man and that he had come the year before from the faculty of Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University. He and I had never met, but I knew of his publishing record even in his thirties on matters touching on the life of the Catholic Church, membership in which we had in common. He turned out to be my close friend at Temple University from day one.

Identifying him as my sole academic co-religionist upon my arrival in Philadelphia is not quite accurate. I was hired by a department committed to teaching about the world’s major religions—but dispassionately with respect to the religion to which each department member was committed. I began my teaching duties in a company of five that included T. Patrick Burke, an Australian Catholic who held a doctorate in Catholic theology from the state faculty of Munich (the other person I had known previously); Samuel Laeuchli, a Swiss who had studied under Karl Barth but who, upon coming to the United States, had earned a degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City; Robert Gordis, a congregational rabbi who had edited Conservative Judaism’s revision of its prayer book; Maurice Friedman, who had served on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, Westchester County, NY, who was a specialist in the writings of Martin Buber; and Swidler. A year or so later, there were two additions to the burgeoning faculty—Jacob Agus, a European-born congregational rabbi in a Baltimore suburb, who represented liberal Judaism; and Isma’il al-Faruqi, a native of Jaffa in Palestine who, upon immigration to the U.S., had enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School to learn what he could of Christian faith and practice, but who shortly transferred to the department of philosophy at Indiana University, where he earned a Ph.D.

Most influential of all on the department’s aims and purposes was the man who assembled the others: Bernard Phillips, a Jew of Minneapolis whose doctorate in philosophy was from Yale University. As a result of his wide reading habits he had become acquainted with the basics of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and was teaching courses at the University of Delaware calculated to reduce the ignorance of undergraduates there of the religions practiced by many millions outside North and South America. When Temple University—founded by Philadelphia [End Page 29] Baptist minister Russell Conwell and named for his church, the Baptist Temple—became an institution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the early 1960’s, its president and later chancellor, Millard Gladfelter, knew he had to close down Temple’s small mission seminary for reasons of church-state conflict. (The Con-well School of Theology moved to South Hamilton, MA, to merge with Gordon Divinity School, forming in 1970 the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.) Being a committed Lutheran, Gladfelter was unwilling to see religion study leave the campus, so he inaugurated a religion department of the kind described above, leaving Phillips to retain any seminary faculty member of his choice for the TUDOR staff.

One other development that had an influence on Swidler’s teaching was the symposium arranged by Burke while on the faculty of St. Xavier College in Chicago (Religious Sisters of Mercy) to bring a number of European theologians who had been...

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