Don Yoder (1921–2015)

Recently, I was examining, in a suburban shop, a late nineteenth-century German Bible published in Philadelphia, paging to see its variety of lithographs and chromolithographs and its rear section marking marriages and baptisms, as well as indented pages reserved for family photographic portraits. My mind soon turned to my beloved teacher, Don Yoder. What would he make of this wonderful object? What could he tell me about who would have used it? Did he know some information about the publisher? What new knowledge could he impart to me about its use in the home practice of its Protestant owner? Don had lived for so many years, and with such mental vitality, that I had begun to think of him as an eternal resource, as someone continually available for conversation and consultation about all matters scholarly. Being around Don Yoder was to remain an ageless student yourself, consistently in awe of his memory and his ability to impart his knowledge and experience, to make historical and cultural connections and scholarly references. He pored through each issue of the Journal of American Folklore—which he enjoyed receiving gratis after being honored with the American Folklore Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006—into his nineties. Don Yoder was a living encyclopedia of knowledge about so many subjects related to the patrimony of Western civilization. In the case of this Bible, he could beautifully contextualize it, speaking authoritatively about its place in relation to the German language in America, American religious history, the history of the Bible in this country, the German and Swiss and Dutch presence in Pennsylvania, oral and written biblical lore, and the vernacular religion of Bible talismanry and bibliolatry.

Figure 1.

Don Yoder and Leonard Norman Primiano, Cabrini University, September 18, 2014.

Photo courtesy of Cabrini University.

Donald Herbert Yoder, who wanted to be known simply as “Don,” died just shy of his 94th birthday on August 11, 2015. He left this world the way, I believe, he desired: no illness, no preparation, no doctors, no hospitals. He just passed one morning, a day after speaking to a visitor for some hours about one of his many passions: family genealogy. A genial gentleman scholar of a sort that seemingly no longer exists, Don had a wonderfully long and productive life that could best be described using the word that he frequently employed to explain religious folk art: “busy.”

Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1921, Don was a proud descendant of the German-speaking settlers who arrived in the colony during the eighteenth century. In the introduction to his collection of scholarly essays, Discovering American Folklife (Yoder 2015), he notes the profound influence that rural Pennsylvania had on his life. During summertime visits with his paternal “Deitsch” (Pennsylvania Dutch) dialect-speaking grandparents, he avidly absorbed the culture of farm life. At age 16, he joined the newly founded Pennsylvania German Folklore Society. He majored in American history at Lancaster’s Franklin and Marshall College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1942.

Don attended the University of Chicago for his doctoral work in American Church History, as the field was then called, coming under the influence of two towering figures in the study of the history of Christianity: William Warren Sweet and John T. McNeill. Religion would be a central guiding focus within Yoder’s scholarly agenda, and these two men molded his understanding of the Christian tradition. Sweet was so grateful and impressed that he asked Don, who was serving as his research assistant, to take a leading role in authoring his book, Religion on the American Frontier, 1783–1840, Vol. 4: The Methodists, published in 1946 (reprint; Cooper Square Press, 1964). With an interest in the history of the Christian ecumenical movement, Don’s 1947 doctoral dissertation was clearly situated in the mid-twentieth century, American Protestant, institution-centered, historical academic tradition: “Church Union Efforts of the Reformed Church in the United States to 1934.”

John T. McNeill (1885–1975) was equally influential for Don Yoder. When Professor McNeill left the University of Chicago for an important post at Union Theological...