A Remembrance of Clyde A. Holbrook
by William Harman

This essay first appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion LIX/a pp. 373-375. William Harman (Religion, '68) is Professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University.

Clyde Amos Holbrook made his academic home at Oberlin College in the Department of Religion he single-handedly designed and managed for 26 years until he retired in 1977. He was the first person to hold Oberlin's Danforth Chair of Religion. His longtime colleague Grover Zinn declared him "one of the most distinguished teacher-scholars to have graced Oberlin's faculty in the past half-century," and it is unlikely that anyone who knew Holbrook as a colleague or as a teacher would be inclined to disagree. I knew him during my years as a student at Oberlin in the late 1960's, and I recall him with affection and awe.

He was a big man, tall and frequently preoccupied, but always willing to chuckle about life's remarkable ironies and contradictions. His razor wit and keen analyses could cut through pretentious fluff to the bare, even sometimes embarrassing, essentials. When he went to work in the classroom, he commanded instant attention from the 40 or 50 students each semester who would pack his introductory course. He demanded much of himself and, by implication, much from his students. You wanted to offer him nothing less than your best, and he would tell you if he thought he was getting less.

After brief earlier appointments at Colorado College and Denison University, he arrived at Oberlin in 1951. He envisioned an undergraduate religious studies program as something quite apart from the theological model from which he had emerged at Colgate Rochester and Yale. Indeed, his book Religion as a Humanistic Field (Princeton) was one of the earliest sustained arguments for the teaching of religion as a portion of the humanities program in the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. He had a breadth of vision that anticipated by 20 years the move to situate religious studies in a cross-cultural context, and he encouraged his students to take seriously the study of primal religions as well as religions of the West, India, China, and Japan. His own scholarly mark was quite different, however, a theologian and student of New England Puritanism (out of which he had himself emerged) he wrote and edited several groundbreaking volumes on Jonathan Edwards.

Denison and Oberlin eventually conferred honorary degrees on him; he left a significant mark on both institutions. In 1966 he was recognized by the Danforth Foundation with the E. Harris Harbison Award for distinguished teaching. He served both as vice-president and president of the AAR. But many of us who remember him in the classroom knew then very little of the external honors the profession offered him. What we saw was a man dedicated to the task of taking seriously the reality of religious experience and religious conviction. He left us with the distinct sense that when it comes to religion, we could take it or leave it. But, he made it clear, before doing either, we must take the religious world seriously, seeking to understand it on the terms of those we studied.

Still, Holbrook was more than a great teacher and a practical visionary in the field of religious studies. Because he seemed to care so deeply for what he was doing, students brought other issues to him, drawn by the intellectual honesty and kindly wisdom he displayed so often in class. I recall sitting with a group of protesting classmates in 1968 wondering with them how the local police could have so brutally resorted to tear gas and fire hoses to break our blockade of an Army recruiter's car. Someone said, "Let's go talk to Holbrook!" and we all knew, immediately, that somehow he could help. We crowded into his office drenched, stinking, tearful, angry, confused, and sore. He listened to us carefully, and helped us understand what somehow we had failed to see: violence, he showed us, begets violence. It strikes me now as incongruous that this group of scruffy, angry protestors felt we could jam Holbrook's office and be quite at home, even welcomed, in doing so. He was, by all appearances, as establishment as you can get: a tenured white male faculty member in late middle age, always dressed impeccably in suit and tie, Chair of the Department, unapologetically affirmative of the value of tradition in the human community. And yet we all knew we could talk to him and that he would be able to help us understand our frustration and our grief. His was no ivory tower intellectualizing. He dealt with the world on its own terms, but he interpreted it in his incisive and distinctively matter-of-fact honesty.

When he taught about religion, Clyde Holbrook taught about people in their ambiguous, joyous, ambivalent realities. He loved neat theological categories, but he was always willing to expand them or to abandon them altogether, if necessary. What he did not abandon was an intellectual integrity that eventually catalyzed the establishment of religious studies programs in colleges and universities all over North America. Without him, the American Academy of Religion would not have been formed as early as it was, nor under such able hands. Those of us teaching the field of religious studies today owe Clyde Amos Holbrook an enormous debt.