Eric
Owens:
Welcome to all of you. My
name is Eric Owens, and I have the honor of serving as the chair of the
American Academy of Religions Committee on the Public Understanding of Religion
which, among other things, serves as the jury for the AAR's Annual Martin Marty
Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. It's my great pleasure to
welcome you to this year's Marty forum. We gather today to honor the many
contributions of Wade Clark Roof to the public understanding of religion over
the course of his extraordinary career. This award was announced a year ago,
and Professor Roof expressed his great appreciation and his eagerness to join
us for the Marty Forum today. To our great sadness, however, professor Ruth
passed away three months ago, and we are forced to honor him posthumously
today. The moving obituaries published upon his death, including those from
Catherine Albanese at UCSB and Jack Jenkins at Religious News Service, among
many others, testify to his great influence as a scholar, a mentor, an
institution builder, a colleague, and a friend.
You will hear much more
analysis and reflection from our panelists in a few minutes who knew him well
and will speak to his impact on the public understanding of religion. But a
very short word of introduction will help to begin our conversation and set
this award in historical context. The Martin Marty award for the Public
Understanding of Religion, established in 1996, recognizes extraordinary
contributions to the public understanding of religion. The award goes to those
whose work has a relevance and eloquence that speaks, not just to scholars, but
to other publics as well. Their work can be undertaken in any medium; books,
films, radio, podcasts, et cetera, or any venue; academia, public service,
journalism, et cetera, so long as it is based upon scholarship in religion.
Winners need not be AAR members or professional academics, and nominations,
including self-nominations for future Martin Marty awards, are invited from
every AAR member. They're due by January 25th each year using a form on the AAR
site, and are compiled for review by the Committee on the Public Understanding
of Religion for review at our annual Spring Meeting. Nominations are considered
for two consecutive years, so please consider submitting a nomination in the
coming months for the 2020 Martin Marty award.
This year's Marty award
winner, Wade Clark Roof, was most recently distinguished Ameritas Professor of
Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he
helped to found the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion,
and Public Life and would serve as its director for 15 years. A sociologist of
religion and the author of fourteen books, he was widely known for a
scholarship on the cultural, civic and political effects of religious pluralism
in the United States, and in particular, on the spiritual lives of the Baby Boomer
Generation. Under his leadership, the Capps Center consistently brought
together multiple publics, scholars, students, Santa Barbara residents,
journalists, scientists, elected officials, and many more, for extended
conversations about key matters of common concern. The Capps Center was named
for Walter Capps, a professor for nearly thirty-five years at UCSB, who was
elected to Congress in 1996, but passed away unexpectedly just ten months into
his term in October 1997. I note wistfully that Walter Capps' death came just
one month before he was set to receive the 1997 Martin Marty Award for the
Public Understanding of Religion at the American Academy of Religion’s Annual
Meeting in San Francisco. Representative Walter Capps was succeeded in congress
by his wife, Lois Capps, who won a special election to fill the seat in 1998
and held it for twenty years until her retirement in 2017. We're honored to
have Lois Capps with us today. Thank you for coming. You honor us, your husband,
and Clark Roof by your presence today. Thank you.
This historical connection
and continuity in the tradition of the Marty Award is enhanced by the many
students and colleagues who are with us as well on the panel and in the
audience. So, for this important work and much more, the AAR's Committee on the
Public Understanding of Religion is delighted to honor Wade Clark Roof with the
2019 Martin Marty Award, which will be accepted by as longtime colleague,
Kathleen Moore, currently serving as the Interim Director of the Capps Center. Congratulations.
And, Professor Roof's family has directed the honorarium that accompanies this
award to the Sara Miller McCune internship program at the Capps Center. It was
a very generous act of them, so thank you very much.
At this point, I'd like to
turn things over to Professor Moore, who will introduce our panelists and get
our conversation started. We have much to talk about and there are many honors
to give, and thank you all so much for being a part of this today.
Kathleen
Moore:
Thank you very much, Eric,
and thank you to the Committee on Public Understanding of Religion for the
Martin Marty award. It is a difficult responsibility today. I am missing my
colleague, Clark, dearly, and mourning his loss. It is all of our losses,
actually, of a towering figure in the field and a wonderful colleague. So, it's
an honor to moderate this session and to receive this award on Clark's behalf.
Good afternoon. I grieve
the loss of our colleague as we celebrate his work, and I'd like to say a few
words about him in the context of the public understanding of religion before I
introduce panelists. Not only was Clark a colleague in the Religious Studies
Department at UCSB, he was also a role model whom I admired for a long time and
more than I can say. I was first acquainted with Clark and his wife, Terry, at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the late 1980s. Yikes! That was when
I was a graduate student and Clark was a professor of sociology. Many years
later, I was privileged when Clark asked me to join him as the co-academic
director of the Summer Institute that he had founded in the early 2000s, right
after 9/11.
I joined him in this
extraordinary project of the Summer Institute for the last five years of the
institute's life until the 2016 Election. I will say more on this in a minute
because I think it shows how global Clark's impact is on shaping the public
understanding of religion. First, though, I want to emphasize how important his
interventions have been in promoting the public understanding of religion, alongside
his impressive scholarship, his body of work on American religions, religiosity
and spirituality. As Eric mentioned, he's authored or edited fourteen volumes.
And, as Eric also mentioned, Clark had many publics that he spoke to, not just
the Academy. He founded the UCSB Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of
Ethics, Religion, and Public Life in 2002 in order to honor Walter Capps, who
was himself, an esteemed colleague, former chair of the department, and a very
well-known public figure and elected official. It was to honor Walter Capp's
role in advancing the study of religion in public life and advocating for
public humanities.
So, Clark served as the
founding director of the center until the time of his retirement, bringing to
campus a host of distinguished and influential speakers from around the world
to engage, not just our campus community of students and scholars, but also the
surrounding community of Santa Barbara residents and officials, and engaging us
in conversations around ethics, religion, and many of the most pressing issues
of our time, such as health care, climate change and political elections. Among
the long list of distinguished speakers is one who has joined us here on the
stage this afternoon. I want to depart from these examples for a moment, these
examples of Clark's accomplishments, to say something about how genuine Clark
was as a human being. It is that genuine quality and his of spirit, his empathy
that characterize how he advanced the public understanding of religion and why
he was so effective at it.
In the summer of 2015,
Clark and I were co-teaching at the Summer Institute that I had mentioned and,
in June of 2015, the news broke of a horrible mass shooting in Charleston,
South Carolina. So, I mentioned, this is during the time that we taught Summer
Institute and Clark, like the rest of us, was stunned by the news, but he was
also visibly shaken. A young white man had killed nine African Americans as
they prayed and read the Bible. Astonishingly, this young man had engaged in
Bible study with his victims for an hour before he fatally shot them. The
shooter's name was Dylan Roof. Clark, being from South Carolina himself, was a
deeply chagrined to learn, in the following days, that he was indeed distantly
related to the shooter. He wrote about this awful legacy of white racism in the
San Francisco Chronicle in an op-ed piece called, "The Charleston
Connection in Name Only." I would encourage you to Google that and read
it.
More to the point, Clark
and I were teaching several foreign scholars of religion who were participants
in the Summer Institute for the Study of the United States and the Study of
Religious Pluralism and Religion's Public Presence. So, Clark was addressing an
audience of foreign religious scholars, and he didn't simply dismiss his
emotions about the shooting and his distant connection. Instead, he shared his
sadness with our visiting scholars and took the opportunity to talk with these
foreign scholars about the intersections of white supremacy, demagoguery, and
racist violence in America. I don't think anyone will ever forget his candor
and vulnerability in that moment.
Now, about the Institute
for the Study of Religious Pluralism, Clark founded this institute with funding
from the State Department in 2002. It was an important undertaking, which
brought religious scholars from around the world to study religion in America
for six weeks, first at UCSB, and then going on field trips to Los Angeles,
Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. This was an extraordinary
opportunity and it operated for over fifteen years. With 18 participants each
year, that means that the total was well over two-hundred alumni of this Summer
Institute, and those people are scattered across the globe, now teaching about
religious pluralism in their countries and spreading the news of the public
understanding of religion. That is Clark's legacy. I also want to say that many
of his students will attest to Clark's generosity of spirit, and I want to
thank his former student alumnus, PhD Dusty Hostly, for making the nomination
for this award.
Now, I'd like to turn to
our panelists and introduce each one of them now, and then they will take in
turn, the podium to make some comments before we open the floor for comments
from the floor, at which time—you can see there are some microphones in the
aisles—we'd like you to use the microphone because this is being recorded, so
it's important to get your voice on the recording. So, on my right, my
immediate right, is E.J. Dionne, who actually needs no introduction, but I'm
going to take a stab at it anyway. E.J. Dionne, Jr. earned his PhD at Oxford
where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, a syndicated columnist for politics for the Washington Post, and
the university professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at
Georgetown University, and visiting professor in Religion and Political Culture
at Harvard's Divinity and Kennedy Schools. He is a nationally known and
respected commentator on politics and appears regularly on National Public
Radio and MSNBC. Dionne began his career with the New York Times, where he
spent fourteen years reporting on state and local government, national politics,
and from around the world, including stints in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. His
bestselling book, Why Americans Hate Politics, was published by Simon and
Schuster in 1993. The book, which News Day called, "a classic in American
political history," won the L.A. Times Book Prize and it was a National
Book Award nominee. He is also author and editor or co-editor of several other
books, including, They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next
Political Era. Keeping my fingers crossed on that one. And his latest book is
titled, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the
Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not Yet Deported, which
he authored with Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein, and was published in 2017 by
Saint Martin's Press.
On the far end, we have Professor
Julie Ingersoll, who is professor of Religious Studies and Religious Studies
Program Director at the University of North Florida. She earned a PhD at UC
Santa Barbara under the direction of Clark Roof, as well as Walter Capps, Kathy
Albanese, and Phil Hammond. Her dissertation was published by NYU Press as,
"Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles.” In that
project, she explored ethnographically, the stories of women leaders in
evangelical institutions where the legitimacy of their roles is contested. Her
most recent book is with Oxford University Press and is titled, Building
God's Kingdom Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction. Professor
Ingersoll is currently working on two projects. One is the rise of the ex-vangelical
movement, and the other is reimagining and repurposing of martyrdom and
persecution narratives in contemporary politics.
Next to Professor
Ingersoll is Dr. Shawn Landres, who earned his PhD in religious studies from UC
Santa Barbara, under the direction of Clark Roof. He co-founded the nonprofit
consultancy Jumpstart Labs and is a senior fellow at UCLA Luskin. Shawn's
current research and publications cover religion and charitable giving, civic
leadership, and public sector innovation. While a graduate student, Shawn co-authored
with Clark a book chapter on leaving religion, and was his lead student
assistant on what became the book Bridging Divided Worlds. Shawn
served as a project co-director during the first few years of the UCSB study of
the United States Summer Institute on Religious Pluralism. Today, he is a
municipal commissioner for the county of Los Angeles and the city of Santa
Monica. But what Clark really would want you to know about Shawn is that Bill
Clinton's 1992 campaign theme song, "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,"
was Shawn's idea. Thank you very much for that, Shawn.
So, first of all, I would
like to introduce, to welcome to the podium, professor E.J. Dionne.
EJ
Dionne:
Now, there's no way I can
top that achievement, Shawn. That's amazing. I can't tell you what an honor it
is to be able to participate in this tribute, but I'm going to try to explain
why it is such a great honor for me, and sometimes, you just have to begin by
stating the obvious. Clark, as you all know, discovered the religious seekers
in our country and their importance because he was a seeker himself: a seeker
of friendship, a seeker of wisdom, a seeker of transcendence, and a seeker
opportunities to engage with others and to teach and to learn and to love. He
was also a seeker of justice. Here is my favorite thing that Clark ever told me
about himself. Before I got to know him well, I mistakenly referred to him as,
"Wade," and he didn't want anything to do with that, and he explained
why. It turns out that he was named after the redeemer governor of his native
South Carolina, a man named Wade Hampton. As many of you know, the word “redeemer”
in Reconstructionist history is not about liberation from sin. It is the
opposite of liberation. Hampton was the governor of South Carolina who ended
Reconstruction and ruthlessly re-imposed white supremacy on Wade's—see, I did
it—on Clark's home state. Clark wanted to have nothing to do with this legacy,
nothing to do with white supremacy, and nothing to do with Wade Hampton, and
that is why we have all come to know him as Clark. His commitment to racial
justice was by no means theoretical. He was an ordained Methodist minister and
was in a church in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Clark's problem, if you'll
forgive me for putting it this way, is that he may have been too Christian for
his time. Julie tells the story, and I'm grateful I spoke before you because
you might have told this story yourself. To quote Julie, "He wanted to
integrate the church, and the elders just wouldn't have it. He was invited to
leave, so he decided to go to grad school." Imagine that, grad school as
sanctuary. But it worked for Clark and even more for the study of religion. It
was the big winner out of Clark's decision and we were all the big winners
because of that decision. There's a great story that appeared in many of the
tributes to Clark after he died that should warm the hearts of every scholar
and every student in this room who has a problem with quantitative methods.
When he applied to UNC's great sociology department, he said in a
conversation... He said, "I had no idea I would have to take four courses
in statistics and methods for which I was ill prepared." He sat down with
Tad Blaylock who was head of the department or an important figure to find out
more about the program. "He mentioned these courses," Clark went on,
"but didn't say they were required. And I stupidly said, ‘Well, I doubt
I'll be taking those courses.’ ‘I've often wondered,’ he added, ‘how I got
accepted.’" We can thank God that the department let that go by. He hated
that for many sociology departments, for some time, religion was, as he put it,
"little more than a dependent variable." Fortunately, that changed
and it's a blessing that he could say toward the end of his life, three years
ago, in a blog that, "This is the most exciting time to teach and conduct
research on religion, politics, and culture in my 46 years of teaching." We
can only wish that he could have had ten or even twenty more.
Unlike so many of you, I
came relatively late to my friendship with Clark. I got to know him after he
became the Founding Director of the Capps Center at UC Santa Barbara, and there
could not have been a better match. Before he was elected to Congress, Walter
Capps was a legendary professor of Religious Studies at Santa Barbara, where he
offered a legendary class. It was a class on the Vietnam War and its impact on
American values and religious views. The guests at that class were just an
astonishing list of important Americans, but they were many important Americans
who are not famous Americans; all sorts of people who were involved in the war
in one way or another were visitors to that class, and a gentleman named Jim Kay,
who was a Vietnam-era conscientious objector described Capps, Walter Capps,
really well. He said, I quote him, "Walter wasn't just a scholar of the
humanities, he was a practitioner of the humanities. His view was as big as the
universe." That described Clark very well too. So, he was the perfect
person to head up this center. And I should say that it's such a joy that a
former Congresswoman Lois Capps is with us today. As Eric mentioned, she
succeeded her husband in Congress, and she is the author of a great book called
Keeping Faith in Congress, in which she reflects on how
public officials should struggle with the balance, with the need for
conviction, and also the obligation to have an open heart and an open mind. She
called for and described what she referred to as servant leadership, which at
this time in our history is a truly radical idea. In a very cynical time, Lois
Capps is the exact opposite of the cynic, which is one reason why she
appreciated Clark. You could say that Clark was a servant leader at the Capps
Center, where he proved himself to be a builder, as well as a scholar. He
created an extraordinary institution that, as Eric suggested earlier, has
deeply embedded itself in the Santa Barbara community. This too was very
Clark-like, he never stopped being a minister and a pastor. His congregation
just became the whole university and the whole city of Santa Barbara. We are
instructed by scripture to welcome the stranger and no one was more welcoming
than Clark. I was among the many who love visiting the Capps Center, both to
honor the extraordinary Capps family, and also because it was such a joy to be
with Clark and the extraordinary group of scholars, neighbors, and friends he would
gather around those he invited as guests. Hospitality is a biblical virtue and
Clark practiced it. Martin Marty after whom this award is named described how
hospitality involves more than making sure a guest has a great meal—although
Clark always did that; hospitality, Marty said, is a word used to describe a
human behavior that has the potential to bring about real understanding among
people who do not share a common faith or culture. It's hard to think of a
better description of Clark's mission.
It's also appropriate I
think that we speak about Clark the day after a session on Laurie Patton's
important new book, Who Owns Religion. And, by the way, if you hang
around Washington a lot—as I do—the words “President Patton” have a really nice
ring to them. I know I am vastly over simplifying her extensive research and
her rich argument, but I do think it's fair to say that she proposes what I'd
call a small democratic view of the interaction between scholars and believers
rooted in respect for both the academic critical enterprise and the lived
experience of the faithful. She wants to highlight the possibility at least of
being deeply critical and caring at the same time. What gave Clark’s
scholarship such power is that he was constantly in search of understanding
human beings, where they were, where they are. As his own courage showed, he
knew that religious institutions could fail and so could people, but he didn't
look down on the struggles and confusions and uncertainties of those seekers
whom he introduced to the world. As I've said, he identified with them in many
ways. I have always admired Father David Hollenbach’s call for intellectual
solidarity, which requires of us engagement and careful listening and even, God
forbid, a willingness to change our minds. I think intellectual solidarity is
what Clark was all about. I’d like to close with his words. And again, I so
wish he were around today so we could ask him to tell us more. A decade ago,
Clark wrote this in the immanent frame:
Might it
be possible, even within this sensitive realm of belief and non-belief, that we
could come to appreciate the other, maybe even discover that in engaging the
other, we come to know ourselves better? That our lives achieve
fullness, not separately, but together. That the veil between belief and non-belief in
everyday life is far more porous than the rhetoric of each suggests. For sure,
in exploring this common complementarity, we learn again what it means to be an
American and possibly have a better sense of how to describe and celebrate the
transcendence that really holds us together. It says something about the moment
we are in that appreciating the other is almost a revolutionary act.
We can pay tribute to
Clark by celebrating the idea that, in engaging the other, we can come to know
ourselves better and perhaps even bring our country back together. We certainly
have to try. Thank you.
Julie
Ingersoll:
Good afternoon. Thank you
for being here with us for this event. How to comment on a life so well lived?
I'm both grateful at having been asked to do so, and daunted at the utter
impossibility of doing it well enough. I started and restarted this more times
than you can imagine. As news of Clark's death spread on social media, former
grad students shared many stories and much affection, calling him colleague and
friend, mentor and friend, teacher and friend. More than a few commented on the
holistic way in which he mentored his students. I've re-read the remembrances
written by Jack Jenkins at Religious News Service and by Cathy Albanese,
Clark's colleague at UC Santa Barbara, and they were both lovely tributes. Rather
than trying to detail Clark's many accomplishments here, I encourage you to
read them if you haven't.
But today is about the way
that Clark contributed to the public understanding of religion. I see this as
fitting in that, while there were many awards throughout his life, there is
none that seems more appropriate as a crowning achievement, not one that better
recognizes the central themes in all of his work, not one that better
recognizes the relationship between who he was as a scholar and who he was as a
person. This award is named for Martin Marty, long time professor of religion
at the University of Chicago. I've known several of Marty's students and met
him myself a time or two over the years. And it occurs to me that the two of
them were actually quite similar, in the ways they engage their students and
the broader public, despite their disciplinary differences. Clark was trained
as a quantitative sociologist and his earliest work was decidedly in that style.
His American mainline religion remains the standard on that topic. Likewise,
nothing has surpassed a generation of seekers which, given the changes in
boomer culture and knowing how he liked to keep up to date on popular culture, I
like to think he might revise as, “Okay Boomer.” Clark was part of a generation
of scholars who led what we've called ‘the ethnographic turn in the study of
religion.’ He saw the value of bringing people to life in his work; the idea
that not everything that counts can be counted. He was never the kind of
scholar to withdraw to the proverbial ivory tower, often describing himself as
just an old country boy. He'd rather be chatting it up at a barbecue joint. He
was humble and I don't mean a feigned humility. His humility was real. He was
an effective interviewer because, when he asked questions, he really did assume
that the person he was asking knew something that he did not. From my point of
view as a graduate student, at a research assistant, this was his best quality
as a teacher. He took on students in whom he had confidence and whom he knew
and whom he thought knew about things he didn't. He gave us instructions and he
set us free.
[Choking up] Sorry. I factored
in time for that.
More than anything, I
remember all the wonderful times spent with him and Terry in their home: from
the American Religions meetings that rotated between their home and Kathy
Albanese's and Phil Hammons’, to the long dinners [at] Clark and Terry's dining
room table; when a visiting scholar was in town and I was lucky enough to be
included—which was often because I lived in a rented little cottage in their
backyard—Clark was a storyteller who loved other people's stories, so those
long dinners were full of them. He had this wide-eyed impish grin at the
suggestion of something transgressive. I'll tell you a secret: he was a gossip.
But it was never the malicious kind of gossip. He really took joy in people
crossing boundaries, violating rules, and doing the unexpected. I can just
picture him saying with a giggle and a whisper, which he did one night at
dinner with a table full of guests, "You know, Gordon Melton is studying
vampires." [Laughter from audience]. This is why he's so readily helped
change the sociology of religion to recognize personal narrative as important.
It's why he was always ready to work with the media, why he so readily gave
non-academic lectures. It's why he began working with young scholars from
across the globe through the Fulbright Program. They came to learn from him,
but I promise you, for him it was about hearing their stories. And it's why his
work has been so influential beyond the Academy.
On social media, after his
death, so many of us noted that we learned more from him outside the classroom
than inside. And certainly, this is key to a significant part of his legacy in
the public understanding of religion. From those of us whom he mentored in
doctoral programs, to scholars he connected with around the globe, and various
colleagues he worked with throughout his life, Clark influenced all of us to
think about scholarship as something that belongs out in the world.
My dear friend, Diana
Butler Bass, to whom Clark introduced me nearly thirty years ago, ended her
recent book on gratitude with this exhortation: "Give thanks, live in
gratitude. There is a place for you at the table." So, this afternoon I
offer thanks to Clark and Terry from all of us who have, at one time or another,
either literally or metaphorically been at their table. Thanks again for being
here.
Shawn
Landres:
I too struggle with how to
begin, and the way I want to begin looking around this room is to ask everyone
who studied with Clark, if you are able to stand up, if you took a class from
him, if you learned from him in some way. Look around this room. This is a
legacy. And I hope we'll hear from so many of you in a few minutes, but I want
to acknowledge that this is the community, this is family for Clark and for
Terry.
Roberto Collazo asks,
"How did it all begin?" so I will go back to that question in a
couple of ways. Looking at this room—and I kind of think Clark would get a kick
out of having accomplished getting two of his graduate students on the AAR main
stage, I think he would have really enjoyed that—I am reminded of a story that
he liked to tell. As an undergraduate at Wofford college, he was part of the Welcoming
Committee for John F. Kennedy's early campaign for president. This was in 1960.
And when the team showed up, the number of students who were available to fill
a room was somewhat fewer than the number of you here. And the room in Clark's
retelling got bigger and bigger and bigger. I think it may have been twice the
size of this one by the time he was finished telling the story. What they did
was to take all of the students and pack them into the end of a very narrow
hallway. I don't remember if this was Clark's innovation or Ted Sorensen's or
someone else's, but at the end of the day, it looked like Jack Kennedy had a
huge crowd at Wofford college, and there was no stopping the campaign from that
day forward. He loved telling this story.
He was mentioned by
President Clinton in a State of the Union Address. That is to say, the work he
did in Generation of Seekers. He loved politics. He loved—we spent hours
talking about politics. We spent hours speculating about whether Walter would
win or whether Walter would win again, when he tried again in 1996, and we were
so happy when he did and crushed when we lost him just ten months later. And I
was also Walter's last graduate student, and so I stand here thinking about
Walter Capps and Clark Roof and Phil Hammond and Ninian Smart and Jerry Larson
and Ninez Talamantes, and so many others whom we've lost over the last number
of years. And remembering Ninian again, how do we begin? I have a memory at the
Grand Ole Opry with Clark and Martin Marty watching country music at the SSSR in
other moments of transcendent piercing of the veil between categories.
It's striking to me that
when Julie and Diana and I spoke to Jack Jenkins after Clark's death, we all,
without having spoken to each other, said the same three things. When I read
the story, I thought that it was really striking. We talked about: of course,
his work on generations, which really was work on pluralism, whether it was
intergenerational or temporal pluralism or religious and ethnic pluralism; his
commitment to a much more sophisticated dialogue about race; and, fundamentally,
the linking of quantitative methods and ethnographic methods to advance a truly
narrative approach to the study of religion. So, what I'd like to do though, is
focus not on my memories—I have a couple of comments—but on the memories of the
students, the scholars to whom Cathy alluded, who are participants in the
religion in the United States Summer Institute. Those students were from all
over the world. Many of them, perhaps the slight majority, were from Muslim-majority
countries. And Holly Grether and I were Clark's co-directors that first summer,
and we were working on this program the summer after 9/11, and we were moving
people around the country. We went from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, to Salt
Lake, to Indianapolis, to Atlanta, to Washington DC. We learned a lot. We
learned a lot about the TSA and religion that summer. We also learned that we
needed to understand that the number of documents required to rent a fifteen-passenger
van is directly proportional to that car rental agency’s southernly distance
from the Mason Dixon Line. But what we also learned in the years to come, whether
we'd gone to a megachurch and a movie theater, or a conference center, or the
Arlington National Cemetery, or the Carter Center or Ebenezer Baptist Church,
was that what this was about for Clark was about catalyzing new knowledge and
relationships in the service of greater understanding of the complex social
worlds of faith.
I received comments from a
number of people. I received comments from a former Dean of the Faculty of
Islamic Studies in Sarajevo, Enes Karić, who says that his academic manners
reminded him of a methodology followed by Muslim Sufi Sheikhs, that when we
talk about anything from the position of faith, it would remind us that
everything [that] walks on dust will become dust, and that all religions speak
about the Great Coming and [at] the same time the Great Leaving, and that
somewhere there between the two, we will overcome our disappearance and dust. I
heard from a friend who is associate professor at Notre Dame University in
Lebanon who, at the time that he participated in the program, could not go home
because there was a war and the airport in Beirut was blocked for many weeks, and
Clark was someone who became a rock for him, even though he couldn't get back
to his family. That Clark knew how to open spaces so we can talk
and debate for hours and hours without being scared or being judged or
rejected. That thirteen years later, Clark allowed him—many of his colleagues—to
form relationships with many of his colleagues and to help him become a firm
believer in bridge-building, trying to use all the opportunities he has to
promote the dignity of being different, and guiding his students for a better
understanding of religious pluralism. From Turkey, a similar comment from Reje
Bostimor who pointed out that, for many Muslim scholars in Muslim majority
countries, the study of religion happens in departments of the theology and
that through Clark, he and his colleagues learned how to do it differently.
But the words that I want
to share in the end come from a professor named Hajer Ben Hadj Salem, whom we
met in 2002. And I want to read directly from her words because I think they
speak so beautifully to everything that's been said and will be said today. She
writes—and Hajer is an assistant professor now at the High Institute of
Humanities in Tunis and she's teaching in Muscat as well—she says:
He struck
me as an epitome of academic modesty in generosity. I was an outstanding
student, but I could not find a specialist in American religious pluralism in
my country to supervise my research project on religious pluralism and American
Muslim strategies of integration after 9/11. I wanted to break new
research ground in my country, but the academic environment thwarted my
academic dreams and crippled every move forward. It was only after I met
Professor Roof that I was catapulted from the quagmire of the impossible to an
academic realm where everything was possible. She returned following the
Fulbright Summer Institute as a Fulbright Scholar. Upon my arrival to Santa
Barbara in September, he welcomed me at the airport. I stayed at his place for
almost a week until I found an apartment within walking distance from his
house. Of all the candidates, predominantly WASPs, the American landlady chose
me as a housemate because my supervisor, Clark, went with me and
highly recommended me to her, even though I came from that part of the world a
few months after 9/11. In reality, I never felt that professor Roof had any
prejudices against us or treated me as a second-class
student because I am a Muslim. On the contrary, he respected our beliefs and was aware of the
diversity within Islam. He enjoyed eating the food I used to cook, and I
remember how much he loved my mother's homemade sweets and how much he wanted
to visit her in my hometown during his academic visit to Tunis in 2005.
Clark assisted Hajer. She
came to the AAR and presented at the AAR, and she writes that doors were open
because he opened them for her and for her colleagues. Reading again,
"After I went back to my country and submitted my PhD dissertation, they
kept me waiting for almost two years to schedule a defense date for me on the
grounds that they did not have experts in that field. I remember that, in one
of his emails, Professor Roof told me, ‘This is outrageous. I can come to Tunisia
and be on your committee.’”
So, a few months after she
finally defended her PhD, she traveled to Santa Barbara with her husband in
2010. I quote, "Professor Roof insisted that I should come to Santa
Barbara to share my research findings with authorities on the field. To my
great surprise, he invited Professor Albanese and distinguished professors of
religious pluralism to his house. It was a real defense. After the presentation
and the discussion, we were invited to a buffet in the living room. I really
felt flattered that day. Pointing to a variety of Santa Barbara-made Middle
Eastern sweets, Professor Roof told me smiling, ‘These are the best sweets I
could find here. I know that your mother’s are by far better.'" With the
loss of Professor Roof, she writes, "I lost the man who helped me shape
who I am, a man who changed my life for the better, a man who helped me achieve
my dreams. I lost a role model whose legacy will live on. May Allah continue to
shower his blessings on his soul."
Twenty-five years ago, my
lifelong friendship with Clark, but also with Julie and Diana Butler Bass
started around a kitchen counter when a flight traveling back from Indiana to
Chicago crashed, and there were no cell phones, and Clark didn't quite manage
to pick up the phone and call and let Terry know that he was okay. We spent
four hours in that living room with Terry waiting for Clark to walk in the
front door, which he did at eleven o'clock. Nearly twenty-five years later,
we've now lost him, but we have gained an extraordinary legacy and we've gained
an extraordinary gift of carrying who he was forward in the world. So, I close,
as his funeral did, with—following Professor Patton last night—a poem from a
song, just one verse; if we perhaps could pierce the veil from night to dawn,
this was Clark's favorite hymn: "Morning has broken, like the first
morning. Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird. Praise for the singing,
praise for the morning. Praise for them springing, fresh from the world.” Thank
you, Clark.
Eric
Owens:
Now we're going to open
the floor for comments, but it's my great pleasure and honor to offer the first
informal remarks to my friend, our former Congresswoman from Santa Barbara,
Lois Capps. Lois, would you mind? There's a mic, I think, right here, if you
would say a few words.
Lois
Capps:
Thank you very much each
one of you for bringing back so many memories for me, but also for this kind of
bittersweet honoring of Clark. Up until just a few days—or not that long ago—he
should be here in person to receive it and to hear our accolades, but I'm also
triggered by other kinds of memories, because this is the Martin Marty Award,
and I remember when Martin Marty came to lecture early on at UC Santa Barbara.
That takes me back to when, in 1964, way back, my husband was finishing his PhD
at Yale University and he saw an opportunity for a position at the University
of California in Santa Barbara and a brand new department had just been
organized, I think the year before. Now this is just memory, so I may not be
absolutely correct, by a sociology professor who thought there should be a
separate, a distinct department of Religious Studies. And what got to Walter,
and I'm sure to Clark as well, was the notion that this was a public
institution, that the study of religion would be not connected with any
particular advocacy of any particular community. So, he joined Robert
Michelson, who was the first person hired, and was very involved with the AAR
as well, early on. I don't quite remember the year, but it was early on that
Clark and Terry came, and eventually—there are other neighbors here—we lived
within a few blocks of each other in downtown Santa Barbara, and I have shared
often at that bountiful table at their generous gatherings. And Terry herself
worked in the community in a similar way; we didn't do the same kind of work
exactly, but we were connected as well. They made a wonderful team together for
all those years of hospitality, of generosity, of spirit, of openness, of that
impish grin with the twinkle of the eye, and an extended hand to all. It's such
an honor to see so many people here whose life was touched by and connected
with his. So thank you for carrying this tradition forward. I remember asking
Sean after his death, I said, "You were going to do this to honor his
life. Now it will be to honor his memory and his legacy." And it is, as
you said, for us to carry it forward. Thank you.
Kathleen
Moore:
If anyone else would like
to share anything, please step to the microphone. While we're waiting for
somebody, I would like to ask any of you, if you have any responses to what you
heard from the speakers here today, did that trigger any other memories?
Speaker 1:
I just want to say how
moved I was by both of you. It was a beautiful tribute, and I would love you to
say more on this idea that he asked questions of others because he actually
felt he could learn from them and how it was humility that fed a certain self-confidence
about his own mission, so there was no arrogance about him, but he had a self-confidence
about his mission that almost was rooted in this humility. I'd just love to
hear you talk about that a little more.
Intercom:
Attention, please. May I
have your attention, please? The fire alarm has been cleared by the center security.
Please continue with your planned activities. Thank you for your cooperation.
[Laughter from audience]
Attention, please. May I
have your attention, please? The fire alarm has been cleared by the center
security. Please continue with your planned activities. Thank you for your
cooperation.
Speaker 2:
If you mention humility at
an academic conference, the fire alarm goes off.
Speaker 3:
You stole my moment for a
joke because I was going to suggest I had planned that so I had a minute to
think. Well, I'm not sure what to add to that, and maybe some other people in
the room actually can do that better than I, but I just find so often that
people ask questions that they think they know the answer to and they're looking
for someone to confirm what they're saying or disconfirm it so that they can
argue with them. People often have an agenda with a question and, even at its
best, I think the agenda might just be to better understand something. But
usually I think we generally think that we know a good bit about what we're
asking about and he just didn't. He just really thought that if he asked you a
question it's because he wanted to know, and he didn't think he knew. I'm
sorry, I can't elaborate much, but maybe somebody else in the room can. I'm
sure there's so many people here who study with Clark. I'm sure that's not
unique.
Speaker 4:
While you're walking over,
I'll just offer one example, which is that I always personally, I mean I wear
the academic title and wear the academic title loosely, and Clark always knew
that. I mean, after all of the twenty-five years he knew me, I was a graduate
student for nineteen of them.
[Laughter from audience]
Speaker 5:
A good gig if you can get.
Speaker 6:
That's right. But I was
working outside the Academy on a couple of occasions, and in one in particular
when I was working with an organization that was interested in synagogue
revitalization, I had organized a retreat and invited Clark to be one of the
panelists. And he very clearly came with this attitude of curiosity. It wasn't
that this was research for him. It was, he was, genuinely interested. He could
have walked in and been the expert, but he walked in and he was– this was
another opportunity to learn. All of our conversations about politics, all of
our conversations about the different things that I was doing outside of the
Academy, he always– there is always an opportunity to have a more interesting
conversation over food, always, and a good drink. But that was this position of
radical curiosity that, for him, was a hallmark of who he was.
Kerry
Mitchell:
I'm Kerry Mitchell,
Indiana University. I started studying with Clark in 1996. One of the things
that he said that really stuck with me is that we tend to think that the most
religious people are the people who believe the strongest and who express their
strong beliefs the most clearly. He said he didn't think that was the case. He
said it didn't make sense, that in fact, people who doubt, who aren't sure
about what they believe, who's maybe the strength of their belief isn't as
strong as those of others, there's no reason to think they're any less
religious than anyone else. That struck me as both intellectually insightful
about the nature of what we were studying, but I think it also implicitly
showed an appreciation for human vulnerability and for really the full
humanity, and that's what I remember really strongly from him is that he wanted
to engage people, not necessarily always in their brightest, shining moments,
but also in their sometimes duller, grayer, uncertain moments as well. I felt
that that grew out of an appreciation for a full humanity, the fullness of
humanity. But, in addition, it was a great implicit message for an aspiring
scholar, which was that you don't have always have to know exactly what you're
doing. You don't always have to have the strongest clearest belief, that we all
are searching here, fumbling around in the dark a little bit, because that's
what we need to understand, not just the bright, shining jewels that we find.
We need to embrace our own journeys in their more uncertain moments as well, so
I felt wonderfully supported in a very full way by that message.
Speaker 6:
Thank you. I heard a joke
last week—actually, it's apparently a very old joke, but it so much sounded
like, just in appreciation for what you said, a Clark joke—the joke is to say
that sitting in church makes you religious is like saying that sitting in a
garage makes you a car. It's really interesting. I think he would have liked
that joke, but you guys would correct.
Kerry
Mitchell:
There would have been a “Ha!”
Kind of a guffaw.
Eric Owens?
There was one thing, Kerry—as
you're saying this—that occurred to me. There was something he was fierce
about. He was fierce about his students. If you were his doctoral student, if
he was your committee chair, he didn't make you negotiate your drafts with the
other members of the committee. They had to submit their comments to him and he
would decide which comments would get to you. I say that because we talk a lot
at the AAR about the formation of new scholars and the training of graduate
students, and as encouraging as he was of all of us to get into the field
quickly, some before we'd even grown up, and he brought us on as coauthors of papers
and research assistants who would get writing credit and contributors to his
edited project. He was very clear and a fierce advocate for his students and
making sure that that their success was as possible as they could make it.
Speaker 7:
Hey, thank you all for
terrific reflections and memories. Sorry, this mic is a little loud from here
at least. I'm just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit, especially as
colleagues from UCSB, about the local connections that you've mentioned in your
talks, the town, relationships with community members and religious leaders and
government officials in Santa Barbara, and how that helped shape his
understanding of publics, and of religions, and of the job of the scholar, as
public scholar, and as engaged citizen.
Eric Owens?
Anybody? Anybody?
Speaker 8:
Well, Clark and Terry were
members for years of Trinity Episcopal Church. They held meetings in their home
in the late 90s, early 2000s, moving the church toward a full inclusion of
LGBTQ+ members. That was a deep commitment for them. It was a national
conversation, but it was well before even a progressive community like Trinity
was becoming a leader in that conversation. So, the living room, then the
church, then the country. Terry's work with young juveniles involved in the
justice system and coming out of the justice system, I think profoundly
affected both of them. It was a humane way of being in the world. He told this story,
I remember he got on jury duty and most people would try to figure out a way to
not stay on the jury. We probably shouldn't do that, right? We need to be on
juries. We need to have those voices present. But he knew that if he said,
"Well, I'm Professor Wade Clark Roof, and I teach Religious Studies at the
university up the…," you know, he was not going to get kept on that jury.
He told me the story. He'd come back. He really wanted to be on the jury, so
when the lawyers asked him what he did, he said, "Well, I just said, ‘Aw
shucks, I work up at the university up the road.’”
He stayed on the jury. But
that was Clark. He could turn on the accent when he wanted to, or not, but it
was because his life was all of it. It wasn't the ivory tower and the town. And
I think—I'll bring this to a close because I'm so glad to see somebody else
wanting to say something—but I think in the formation of the Capps Center too,
I had the chance to spend time with him, with Lois and Laura and members of the
community, and they were really trying to think about ways to bring the
community and the university in conversation with one another. The Capps Center,
at its very core, was premised on the very public understanding of religion.
Without it, it didn't mean anything. I think it's interesting to see the
iterations of the Capps Center and now the Lois and Walter Capps Project, which
is a new, independent effort, all of which are rooted in this idea of public
engagement. To quote Lois quoting Walter yesterday afternoon in another
session, "Because democracy, after all, is born and reborn in
conversation."
Speaker 9:
Could I just say something
real quick? I was so struck in my visits out there. You guys knew him with an
intimacy that I never did, although he made you feel like you were his intimate
friend very, very quickly, so I kind of still felt that way. But I was struck
by his deep practicality about how the Capps Center would succeed, and it
couldn't succeed if its only base was within the university, and that it could
only be successful financially, as well as in every other way, if a large
number of people in the community were invested in it. So, he organized events,
dinners, and the like, with a really sharp eye on “who from the community can I
bring in? Whom from the community can I bring in that will help this
institution endure?” I found it, on the one hand, it was very much part of his
deeply open and gregarious nature to do that. But it was also part of his
immense practicality about how, in a very difficult time in academia,
particularly a public university—think about what was happening to public
universities in the period when he was running the Capps Center—he knew what he
had to do to make this work, and I really respected that. Thank you.
Tricia
Bruce:
Tricia Bruce, a student of
Clark's, finished my PhD in Santa Barbara in 2006. One thing that I especially
appreciate about Clark, both as a student of his, but also regarding his impact
on our entire field, is the way in which he carved out a space for religion in
sociology, which is a harder task than it should be. The first encounter that I
had with Clark was actually when I was an undergraduate student at Southwestern
University in Georgetown, Texas. It so happened that Clark was doing a speaking
tour of sorts for his latest book and came to my institution, my college, and I
thought, "Wow, what is this thing ‘sociology of religion’? What is he
talking about?" After that time, I went to my sociology professors and
said, "Hey, can I take a class in sociology of religion?" To which
they said, "No, we don't have one." And so we created a readings
course, and I read one of Clark's books in that readings course, and then sent
him a letter in Santa Barbara talking about his work and in gratitude for that,
and then beginning a conversation that would ultimately lead me to the graduate
program in Santa Barbara. I was, of course, in the sociology department, so
that meant that I physically left the department to go find Clark in Religious Studies
to have a mentor in the sociology of religion because we really didn't have a
lot of conversations about religion in the sociology department. He modeled in
that way, carving out room for religion in sociology and for sociology in
religion, and he was able to do that in a way that respected multiple
methodologies, of quantitative and qualitative, that respected this kind of
listening that we've already heard. And that said that, "Hey, these two
areas have a union that needs to be explored, instigated, and respected because
if we're not doing that, we're not studying society right. We're not doing sociology
quite right.” I am forever grateful to him for that impact.
Speaker 10:
Thank you. Could I say one
other thing? Oh, is there somebody else? Go ahead.
Robbie
Jones:
That's right. This is
Robbie Jones. I was not a student of Clark's, but I was the beneficiary of his
deep generosity. I just want to say a deep word of gratitude. This year we're
celebrating the tenth anniversary of Public Religion Research Institute that we
started. And when I first started the organization, I was looking for the best
thought leaders out there and immediately thought of Clark Roof, but I didn't
know him. And I got an introduction to him through Diana Butler bass and
reached out to him. He generously agreed and was one of the founding board
members of PRRI, and stayed on the board for six years, and just played a huge
role in helping us get off the ground. I thought I'd be remiss today if I
didn't say a deep, deep, thank you. As an example of him, he had no axe to
grind. He had made his name it was, it was just really generous, generosity of
spirit and willing to help something else get off the ground while he was still
running the Capps Center out on the West Coast and helping something get
started in D.C. Just very, very generous and I'm deeply grateful to have had
that experience with him.
Speaker 11:
If I could say, just for a
moment though, I know how important PRRI was to him and he spoke very
affectionately of it and being able to go to Washington and speak at the events
at PRRI. And that's, I think an example of what you were asking about before, can
we describe how he connected to government officials and people beyond the
Academy to engage in these kinds of conversations? And a lot of it was that he
was listening, and he was open to people in the field who were doing a survey
research and, and as well as government officials.
Speaker 12:
And I should say really
quickly on that, it meant a great deal to him. Walter Capps meant a great deal
to Bill and Hillary Clinton. And, in the height of the nineties, when Walter
was running and won and they were campaigning for President Clinton's
re-election, there were opportunities that they had to meet and talk, and there
were other opportunities as well, but that was incredibly, I think, important
to Clark, not because he was the president—I mean, it was really cool that he
was the president—I think there was a sort of a Southern-boy-made-good moment
there that they connected in some way. And because, of course, Bill Clinton was
the first "boomer" president, so it was this achievement of a
particular generational moment. And of course, when we lost Walter, they came
back and campaigned for, I remember that, I think it was Hillary Clinton came
and campaigned for Lois in the special and that was also a very meaningful
opportunity for them as well.
Speaker 13:
Can I just say that my
personal debt to the Capps family is actually very significant because Laura
Capps, the daughter of Walter and Lois Capps, gave me my most important life's
ambition because of her love for her father. I got to know Laura when she was
working for George Stephanopoulos in the White House, and our first child, our
son, was born about two weeks after the 1992 Election. And whenever I went in
the White House to talk to George Stephanopoulos, I had often– fortunately he
couldn't come right away, which I was happy about because I could talk to Laura
outside his office and I heard Laura describe her dad—and I told her this, when
he died—I heard Laura describe her dad with such love and respect and affection
that I told her later that she gave me the most important ambition I had in my
life, which was to have my kids someday talk about me the way she talked about
her dad, but there was just– if you want to know who Walter Capps was, just
think about a daughter describing a father with that kind of love and respect
and admiration. So, thank you to the Capps family.
Barry:
Hi, I'm Barry, a student
of Clark's. Graduated from Santa Barbara in 2008. Clark was a great storyteller
and a few people have mentioned his proclivity for telling funny stories and
there's one in which I just can't, I'd be remiss to not remind us of a story
that he's probably told all of us on multiple occasions. He told the same
stories, some, so he—and this is actually about a previous winner of the Marty
Award, Robert Wuthnow—one of the things he said he didn't like about the West
Coast is they would wake up in the morning and he would go to shave and look in
the mirror and think, "Dang, Robert Wuthnow has three hours ahead of me.
He's already been writing for three hours!" Right? And so he would
sometimes build on that story and say that if Terry was ever out of town, he
would just not shave cause he had to look at himself in the mirror and didn't
want to have that thought. So once, apparently, she was out of town for a few
days and he went to the Blue Dolphin for breakfast, if anybody remembers that
place, and that he sat down, hadn't shaved in days, enjoys his breakfast and
gets up to leave. And one of the waitresses says, "Oh it's fine, honey,
the man who just left paid for your meal." He was a great storyteller, and
it's that kind of outside-the-classic classroom humor that I think that really
put in an impression on students.
Speaker 14:
We'll never read Robert
Wuthnow work the same way again.
Catherine
McCylmond:
Yeah, never again! That
was great. I'm Catherine McClymond that graduated from UC Santa Barbara in
1999. And I've been sitting here thinking that I was never a student of
Clark's, but I was, and that's what really was amazing. I studied with other
people, but somewhere along the line, and I can't even remember where, he just
brought me in and including me in this research and for over ten years, I was
the point person in Atlanta for his Summer Institute tour. And every time he
came through, we took time to go and eat ribs at the rib shack, and get a beer
or bourbon somewhere, and just tell stories. And I'm just sitting here thinking
how that was classic Clark, that he just figured out a way to bring you in and
include you and embrace you and what you were doing.
Speaker 15:
Real quickly—just jumping
off that cause it keeps coming to mind—the sort of flip side of that is, I know
we haven't really talked about this, but he was extraordinarily adept at
pushing his grad students out and making sure we met everybody that we should
meet and dragging us up to SSSR and introducing us to everybody. And one of the
things that happened on social media when he died was there was a bunch of
people who had been Nancy Ammerman's graduate students at the same time [that]
we were all Clark's grad students. And, of course, he and Nancy were close
friends. And through those years at SSSR, we became really close friends with Nancy's
grad students who are all at Emory. So, he had this way of building these
communities everywhere, which was really beneficial to all of us, I think.
Cheryl
Townsend Gilkes:
Hi, my name's Cheryl
Townsend Gilkes and I was not a student of Clark's, but when you had asked his
students to stand, and then you said, “and who has learned from him,” I almost
stood up. But I met Clark in the context of his administrative excellence as
the Executive Officer of SSSR. And I'm so glad you've mentioned SSSR, cause I
was afraid we wouldn't hear the name here, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion,
where I had the benefit—I was not trained in the sociology of religion, and I
sort of backed into the field and sister Maria Gusta-Neil was President and I
was her Program Chair 1983 and once you get the program together, you have to
get it to the Executive Officer so that it can go to the printer. And this was
in the days before the computer, so we used 3x5 cards and things to make sure
we didn't schedule people against one another, and he always teased me because
I was so afraid to put it in the mail. I got on the bus and rode out to Amhurst
and he and Terry met me at the bus station and we had such a good time. But as
you talk about his storytelling, when he gave papers, when he gave lectures, he
said things in such memorable ways that you find yourself repeating them when
you're lecturing to your students. And I just want to say, I did learn from him
and loved him so much.
Dusty
Hosely:
I'm Dusty Hosely and
currently at the University of Southern Mississippi, and Clark's last graduate student.
I just graduated last year, and it was the honor of my life to have him on the
stage with me putting the hood over me. And I don't have a lot of photographs
in my place, but that photograph is right on my desk. It was such an honor to
start working with Clark, to prepare the materials to nominate him for this
award, to go through his CV again, finding some items that he had not had on
his CV, he'd forgotten to publish them or something. Anyway, building a CV,
reaching out to all of the people that he had touched. Reaching out to scholars
in Europe, scholars across America, reached out to Lois, to Robbie, reached out
to Mr. Hamdani, and Sarah Miller McCune, local business leaders in the Santa
Barbara area. The Mayor, Helene Schneider wrote. I reached out to eminent
public figures like E.J. and Bill Moyers and Jim Fallows. All of these people
committed to either signing onto the draft letter that we created, or wrote
their own letters and submitted them in support. Over two dozen people, easily,
supported this nomination, and he was so touched. He never imagined he would
get this award. He never imagined he would get it on the first time that he got
nominated for this award. And happily, in addition to this award, he also won
from the Association for the Sociology of Religion, their Lifetime Achievement Award.
We nominated him for that as well, also on the first try. I am so grateful for
all of you for being here. I'm so grateful for AAR and the Public Understanding
of Religion Committee to give him this award. I know that he was so, so
incredibly grateful to have won these two awards, to have the public
recognition of his work, of his person, of his humanity, and I know how much he
was looking forward to being here and how sad we all are that he's not able to
share this day with us. Thank you.
Speaker 16:
Thank you for doing all
the work, for putting this together. For those of you who don't know, Dusty
coordinated this application, this nomination.
Speaker 17:
I'm struck. I'm seeing
folks around the room. I see colleagues. I see José. I see Barbara. I see
students. And what struck me was that not everyone, not every student who stood
up and said that Clark was their teacher, had Clark as their doctoral
supervisor, or even on their committee, and they're here. And I think that says
something. Clark was, for many years, Chair of the Department, and I think that
that says something about the kind of culture that he helped build in the
institution of UCSB. Professor Gilkes, you mentioned your work with him, he was
administratively brilliant as Chair of the Department. He was excellent. He
inherited a department that was not in good shape financially. He left a
department that was in good shape financially, still struggling in the context
of broader, higher education, but he turned it around and he created in doing
so. He created a culture. We who came through the department, we were taught to
engage with one another. I was Clark's T.A. once, and Barbara's T.A. the next
quarter. And that was—I saw Tom Carlson here earlier—I mean, to think of the
disciplinary breadth, right? And the increased sense of inclusion, that we were
all students and learners at the same table, engaged in this enterprise of Religious
Studies, even though he was a sociologist, right. That was his field. He was
curious about everything and he inspired that in all of us.
Steve
Prathrow:
Hi, I'm Steve Prathrow.
I'm sorry I haven't been here for the whole event, but it seems like the
tribute time. So, I was invited to come out many years ago. Sean might remember
when it was, but to be a Capps fellow in the Center, and Clark was just a
wonderful host to me and to my family. And I'm struck, given this award in the Public
Understanding of Religion, that it was really at a time in my career when I was
thinking about ways that I could not write books for forty people and write
them for a broader audience. And I think my time at Santa Barbara and, really
because of Clark, was really instrumental in transforming my own career, so I'm
very grateful for my time there, and also for having known Clark.
Speaker 18:
Every time you brought out
a new book, we would know about it, because—Steve, seriously—he looked to you,
as well, as someone who was committed to that same enterprise of making, making
the difficult to understand, somehow comprehensible, and not being afraid to
shy away from saying hard things. It's not necessarily that he would have
agreed with everything. He didn't agree with everything anywhere, but to see—you
know, I think you, for him, have been an example of what that work looks like
in the wake of, I think, the foundation that he was trying to build and the
foundations that you've built alongside.
Speaker 19:
Well, it seems like we've
heard from many– we've heard from a lot of precincts, and it's been an honor
and a pleasure to be up here on the stage with all of you. I would encourage
everybody to join us at nine o’clock. Between nine and eleven, there's a UCSB
reception, where we will continue to share our memories about Clark, and also Ines
Talamantes and Jerry Larson, two other of our colleagues who have passed on. This
is in the Hilton.
Speaker 20:
Bayfront Indigo, 202B.
It's not in the program book, it's only in the app. Hilton Bayfront Indigo 202B.
And I think, I also, in my litany of people who've passed, may have not
mentioned Phil Hammond, and I also think that as we, as we recall, the
extraordinary Americanist legacy at UCSB that Clark was a part of, to think
about the work that he and Phil Hammond, in particular, did to help put Santa
Barbara on the map and to create this extraordinary legacy of colleagues and
friends.
Speaker 19:
Thank you everybody.