February 13, 2002

In the death chamber at San Quentin just after midnight on January 28, a confessed killer was executed by lethal injection. He was convicted two decades ago for the murder of an 81-year-old woman during a botched burglary in which he cooked noodles in her kitchen as she died. California Governor Gray Davis, a liberal Democrat and steadfast backer of capital punishment, denied clemency in the case—as he had for two other death row inmates in the past three years.

In the safe, posh setting of the seminary, the Bible can seem straightforward enough. For example, my class one day was considering 1 Samuel 5, which is about the capture of the ark of YHWH by the Philistines, who brought it to the town of Ashdod and placed it before Dagon, the Philistines’ god. In a strange nighttime turn of events, the statue of Dagon is turned on its face before the unblinking ark of the Lord, and then Dagon’s face lies shattered before the unimpressed ark.

Many of the most moving experiences I have had with students in class have involved encounters with members of other religious traditions. When teaching at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois, I used to invite Rabbi Herman Schaalman to speak to first-year seminarians about the importance of Jewish-Christian dialogue since the Shoah.

The encounter that most decisively shaped my teaching occurred during my very first year in the classroom. I was fresh out of graduate study at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the lines of my life, as the psalmist says, had fallen in pleasant places. It was a lovely spring afternoon in 1972, when the North Carolina azaleas and dogwoods were in glorious blossom, and the late April breeze was wafting into my office past the maple tree outside my open window. All seemed indeed right with the world.

Our parents are our first and most important teachers, but they cannot teach us everything. Sometimes they are not equipped to teach us some things we need. Sometimes they teach us things that we do not need. So we move at age five or so to additional teachers.

With books like Blessed Rage for Order (1975) and The Analogical Imagination (1981), David Tracy became widely recognized as an important revisionist theologian—one who revised Christian categories in view of modern categories of thought.