Robert McAfee Brown, selected with an introduction by Paul Crowley

Decades ago when I was a graduate student at Union Seminary in New York City, Robert McAfee Brown was the hot young teacher of theology. He was exceedingly popular—funny, learned, passionate and engaged, greatly admired and greatly beloved. The rumor among us graduate students was that he was likely to be the next president of the seminary. In our graduate-student myopia, we could imagine that the pinnacle of a theological vocation would be to ascend to the peacock seat occupied by Henry Pitney Van Dusen. Little did we know that Bob Brown was destined to a very different life and a very different vocation. He surely would have been ill cast to be burdened with the chores of an administrative office.

After his steadfast years at Union Seminary, Brown migrated to Stanford University, where he was drawn into matters of the public square. As a colleague and ally of B. Davie Napier, who was then dean of the chapel at Stanford, he used considerable energy making the case that faith (and therefore theology) must address political issues because it belongs to the nature of Christian faith to do so. Apparently the matter was contested at Stanford, home of the right-wing Hoover Institution. Later Brown returned to Union Seminary for a stint as a visiting professor. By that time he was fully engaged with a liberation hermeneutic and the activism that he derived from it.

Paul Crowley has produced a rich collection of Brown’s speeches and essays, organized according to five themes: “Foundations of a Prophetic Soul,” “Living the Gospel of Justice,” “The Struggle for Human Rights,” “Peace­making” and “Interfaith Solidarity.” The grand sweep of Brown’s talk and walk makes clear that he was engaged—with energy, passion and courage—in all of the great public questions of his day and that his faith authorized him for that engagement. His testimony is unerring in its linkage of faith and public life, revealing not only a clear thinker but a passionate believer. Brown was much informed by the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, his senior colleague at Union Seminary, but he pushed in new directions beyond Niebuhr’s realism.