I first met him in his cramped subterranean office at the bottom of the old Bishops Hall on the Emory University campus. I was hoping to become his student. He was offering me coffee and surprisingly comfortable conversation. On the wall behind him, over his left shoulder, was a framed photo of two men on horseback—his father and Billy Graham, both heroes to him he told me. I did become his student. He became one of my heroes: a giant in the landscape of religious education, a man of amazing intellect, and even more amazing grace.
Jim Fowler was the son of a Methodist minister, a graduate of Duke University (B.A.), Drew University (B.D.), and Harvard University (Ph.D.). He taught at Harvard, Boston College, Drew University, and Emory University. He also did important work with the Center for Moral Development at Harvard, founded the Center for Faith and Moral Development at Emory, and was founding director of the Emory University Center for Ethics. When highlighting his own professional formation and career he always spoke of his work with Carlyle Marney at Interpreter's House, a retreat center for clergy renewal at Lake Junalusko, North Carolina in the 1970s.
Across his career he published eleven books, more than sixty articles, and a raft of book chapters and book reviews. Twenty-nine doctoral dissertations have been written about him in universities in the United States, Canada, and Europe. His centerpiece book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Development and the Quest for Meaning (1981) has been published in half a dozen languages and is now in its 42nd printing. But readers of this journal know all that.
In the late spring of 1974 James W. Fowler first published his emerging research in the pages of this journal articulating “a provisional description of stages in faith development” (Volume LXIX No. 2, 213). His theory was subsequently disputed, tested, employed, celebrated, and ultimately appropriated as part of the basic landscape of the field. Immediately after publication of Stages of Faith, important debates about the theory took place at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education, and were subsequently published in Religious Education, Volume 77 No. 2, 1982. Numerous other articles on faith development theory were published in the journal throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 2009, we paid tribute to Jim at our Religious Education Association banquet at the annual meeting in Dallas, Texas, where he received the Association's Harper Award. Jim spoke to us briefly, and his wife Lurline read the full text of his remarks. This was one of his last public appearances due to his advancing Alzheimer's disease.
Those who knew Jim personally knew him as a kind and grace-filled man, with a generous spirit to match his generous and wide ranging intellectual curiosity. I had the pleasure of becoming his colleague on the Candler faculty in 1998. But he had made me a colleague long before, even as a graduate student, as was his habit. Jim Fowler was a mentor, teacher, and enriching scholar to hundreds of colleagues, and thousands of readers. May his legacy continue into many generations to come.
Theodore Brelsford
Affiliate Associate Professor of Religion
and Education, Emory University, and
Pastor, The Orchard Park Community Church