Rosenstock-Huessy Lectures

Three visiting theologians came to the College last month to speak about contemporary religion, as participants in the annual Rosenstock-Huessy Lecture Series at Dartmouth College. The lectures, sponsored by the Tucker Foundation in cooperation with the Preston Kelsey Professorship in Religion held by Dr. Fred Berthold, are a memorial to the late Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who was professor of social philosophy at Dartmouth for 22 years, 1935 to 1957.

The series was opened April 11 by the Reverend John Snow, professor of pastoral theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., who spoke on "Social Darwinism and Its Challenge to the Church." He was followed on April 21 by the Reverend Eugenia Lee Hancock, assistant minister at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, whose topic was "The Possibility of Healing and the Indifference of the Church." The final speaker on April 25 was Prof. Harold Stahmer '51, chairman of the department of religion at the University of Florida, whose subject was what he called "the revolution" in the Christian thought of Dr. Rosenstock-Huessy. Stahmer studied under Rosenstock-Huessy at Dartmouth and went on to become a lifelong scholar of his works and ideas.

Beyond his own scholarly work, Rosenstock-Huessy is remembered as a supporter of the philosophy of William James and as the key figure in the establishment in Vermont of the voluntary, experimental work camp known as Camp William James. He sought to perpetuate a variation of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps as a framework for universal national service that would advance the idea of "the moral equivalent of war."