1. Langdon Brown Gilkey was an American Protestant ecumenical theologian.
12 Facts About Langdon Gilkey
1. 2.
Langdon Gilkey's father Charles Whitney Gilkey was a liberal theologian and the first Dean of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel; his mother was Geraldine Gunsaulus Brown who was a well known feminist and leader of the YWCA.
3.
Langdon Gilkey attended elementary school at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, and in 1936 graduated from the Asheville School for Boys in North Carolina.
4.
Langdon Gilkey was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, and went on to become a professor at Vassar College from 1951 to 1954, and then at Vanderbilt Divinity School from 1954 to 1963.
5.
Langdon Gilkey received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 to study in Munich; another Guggenheim in the mid-1970s took him to Rome.
6.
Langdon Gilkey died of meningitis on November 19,2004, at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville.
7.
Langdon Gilkey was a prolific author, with 15 books and over 100 articles to his credit.
8.
In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure, Langdon Gilkey narrates his departure from the liberal Protestant belief system during World War II when he was made a prisoner of war in the "Civilian Internment Center" near Weixian for two-and-a-half years.
9.
Langdon Gilkey was respected academically for his work on Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, but was popularly known for his writings on science and religion.
10.
Langdon Gilkey argued against both Christian fundamentalist attacks on science and secularist attacks on religion.
11.
Langdon Gilkey was an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1981 McLean v Arkansas lawsuit against an Arkansas State law mandating the teaching of creation sciences in high schools.
12.
Langdon Gilkey held the view most world religions enjoyed "rough parity".