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Dr. Lonnie D. Kliever, former chair of the Department of Religious Studies and award-winning scholar and teacher, passed away in July 2004, at the age of 72. Four of the many tributes to this remarkable man are reproduced below.
Eulogy by James Wiggins of Syracuse University, delivered at the SMU memorial service, July 12, 2004
Lonnie Kliever and I never lived in close proximity nor was I ever privileged to work in the same university setting with him, so many of you knew him on a day in and day out basis far better than I. But from the moment we first met late in the 1970’s when he was on the faculty of Windsor University and he came to Syracuse University, where I was on the faculty, to visit my colleague Gabriel Vahanian, Professor Dr. Kliever was a person to whom I was immediately attracted and with whom I felt a close affinity, and that grew into a cherished friendship in the years since.
I am extremely honored to have been invited to speak on this occasion. I am also humbled. My ability with language has never been more severely challenged than in these hours since Arthiss asked me to participate in the memorial service for this remarkable man. There are memories and experiences over decades of friendship and collaboration to draw from. Vignettes and anecdotes aplenty could be assembled for this occasion, but I have found no way to relate them in a way that would convey to others why they are so meaningful to me. Regarding so many of those it seems “You had to be there.” That was a dead-end strategy. A different route had to be found.
The generosity of heart, mind and spirit that Lonnie so consistently displayed enabled him to explore and reflect upon matters that often are left unexamined by others too timid and fearful to go there. Familiar as he was with almost unimaginable physical challenges all his life, he developed his many other gifts in transcendent ways. He once told me of the influence of his mother in telling him from early in his life that he would have to find his way by the use of his mind to compensate for the bodily challenges he was dealt. And that he did!
Another theologian from Texas, John Dunne, once posed the ultimate issue in this way: “If one day I must die, what can I do to live?” Lonnie Kliever was well acquainted with the reality of his mortality, and he overflowed with a determination fully to live. The tender affection and profound admiration he displayed for Arthiss and the love within which only a father can hold his daughters Launa and Marney are testimony to the quality of steadfastness in commitment that was so prominently a major aspect of his living.
His extraordinary capacity to establish and maintain friendships was another. I am sure there must have been someone who was not drawn to him from the moment of first meeting him, but I am unaware of whom that might have been. As related above, I had the great good fortune of being within that friendship circle for almost 30 years and it was one of the great good gifts I have ever received. And the way in which he extended our relationship to incorporate my wife Betsy when she came into my life almost 15 years ago was wonderfully important to us.
He was a great story teller and purveyor of many jokes, some great, and some awful. We frequently exchanged many of both kinds over the years. His sense of humor was one of his defining characteristics. My what a joy the man’s laughter was for me!
After he moved to SMU and became the departmental chair, our paths crossed frequently in the 1980’s and early 90’s, primarily through the American Academy of Religion, in which we were both deeply involved. We frequently spoke on the phone in the pre-PC days and then often exchanged e-mail messages. Since then on my at least annual trips to Texas, I never failed to see Lonnie, often with Arthiss. Both on the phone and face to face he invariably would say, “Wiggins—what’s happening?” Those were treasured times analogous to the quality that was conveyed in a best-selling book about a different kind of relationship that was entitled Tuesdays with Morrie. Some of you are familiar with that book , but more importantly with that quality of times spent with Lonnie.
Lonnie had a great interest in what was happening in the lives of all within the circle of his family and friends and in the enormous circle of his intellectual interests and concerns. He was a great teacher and a very accomplished administrator and university politician. His talents in all those respects were repeatedly honored by his colleagues at SMU and the larger academic world. He was widely known and deeply respected with in the academic world through activities on behalf of the American Association of University Professors and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. And within the field of the academic study of religion he was a very significant participant and important contributor in a number of arenas of study. He bridged the field of theology and the broader study of religion, no small feat.
Lonnie was intrepid in following his interests and instincts in his academic pursuits. He was masterfully accomplished in traditional areas such as theology, ethics and philosophy of religion. One of the two of his most widely known books published in 1981 is a magisterial analysis of the proliferation of new theologies in the 1960’s and 70’s that is entitled The Shattered Spectrum: A Survey of Contemporary Theology. That work indisputably cemented his stature and reputation in a traditional and conventional subject area.
But he became expert in less widely explored areas such as that of the rise of new religious movements, cults and sects. Many others of us stayed at arm’s length from such groups as the Unification Church led by the Reverend Moon. Lonnie went exploring and helped the rest of us better to understand the dynamics of that new community and its underpinnings. He closely followed the siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco in 1993 and helped the nation better understand that the intervention by the federal government was disastrously misguided in many respects. Subsequently he was often sought for consultation by numerous police and governmental agencies as they confronted issues related to new and little known religious communities.
Another arena in which he invested himself was that of religion and medicine, and particularly medical ethics. The second of his most widely known works is entitled Dax’s Case: Essays in Medical Ethics and Human Meaning (1989.) The issues in Dax’s case were complex. The book was a companion to a movie on Dax’s case for which Lonnie was the leader of a group of humanist advisors. Dax had suffered extensive third degree burns over much of his body and suffered enormous pain and disfigurement. While his life still hung in the balance he begged to be allowed to die. But the forces of medical technology and skill prevailed and Dax survived. However, the quality of life issues that were Dax’s constant companions for the remainder of his life deeply concerned Dr. Kliever. I have always thought that his reflections on Dax’s case profoundly mirrored some of his own struggles with the quality of life issues by which he was confronted through his physical conditions, especially the renal failure during the last several years that required constant dialysis and the array of other maladies that beset him.
He spoke frequently and wrote occasionally about euthanasia and assisted suicide. He profoundly explored the reality of human mortality. Nobody I have ever known more openly confronted and accepted death as a natural biological aspect of organic existence. No less he recognized the powerful role that the reality of death and dying plays in individual lives and in the creation of religious and cultural traditions as we all seek meaning in living. He was anything but morbid as he wrestled with the angels of disease, physical limitations, death and dying and demanded that they yield up insights to him and all the rest of us who inevitably will one day die. Then only a few days ago he decided that he wanted no more medical interventions and that he was ready to die.
The narrative of Lonnie’s life and work is a profile in courage both personally and intellectually. He walked the lonesome valley with grace, great good humor, amazing vivacity, and a wondrous capacity to connect with and selflessly support and sustain the family members, friends and colleagues who came into his magnetic field. We are simultaneously the poorer for his having left us physically, and the richer for all that he gave to us in so many ways. Words are inadequate to express the gratitude due to him. May he forever rest in peace.
Tribute by Paula Cooey of Macalester College, published in Religious Studies News, October 2004
Much has already been written and spoken in honor of Lonnie Kliever’s kindness, his greatness, his generosity of spirit, and his accomplishments; the importance of his life to so many of us as a family member, a teacher-scholar, a community leader and a friend; and the suffering he endured with sustained grace, especially at the end of his life. For those in the Academy who do not know him, his leadership and his example as an excellent teacher and scholar helped cultivate some of the very best features and values of the American Academy of Religion, as we presently know it, a subject I am sure others will address at some length. I will, however, attend briefly to his sense of humor as a manifestation of his courage.
Lonnie made me laugh. Almost every time we got together, his dry, ironic, self-effacing, distinctive wit made me laugh. He saw the world through a lens that I associate with the southern, rural Middle West, shared by Will Rogers, Molly Ivins, and Jim Hightower, just to name a few. Like them, he was particularly attuned to the comic quality of the grotesque. Without shrinking from the grimness of reality, a grimness with which he had a direct, intimate, and ongoing acquaintance, he figuratively gave it the finger by making us laugh—deeply, resonantly, powerfully. And he made us laugh not only with him, but also, gently at him and, more importantly, at ourselves—our shared pretensions, our silliness, our foibles.
One example will do. I borrow it from a friend. I have no doubt that it is authentic, for it is entirely consistent with my time spent with Lonnie over the years. As I understand it, from Bill Walker, a mutual friend and co-conspirator, during the sixties when Lonnie taught at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, a position I later held as well, he joined a peace vigil one Saturday afternoon, at that most sacred of Texas sites, the Alamo. (It was a one-hour vigil, held weekly). For those of you who did not have the joy of knowing Lonnie, he stood less than five feet tall, thanks to a chronic, congenital condition, a rare form of Ricketts that inhibits growth hormones. On this occasion, as Bill remembers it, he carried a sign. At one point, what he later described as a portly dowager confronted him. As he told it to Bill, she berated him relentlessly, culminating in an exasperated, “You, you draft dodger, you!” Seeing as it was a silent vigil, Lonnie did not reply, but as he told Bill later, a bit mournfully I suspect, he wished he had thought to say “Thank you, Ma’am.” Not long after that he took a position at Windsor University in Canada. His colleagues never let him forget the irony of the new location in light of the dowager’s excoriation.
It is easy to forget how difficult those times were. Though not subject to the draft, because of his height, or rather lack of it, Lonnie remained vulnerable all the same. At the time, institutions of higher education sought to deny tenure to young faculty based on their political views, their appearance, their activism. Lonnie’s limited height notwithstanding, he cast a long shadow as one who stood up for what he believed in from the sixties right on into the present, when he requested the withholding of artificial life support. In his absence and in the midst of present political difficulties, we would all do well to seek to measure up.
Tribute by Paul Courtright of Emory University, published in Religious Studies News, October 2004
People who knew and worked
with Lonnie Kliever have enough Kliever stories to
keep them going for a good long summer night under the Texas stars. Academic
scholar, public scholar, mentor, colleague, administrator, expert witness for
the courts, Kliever took on the study of religion with an exceptional skeptical
appreciation. He understood religion in both its genius and its goofiness. He
studied the margins: radical theology of the sixties, the Unification Church,
Scientology, right-to-die, organ transplants; when other scholars got to the
clearing in the woods Kliever was already there and had set up camp. He took
nothing for granted: not health, happiness, claims to certainty, academic or
administrative authority. There was something quintessentially American about
Lonnie Kliever. Child of the prairie, formed by home-grown evangelical
Protestantism, schooled in modern skepticism of theological verities,
natural-born teacher, he understood the crazy and profound mixture that is
American culture. He could spot a phony--scholar, student, politician,
churchman--a Texas mile away. There was an uncommon and unpretentious wisdom
both in his words and his silences. Lonnie Kliever was a category of one. His
last years were ones of unremitting pain from cancer and kidney failure. Even
when he was tethered to a dialysis machine he gave thanks for the gift of
embodiment, the love of family, the power of analysis, and the mystery of
belief. For those who were fortunate to know him and learn from him, as I was,
his living and dying are written in our minds and inscribed on our hearts.
Eulogy by Richard Cogley, Chair, Department of Religious Studies, delivered to the Dedman College Faculty, November 29, 2004
Lonnie D. Kliever was educated at Hardin-Simmons University, Union Theological Seminary in New York, and Duke University, where he received a Ph.D. in Religion and Philosophy in 1963. After spending a total of thirteen years teaching at three different institutions (Texas Western [now UTEP], Trinity University in San Antonio, and the University of Windsor), he joined SMU's Department of Religious Studies in 1975 as professor and chair. He served two terms as chair, the first from 1975 through 1986 and the second from 1993-1999. During his twenty-nine year career at SMU, he published four books on various theological and ethical topics, and wrote numerous articles and op-ed pieces; served on many university committees, including the Athletic Council during the "death penalty" phase in SMU's unfortunate football history; compiled a remarkable record as a teacher; and belonged to many regional and national committees in the American Academy of Religion, the major professional society for the academic study of religion. He received three of SMU's highest honors: the M Award, the Rotunda Teacher of the Year Award, and the Godbey Lecture Series Author's Award.
Lonnie was a twice-transformed academic. The first transformation took place in his early twenties, when he was a student at the Southern Baptist seminary in Fort Worth. It was then that he repudiated the conservative and evangelical Southern Baptist tradition in which he had been raised. After this Southern Baptist deconversion experience (he was, as it were, recalled by the Almighty, "Lonnie Kliever, I won't be needing you anymore"), he transferred to Union Seminary in New York, at that time the pre-eminent liberal Protestant seminary in the US.
The second transformation occurred when Lonnie was in his early thirties, teaching at Texas Western (where, incidentally, he met his future wife Arthiss). It was at about this time that the discipline of the academic study of religion began to take on a more global cast: Christianity was disenfranchised as the only religion worthy of thorough study, and all the world's religious traditions were elevated to positions of equality in departmental curricula (whether those of us in the business are supposed to regard all religions as equally true or equally false, I've never quite figured out). Lonnie belonged to the last generation of graduate students whose training had been in Christianity and in little else. But unlike many members of his generation, he made a point to educate himself in non-Christian religious traditions and also in comparative method in the study of religion. In fact, Lonnie spent most of his professional career teaching courses in areas in which he had no formal graduate training. I know that all the younger members of the department (a category into which I happily place myself for the purpose at hand) always marveled at the range and the depth of his erudition.
Lonnie was most reluctant to retire because he enjoyed his professional life so much. In his direct and down-home manner of speaking, he always said that he wanted to die with his boots on. His deteriorating health, however, obliged him to announce his retirement, effective in August 2004. He did not want to continue teaching if his health created problems for his students and for his colleagues. But in a way, our dear friend got his wish. When we lost him in early July at the age of seventy-two, he was still a member of the department.
I had more fun talking to Lonnie than to anyone I've ever known. He loved to argue about interpretive issues, to talk about academic politics, and to tell or hear a good story. In fact, I have many anecdotes about Lonnie that I'll happily share with anyone who wants to hear them, provided there are no restrictions on profanity or impiety.
Lonnie went through life with an astonishing equanimity. He was, or so it often seemed, the founder and sole member of a late twentieth-century philosophical movement known as neo-stoicism. His longtime colleague Bill May once told me that Lonnie was the most remarkable person he had ever met. I wanted to ask Bill what he meant by this, but I did not want to appear incredulous. I'm sure that what Bill had in mind were the same qualities admired by all of us who knew Lonnie well: his intellectual integrity, his emotional stability, his unfailing good humor, his enduring love for his wife and their two daughters, and perhaps above all else, his uncompromising refusal to indulge in self-pity despite his chronic physical impairment and his final illness.
The last gift that Lonnie gave to his SMU friends was the strength to deal with his passing. For this, and for his boundless enthusiasm for life, he will remain with us.