Robert C. Gregg, former professor and dean who catalyzed a multifaith strategy to spiritual life on campus, has died

Robert Gregg (Picture credit score: Courtesy Stanford Information)

Robert C. Gregg, a scholar of early Christianity who welcomed many religion traditions and whose imaginative and prescient as dean for non secular life at Stanford continues to have an effect many years later, died from a stroke March 20 in Palo Alto. He was 84.

Gregg got here to Stanford in 1987 and served as dean for non secular life till 1999 when he resumed full-time instructing and analysis because the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor in Non secular Research within the College of Humanities and Sciences. He retired as a professor in 2005.

Throughout his tenure at Stanford, he was continuously on the coronary heart of efforts to adapt non secular life on campus to a extra numerous inhabitants.

He employed the primary non-Christian affiliate deans within the non secular life workplace, expanded Baccalaureate from a largely Christian-focused service to a celebration that mirrored the various religion traditions discovered on campus, and developed programs that enabled college students to delve extra deeply into numerous religion practices and histories. He created and served as founding director of the Abbasi Program for Islamic Research.

These mirrored a rising recognition of and appreciation for a campus neighborhood that had begun to vary over time.

Serving a various neighborhood of many and no faiths

Gregg summed up the modified atmosphere in Soul Man on Campus, a STANFORD journal Q&A, in 1993.

“What now we have at Stanford,” he noticed, “is a neighborhood whose range additionally extends into non secular groupings that are multifaith, decidedly multifaith – with a big block of people who find themselves of no religion, no specific religion connection in any respect.”

Pals and associates bear in mind Gregg as somebody whose mind and allure helped him navigate administrative complexities and resist pushback.

Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, employed by Gregg as the primary non-Christian affiliate dean in 1996, was an early instance of the transitions he drove. She described Gregg’s strategy to his work as scholarly and considerate, affable however direct.

“He was very cautious and scrupulous and important, in the most effective sense, however he by no means stood on ceremony. He by no means took himself too significantly and by no means let anyone else take themselves too significantly, which gave him an in into every kind of conditions that may have been actually tense in any other case,” Karlin-Neumann mentioned. She recalled how his “clear blue-grey eyes have been typically light and laughing, however could possibly be piercing when somebody was inauthentic.”

Rising by schooling and motion

Gregg was born in 1938 and grew up in Houston. He earned a bachelor’s diploma in English literature on the College of the South in Tennessee in 1960, the place he protested disciplinary motion taken towards professors who met with space Black leaders for discussions vital of racial segregation.

Again dwelling in Houston throughout a break in 1960, he met Mary Layne Shine, who was visiting from Illinois. They have been married in 1961. Years later, when interviewed for a Stanford Historic Society oral historical past, he mentioned, “… she and our relationship, and my privilege of being married to her, is the only most vital factor in my life.”

Gregg acquired a grasp’s from Episcopal Divinity College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1963 and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1964, after which he traveled to Mississippi to take part in voter registration efforts throughout Freedom Sumer. After starting doctoral research at Brown College, he transferred to the College of Pennsylvania, the place he earned a PhD in non secular thought.

He served as chaplain and taught faith and philosophy at St. George’s College in Rhode Island, earlier than changing into assistant professor of New Testomony language and literature at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Illinois. He subsequently moved to Duke College, the place his instructing and analysis targeted on the early Christian church and the social historical past of religions.

Flattening boundaries and constructing neighborhood

In 1987, the Greggs moved to Stanford, the place he would turn into recognized, within the phrases of former college President Richard W. Lyman, as “non secular chief, all-purpose counselor, mediator, peacemaker and comforter of the stricken.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is greeted by Dean of Non secular Life Robert Gregg on April 19, 1994. (Picture credit score: L.A. Cicero)

Dean for Non secular & Non secular Life Tiffany L. Steinwert got here to know her predecessor as a mentor, sounding board, and pal.

“We, within the Workplace for Non secular & Non secular Life, stand on the shoulders of Dean Gregg. With out his imaginative and prescient, tenacity, and deep appreciation and admiration for the plurality of religion, the workplace because it exists at this time, in all its multifaith expressions, would merely not be potential,” Steinwert mentioned. “Dean Gregg was among the many first deans within the nation to acknowledge and reply to the rising non secular wants of campuses. He understood that non secular life have to be inherently numerous, making house for these throughout many non secular traditions and none in any respect.”

Gregg revised his title from dean of Memorial Church to dean for non secular life (later expanded by Steinwert to incorporate “non secular life”). Along with Rabbi Karlin-Neumman, he employed the primary Muslim and Black affiliate deans in his workplace. He additionally invited the Dalai Lama to his first go to to Stanford, in 1994.

Colleagues recall him flattening partitions, actually, to create prayer and worship house for an array of non-Christian believers in Previous Union. Not solely did he spearhead reconstruction of Memorial Church after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, working intently with college Trustee Melvin Lane to boost funds and full in depth repairs shortly, however he additionally opened MemChu to same-sex dedication ceremonies.

Mixing scholarship with an ‘openness to otherness’

Along with his administrative duties, he continued his instructing and analysis by appointments to the Classics and Non secular Research departments, and acquired the Richard W. Lyman Award for College Volunteer Service in 1996. He authored 5 books, together with influential research on the competitors of religions within the late Roman-early medieval Mediterranean and Levant, and edited a sixth.

Over time, his focus expanded to handle questions he heard round campus.

As invites to attend dorm dinners turned frequent, he developed an off-the-cuff presentation titled “The place are Your Non secular Edges?” These discussions and others round campus led him to create the category I Am Non secular Not Non secular. What Does This Imply? that examined the interaction of non secular establishments, morals, and values, and of individualism and communal existence.

Three Sacred Tales, one other class he created, helped college students take a look at the interplay of faiths by tales frequent to Christian scripture, the Hebrew Bible, and the Qur’an. This work led to his remaining ebook, Shared Tales, Rival Tellings – Early Encounters of Jews, Christians and Muslims, revealed in 2015, which explored these themes within the artwork and texts of these faiths.

“Bob had this openness to otherness throughout non secular traditions, but in addition throughout race, ethnicities, and cultures,” mentioned Luke Powery, ’96, who got here to understand Gregg from a number of angles, first as a Stanford pupil within the Nineteen Nineties and, since 2012, as dean of the College Chapel at Duke.

A lot of Gregg’s time at Stanford overlapped with then-Provost Condoleezza Rice, now Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Establishment, who remembers him as “an expensive pal and non secular information to me for a few years.”

“Bob introduced a novel mixture of deep religion, mental curiosity, and an appreciation of the non secular range represented on campus,” Rice mentioned. “He was a beloved member of the Stanford neighborhood and shall be vastly missed by the various college students and college members whose lives he touched, together with my very own.”

Serving 30,000 congregants throughout the Farm

From his scholarship and imaginative and prescient to his collegiality and management, Gregg lived a full life that didn’t match into neat, easy classes, mentioned his son Clark Gregg. “He was a world-class theologian, a liberal Texan who was enthusiastic about golf and every kind of music, particularly jazz, and he performed a imply harmonica.”

Gregory Wait, senior lecturer emeritus within the Division of Music, got here to know Gregg whereas serving as director of the Memorial Church choir and noticed many sides of him throughout “a whole lot of rounds of golf.”

“The conversations concerning the politics of the day, latest discoveries of nice jazz tracks from the web, his most up-to-date article or chapter of his award-winning ebook, all revealed a person of compassion grounded in progressive beliefs based mostly on his religion, about which he hardly ever spoke,” Wait mentioned. “Unfailingly constructive, he may giggle, curse, reward, and dissect an argument with razor-sharp wit and accuracy.”

Throughout Gregg’s time at Stanford, he targeted on individuals. Powery discovered him to be “all the time very type, interested by me as a pupil.” As Gregg made clear within the oral historical past interview, that curiosity stretched throughout the campus neighborhood.

“I made a decision that I’d simply examine the place and get to realize it as extensively as I may – departments, any of the general public occasions, assembly college students in dorms for dinner, no matter. Attending to know the individuals who labored within the college, individuals within the outlets, and folks in workers stage,” Gregg recalled.

“I bear in mind coming dwelling and telling my partner at some point, ‘You realize, should you take significantly the truth that you ought to be accessible to everybody at Stanford, that’s 30,000 individuals. That’s a really giant congregation.’ But it surely turned true.”

Gregg is survived by his spouse, Mary Layne Gregg, a son, Clark Gregg, daughters Courtney Gregg and Amy Gregg Masterson, and 4 grandchildren. A second son, Andrew Gregg, died in 2020. A service is deliberate for two:30 p.m. Saturday, June 3, at Memorial Church.