“My Excitin’ Life”

That’s an historic picture — you can tell by the hair, the typewriter, and, yes, the size of the collar — that ran on the Fall 1994 front page of Samsara, what was then the annual newsletter of the University of Tennessee’s Department of Religious Studies (see the issue here and 1993’s here); it ran along with an article entitled “A Report from the Head.” Charlie Reynolds (1938-2017), who earned his Ph.D. in religious ethics from Harvard in 1968 and who was a longtime member of their faculty (starting in 1969), passed away the other day, from complications associated with Alzheimer’s.

He was the Head — and not the Chair, as I remember him once correcting me — from 1980 to 2000, and he was the person who first hired me in this field.

I’ve never forgotten his generosity and demeanor; now’s the time to share a story or two.

I met Rosalind Hackett (UTK’s current Head) at the North American Association for the Study of Religion‘s annual meeting in San Francisco, in the Fall 1992 — the first time I went to a national conference. I was then a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, writing my dissertation, and we were introduced in passing, likely by Don Wiebe (who was involved in NAASR’s founding and was one of my committee members at the time). I have no idea who all came to mind when, some months later, Tennessee realized it needed a one year Instructor to start in August of 1993, but — as I understand it — somehow she ended up phoning Don and somehow my name came up as a possibility.

Don told me about it and she called me.

And that eventually led to her Department Head calling me — it was the first time I heard his slow, almost sing-songy Alabama accent. The American south slowly becoming a reality for me.

And that eventually led to me being hired on a one year appointment as an Instructor in Knoxville. (Which eventually led to young nieces, fans of the Simpsons, querying me about the Sunsphere.)

I still have the letter and all of the Visa information that they sent.

So I started my career teaching three classes each semester (two sections of one and one of another) at $25,000 U.S. Not a lot (though benefits were included), but it was a job, and in that job market — let alone the one we have today — it was a toe-hold on a possible career. My wife had a good job in Toronto, so apart from joining me for the first month, she’d be staying in Canada. But despite only coming with suitcases and books, you’ll see on the corner of the memo that Charlie threw in an additional $1,000 (bringing my salary that year to $26,000) to help a 9 month Instructor from Canada move to the U.S. — my first taste of his generosity.

I ended up working at UTK as an Instructor from August 1993 until May 1996 (helping to make that newsletter each year), when I left for a tenure-track job in Missouri. That job came along at a good time, since UT’s funding for an Instructor had dried up and 1995-96 was to be my last in Knoxville no matter what (we were already entertaining moving back to Toronto). That first year, 1993-4, I was one of two Instructors they had, since Ralph Norman (another longtime faculty member and then editor of Soundings, which was based at UTK) had temporarily left the Department to be the campus’s Vice Chancellor — thereby freeing up some funds to replace him in the classroom. That funding allowed them to hire two of us, as I understood it, but soon after that first Fall began we both got called down to the Head’s office and Charlie informed us that, in the coming year, he’d only have enough money for one of us.

Simple as that.

He didn’t sugar-coat things. No one had made any promises of more than 9 months employment, but now one of us might remain full-time for at least another year.

I was lucky enough to get that position (as with so many things related to careers, who knows the reason); but my friend stayed on 3/4 time, which brought benefits, as I recall. I also have no idea how that was possible, given what we’d been told in his office, but I have a hunch that Charlie used his smooth style and considerable social capital on campus to work something out that cut in our favor.

And now that I’ve been a Department Chair for twelve years, that’s what I recall most about Charlie: seeing him work within a structure in a creative manner, by finding the gaps and looking for the limits, testing them, gingerly perhaps, in hopes of finding a way to achieve things he aimed to accomplish — doing so without undermining the institution that made it all possible in the first place. I also learned that it doesn’t hurt if you’ve amassed a little social capital before you go poking around.

As for Charlie’s capital, it’s probably tough to talk to old timers on UTK’s hilly campus without them bringing up stories of him as a first year tenure-track Assistant Professor when President Nixon came to town, invited to speak in Neyland Stadium as part of a Billy Graham crusade that had booked the facility. If you know your American history then you might recall that this happened just a few weeks after the Ohio state National Guard had killed 4 student protestors on Kent State’s campus (on May 4, 1970) — Nixon was pretty much banned from university campuses after that and his guest appearance at UTK’s famed football stadium (accomplished by means of what some might term keen strategery) was not insignificant.

Charlie, as I’ve heard the tale, helped to organize what was intended as a peaceful and silent protest, and was later arrested and charged, a bold move for an untenured

faculty member. And they might also tell you that, as a point of principle, he appealed the $20 fine (the minimum mandated by State law), for having been convicted of “willfully disturbing or disquieting any assemblage of persons met for religious worship … by noise, profane discourse, rude or indecent behavior, or any other acts,” all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (which, on January 21, 1974, declined to hear his case).

(Read what one of the organizers of the protest said about the event.)

As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his dissent of the Court’s decision to decline to hear Charlie’s case (read it in full here):

I find it difficult to conclude that the petitioner was given fair notice under the statute that his conduct was proscribed. Petitioner had to guess not only as to the conduct proscribed by the statute at the meeting in question, but whether the statute applied at all to this portion of the meeting, which could be characterized as political as well as religious

What a wonderful e.g. to use in a class, of that porous boundary between that which we name as religious or political: for how would you classify Nixon’s appearance to deliver (as Graham, his host, called it in his introduction), “his brief word of greeting”?

So Charlie was, for many people and for many years on that campus, a bit of a folk hero. Despite being there over twenty years later, it was still evident to me when I arrived. So he struck me as someone worth watching — maybe to learn a thing or two.

I’ll never forget first meeting him in person; Marcia and I flew in from Toronto, by way of Charlotte, the day before and spent the night in a hotel; we took a cab to campus the next morning, luggage in tow, and were greeted by McClung Tower’s curious exterior elevator on the ground floor — we were puzzled for a bit, as to how to get into the building, since

there was no lobby or front door, but then we figured it out. Up to the fifth floor we rode, and we met Joan and Debbie in the main office, and Charlie soon arrived. Now, remember: we were Canadian and I was newly arrived as a J-1 Visa holder. To start life in the U.S. I’d need all sorts of things — a bank account, a Social Security card, a credit card to start establishing a U.S. credit history, an apartment, some mode of transportation…. Luckily, I’d already arranged, with the Department’s help, for furnished, off-campus grad student housing, but we soon learned that this wasn’t available for a week; what we didn’t know was that Charlie and Rosalind (who was out of town for part of the summer) had already decided we’d be staying at her house until my apartment was ready, even using her car. I’m still astounded by this generosity. So at that point we took the elevator down to the building’s garage and Charlie drove us over to her no less hilly neighborhood and we dropped off the bags, he gave us the keys to the house and the black Honda Prelude, but then off we went with him for the day — first to the bank, then to the Social Security office, eventually to HR on campus (lots of forms to fill out), with Charlie blazing the trail each place we went. He was tall, so he’d lean down and ask the bank teller or receptionist, in that slow, friendly drawl of his, if “you could help these fine people” to do this or that. It all went remarkably smoothly. And I still remember us driving around town with him that day, the way he’d exit parking lots, gentling waving others forward, into the line of cars ahead of him,

I’m sure he had better things to do with his day, but by the end of it we were settled into life in the U.S. thanks to him — so, really, he did far more than just hire me — and I was pretty impressed that this full professor, the Department Head, took such care to make us feel so much at home in this new place. It’s a lesson I took to heart; I’ve been involved with my share of new faculty since then, some of whom were international scholars new to the U.S., and it always seemed that the best way to pay Charlie back was to — as they say — pay it forward to others.

Although I didn’t work on topics similar to his own, he played a significant role brokering my appointment as editor of what was then called the Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion. (He was the inaugural editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics, by the way.) He called me in Missouri, not long after I started my new job, to chat about taking over the journal (which I then edited for 5 years); and, when I eventually left it, I did by just as he had done: get others involved. In fact, I had a direct hand in the next three editors (some of whom were grad students at the time) and then was able to help usher it to an interested publisher when, acting as its president, the CSSR had no choice but to disband — a onetime key organization in North America, from the days of Charlie’s generation in our field, that just couldn’t make it once the AAR/SBL had teamed up and invented Religious Studies News, Scholars Press, Openings, etc.. (Religious Studies Review, the CSSR’s other quarterly journal, went to Rice’s Department of Religion.)

All those people involved in the Bulletin, let alone those with whom I interacted at the CSSR over the years, were directly linked back to Charlie calling me in Springfield, pitching what was then just a thin little newsletter as an opportunity for me.

He was right. It was.

When you think about it, phone calls from Charlie turn out to have been important milestones in my career.

So he heightened in me an awareness to be strategic, to take the long view, to pay attention to how an institution works, to find opportunities and to share them, but also to put effort into the little things — the details matter. I also learned a few other things, for e.g., that bad news is best delivered not in your own office (“That way you can just leave after telling it,” I recall him saying — who knows how we got onto that topic) and I learned that not everyone from Alabama was a fan of the Crimson Tide (he was a BA grad of Birmingham Southern [1961] and, as I recall, sided with Auburn, Alabama’s in-state arch-rival). In fact, when I got to Tuscaloosa in 2001 (Roll Tide) we started sending faxes back and forth (with Debbie penning his) to bet on the annual Tennessee/Alabama game.

Tennessee mostly won in the early years, so, as I remember it, I think I just ended up mailing him a Department mug and some Alabama t-shirts.

I also learned to lie a little better: such as confidently saying “Yes I can” when someone about to hire you asks if you can teach a course on a topic well off your radar (e.g., that first semester’s course on Myth, Symbol, and Ritual was something I had no preparation to teach but, when he first called me in Toronto, he said that they needed someone to teach it since it was a popular course and Stan Lusby, its longtime professor, had retired, and so he asked if I could…) and I also learned that a story, even a rambling one such as this, needs a good punchline — something made evident when we were both leaning on the main office counter, one day, at the end of a Fall semester, talking while munching on some nachos and salsa left over from an end-of-semester party one of the classes had had. For some reason he was telling me about how someone he knew had recently told him that he had lived a life more exciting that that of several men put together. Taking out his handkerchief — yes, he was the sort of guy who carried one in those days — to wipe away some salsa that had dripped on his shirt while he told the story, our eyes met as we both saw that there was already something red on that white hanky, red and smudged, like lipstick. I have no idea what it was but I’m guessing that he pretty quickly figured out what I thought, and so, after a pause of exquisite comedic timing…, he looked at me, with a big smiled, and softly said:

“My excitin’ life….”

And then he ate another nacho.

So that’s how I choose to remember Charlie: a broad smile, his slow drawl, a mischievous glimmer in his eye when he came up with what he thought was a good idea, and the kind generosity that couldn’t help but rub off on others. My career has benefited from Charlie, likely in more ways than I know, and those with whom I’ve interacted since those early days in Knoxville (whether they knew it or not), have benefited from him too.