Robert McAfee Brown, renowned Presbyterian theologian and political activist, refused to buy new clothes. “He always looked great, but he never bought brand-new clothes,” says Brown’s friend and colleague Ernlé Young, a professor of medicine and former associate dean of Mem Chu. “He wanted his resources to go toward the betterment of mankind.”
For Brown, who taught religious studies at Stanford for 14 years, the betterment of humankind was a way of life. He was one of the best-known and most eloquent proponents of the liberation theology movement, promoting the idea that Christians should help oppressed people free themselves from unjust political and social conditions.
A leader in civil rights, ecumenical and social justice causes, Brown was jailed briefly in 1961 while challenging racial segregation as a Freedom Rider in Florida. He also protested America’s involvement in Vietnam and, as recently as 1997, joined other prominent religious leaders outside U.N. headquarters in New York in a weeklong hunger strike against nuclear weapons.
Brown died September 4 in a nursing home near his summer residence in Heath, Mass., after suffering a broken hip. He was 81.
Born in Illinois and raised in New Jersey, Brown earned his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1943 and was ordained a Presbyterian minister the following year. He served as a Navy chaplain during the final year of World War II, won a Fulbright grant to study at Oxford and, in 1951, completed his doctorate in the philosophy of religion at Columbia. He taught in Minnesota and at New York’s Union Theological Seminary before coming to Stanford in 1962.
“My reason for moving from seminary teaching to university teaching is an attempt, if possible, to build some bridges between the world of theology and the world of modern man,” he wrote in 1964.
At Stanford, Brown taught popular courses relating ethics and religion to contemporary life and literature and co-founded the antiwar group Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. He served as an official Protestant observer to Vatican Council II at the invitation of Pope John XXIII and was appointed to President Jimmy Carter’s Holocaust Commission by friend and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel. He left the Farm in 1976 to teach at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.
The author of 29 books, Brown was dubbed “the Catholics’ favorite Protestant” by Time magazine for having coauthored the book An American Dialogue (1960) to help dispel anti-Catholic prejudice against President John F. Kennedy.
He is survived by his wife, Sydney Thomson Brown; three sons, Peter, ’70, MFA ’77, Mark, ’74, and Tom; his daughter, Alison Ehara-Brown; and six grandchildren.
