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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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The Church, the University, and the City
I spent yesterday morning in the very beautiful nave of the Riverside Church in New York City. These days I spend more time than I would like at memorial services, but sometimes these occasions are more than celebrations of long friendships. Yesterday we memorialized Lowell Livezey a wonderful person and a useful citizen of the world.
I came to know Lowell in the 1980s when he was the director of the undergraduate program at the Woodrow Wilson School, the public policy major in which I teach at Princeton University. We became fast friends because we shared an interest in world peace and a commitment to the role of nongovernmental organizations in conflict resolution. It was during this time that Lowell completed writing his study of NGO’s and the peace movement.
This important academic study followed Lowell’s two decades work as executive director of the World Without War Council, originally an anti-Vietnam War organization. And that job had followed Lowell’s intense undergraduate experience (and engagement with the Friends) at Swarthmore College, and his graduate work at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he developed his calling for the urban ministry. But Lowell was a minister without a church — the city was his church. And his cities were Chicago, where he first developed as an intellectual, a minister, and a social activist, and New York, where he ended his mission and his life. Lowell was a remarkable combination of an old-fashioned social gospeler, in the tradition of Walter Rauschenbush, and a social-science urban reformer, in the tradition of the 1930s University of Chicago.
After leaving Princeton (to follow his minister-scholar-activist wife, Lois von Gehr Livezey) back to Chicago, Lowell was to the end of his life supported by the Lilly Endowment to undertake a series of ethnographic studies of the role of religious congregations in urban life. His idea was that churches, synagogues, and mosques (he was the ultimate ecumenical Christian) both reacted to the urban environment and impacted upon it — group religious life was, for Lowell, an organic part of democracy. His final move, in 2005, was to the New York Theological Seminary, where he organized (once again funded by Lilly) the Ecologies of Learning Project, an interactive effort of scholars, ministers, and parishioners to understand the symbiotic relationship of church and city.
Lowell had a wonderfully productive life. For me he represented many of the best things in late 20th-century higher education: the benefits of a liberal-arts collegiate education and a superb graduate training at a divinity school fully lodged within a great university, which he used to apply social science to democratic goals. He was, to the end, a committed internationalist, committed both to world peace and to the proposition that the life of the mind cannot be lived within merely national boundaries. In all of this he was supported by a thoughtful foundation, several fine universities, innumerable NGOs and a plethora of religious organizations. His was a life I admire to the bottom of my heart. RIP, Lowell.
Posted at 11:25:49 AM on January 27, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
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Lovely tribute, Mr. Katz. You make me wish I’d known Mr. Livezey.
— Dan Kirklin · Jan 29, 03:57 PM · #
Beautifully said, Stan – you really capture all the wonderful things about Lowell.
— Ruth Miller · Jan 29, 09:20 PM · #
I worked with Lowell during his years directing the Metropolitan Congregational Studies Program at Harvard Divinity School. I knew Lowell as a caring teacher and human being, intense researcher, and activist; all of these attributes were reflected in your moving piece. Thank you.
— Paige Eppenstein · Jan 30, 08:08 AM · #