The essays in this issue of Harvard Theological Review were originally presented at a celebration in honor of Richard R. Niebuhr on the occasion of his retirement as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. On that day, May 7, 1999, many of Dick's colleagues, friends, and students past and present gathered to pay tribute to him and his forty-three years of service at Harvard. The papers that were delivered and the memories that were shared all told of the profound effect that Dick's teaching, scholarship, and friendship has had on those who have had the pleasure of working and talking with him over the years.

I first became acquainted with Richard Niebuhr's scholarship and thought in a German graduate seminar on Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch. Niebuhr's book, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, was a required text for the course and was regarded as the most significant study on Schleiermacher. My interest in Karl Rahner's theology had led me to go to Germany for doctoral studies. Once there, I discovered that much of what I had admired in Rahner had already been anticipated a century and a half earlier in Schleiermacher's work. Professor Niebuhr's study on Schleiermacher was the source of this insight. It influenced my decision later to translate into English Schleiermacher's On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke. My topic for this article, the theological retrieval of the category of religion, is obviously suggested by Niebuhr's study of Schleiermacher, which sought to overcome the dichotomies associated with the category of religion by the then-dominant Neo-orthodoxy. This topic is also a theme of Niebuhr's ensuing book, Experiential Religion, in which he elaborated his own constructive account of religion and experience. In addition, this topic appropriately relates to Niebuhr's activity at Harvard University, where he helped establish a program of studies in religion within the Committee on the Study of Religion.

Theology, defined specifically as academic theology, belongs as a legitimate area of expertise in the study of religion. Academic theologians, like historians, comparatists, philosophers, and social scientists of religion, should hold a rightful and honorable place as teachers and scholars in the discipline. Like other scholars of religion, academic theologians advance knowledge of religion. As intentional critics and makers of religious symbol systems and as critics of the wider cultures within which such systems flourish, academic theologians make a distinctive, valuable contribution to teaching and to scholarship—in non-sectarian liberal education environments, as well as in seminaries and divinity schools. In this essay I seek to represent the contribution of academic theology to private undergraduate institutions of liberal education in particular.

In one of his earliest articles, William James says that the radical question of life is whether this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe: moral or unmoral, not moral or immoral. James is not asking whether the universe is good or bad, but whether i t is coordinate with the inner lives of persons, their desires, and their purposes. The sense of “moral” here is not restricted to ethics, but is the sense in which the moral sciences (comprising what we now call the humanities and the social sciences) were contrasted in the nineteenth century with the natural sciences.

I discovered religious experience at Harvard Divinity School, in the Sperry lecture hall, sometime in the late 1980s. By that I do not mean to confess that I had a “first religious experience” there; nor do I mean that, somehow through some activity of my own, I laid hold novelly to the notion of “religious experience,” exposing something new to scholarship, some new direction, or some deep, fundamentally new insight. Rather, I mean quite simply that “religious experience,” the idea, the genre for thinking and reflection, came to my attention for the first time in that room in the late 1980s. In retrospect, I must say that it did so momentously, as I have not been able since to expunge it from my habits of thinking.