We celebrate the life of Robert McAfee Brown, grieve our loss of an incredibly dear friend, and hold Bob's friends and family in our thoughts and prayers.

• Click here for pictures of a happier moment, Bob's 80th birthday party.
• Click here to read Bob's essay, Servants in Pharoah's Court.

What can one say about a man who:

• Was an incredible father, husband, grandpa, and friend
• Marched with martyrs
  
• Gave advice to a Pope
  
• Got arrested during protests more times than Martin Sheen
  
• Inspired and taught many of the greatest theologians of our time
  
• Defined humility
  
• Wrote more books than Stephen King
  
• Played cello by ear
  
• Helped multitudes understand liberation theology
  
• Loved chocoloate chip cookies

I would imagine one could say a lot! In fact, I'm certain that many of you could say much much more than your humble webmaster.

Messages for Bob, Sydney and the family:

Sydney - Thanks for Bob's great encouragement to me as a new pastor here. It was always good to share with him. I remember the wonderful dinner we had your home.

Bob will be an inspiration for years to come. I appreciate God touching
my life through him.

Love,
Isaiah Jones, Pastor - Covenant Presbyterian Church

Dear Sydney,

My life is richer from knowing you and Bob, even for the brief time we
were at FPC. One of my favorite recollections is being in Diana's
"powers" class with you and the occasional visit from Bob. Another is
recollecting Bob talking about his view of his occasional lapses of
words - something along the lines of "living the adventure of where this
sentence I started might end!" Perhaps my most favorite, though, as a
budding preacher, is recollecting Bob's comments after I gave my
introductory chat at Prime Timers - he said that he'd written down
several sermon topics just from what I'd spoken basically off the cuff.
I must've floated off the couch after that!

My son was baptized on Bob's cookie day 'way back in 2000 - we will
light Sam's candle and remember not only his baptism, but also our
friend Bob. Shalom to you, sister.

Sarah Pressly

I only learned this afternoon that one of my heroes, Robert McAfee Brown (who shared the same birthdate as my mother) died recently.

I met him while I was working at Santa Clara University and he was a visiting professor there in the Religious Studies Department. I interviewed him for a profile to be published in "Spectrum," the faculty/staff newspaper which I wrote and edited at the university.

Meeting and working with him on the article was both inspirational and fun. He was engaging, creative, thoughtful and seemed to enjoy working with me as much as I enjoyed working with him.

Later, when I prepared an action plan for incorporating social justice within the employment practices of Santa Clara University, he reviewed my plan, which I entitled: "The Claims We Make Make Claims On Us," and encouraged me to pursue applying social justice principles in Silicon Valley settings. His insight and concern for my small project were vastly empowering. I will never forget his encouragement and the impact that it made on my life and views.

He invited me to his home to talk about ideas, ideals and life. That afternoon, sitting in his back yard, then later getting a tour of his house and a running commentary on the photography of one of his sons...and then meeting his wife...was one of the great afternoons of my life. Over the years since then, we shared brief conversations on the phone and in written form.

It would be presumptios of me to consider myself a friend of his....but I know that his great spirit and open heart encouraged my feeble steps in the path of social justice and liberation theology...

Because of who he is, I loved him like a favorite uncle. And I am so sad that he is no longer among us. And I am so grateful that he was with us, and that his words and ideas continue, as powerful as ever.

My prayers and love go to his family. Thank you for the opportunity to say something about this man who has meant so much to me.

sunny merik

Click here to read an article written by Dr. Donald McKim, Academic and Reference Editor for Westminster John Knox Press. This article is to be published in the next edition of the Presbyterian Outlook. The publishers have agreed to allow us to make it available here prior to publication as a tribute to Bob.

Bruce Hahne let us know that there were two tributes to Bob in the September 21st edition of the Sojourners e-mail newsletter. The first is from Bob's son-in-law Paul K. Ehara, and the other is from David Bastone. Click here to read the web version of that newsletter.

Obituary in the San Jose Mercury News - September 5th, 2001
by Richard Scheinin

Robert McAfee Brown, a celebrated religious educator and writer whose name was linked for nearly half a century to the great causes of liberal theology, died Tuesday at age 81.

Mr. Brown, who lived in Palo Alto but died in Massachusetts where he kept a summer home, was a leading voice of that generation of clerics who came of age during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
Handsome and square jawed, with a thatch of white hair as he grew older, Mr. Brown was a popular Stanford professor of religious studies who also taught at seminaries in New York and Berkeley.

During his long career, he was jailed as a Freedom Rider, preached and wrote against American involvement in Vietnam, and emerged in later years as one of the best-known advocates of the liberation theology movement in Latin America. Liberation theology advances the idea that Christians should concern themselves first with the emancipation of oppressed people from unjust political, economic or social subjection.

Mr. Brown was also an important player in Protestant-Catholic dialogue. In 1962, at the behest of Pope John XXIII, he was invited to serve as a special observer for the Reformed and Presbyterian churches at Vatican II in Rome. Out of that experience, Mr. Brown wrote ''Observer in Rome: A Protestant Report on the Vatican Council.''

It was one of his 28 books, which were widely read by lay people and scholars. They ranged from a Bible primer for Presbyterian Sunday school children to biographies of Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian priest widely regarded as founder of liberation theology, and Elie Wiesel, who became a personal friend while Mr. Brown served on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Councilfrom 1978 to 1986.

''He was a giant,'' said Paul Masquelier, executive presbyter for the Presbytery of San Jose, ''always on the cutting edge.''

In the world of theological education, ''everybody knows Bob Brown,'' said William McKinney, president of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, where Mr. Brown taught from 1978-85.

''As much as any Anglo-American, he brought liberation theology into the consciousness of seminary faculty students and church leaders. I put him at the top of the list of those who were listening to other voices, voices from the margins of the world's justice movements.''

Oxford-trained, a Fulbright scholar and a Presbyterian minister, Mr. Brown was born in Carthage, Ill. in 1920. His grandfather was Clellan B. McAfee, famous as moderator of the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Mr. Brown's father, George W. Brown, was a Presbyterian minister in Summit, N.J., where Robert grew up.

Dynamic duo

In 1944, he married Sydney Elise Thomson, who became a well-known labor activist as well as a teaching colleague of Mr. Brown and his foremost confidant and political sounding board. ''They were the dynamic duo,'' said the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a friend whose political activism overlapped the McAfee Browns' for decades.

In the early '40s, the couple courted in the Berkshire hills town of Heath, the community where Mr. Brown vacationed with his family this summer before his death. Mr. Brown attended Amherst College, also in the Berkshires. Sydney Brown went to nearby Smith College and worked as a nanny to the children of Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian whose writings on the Social Gospel profoundly influenced Mr. Brown.

Mr. Brown received his masters of divinity from the Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1945 and served as a naval chaplain in the Pacific.

It was when he began teaching at Amherst, fresh out of the Navy in 1946, that Mr. Brown found his real calling: ''I think we discovered what Pooh likes,'' Sydney Brown said at the time, according to the Rev. Diana Gibson, who helped Mr. Brown assemble his autobiography over the last two years. Gibson is the retired pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto, where Mr. Brown sometimes preached and served as parish associate.

The Browns moved to Palo Alto in 1962. A popular campus speaker in the 1960s and '70s, Mr. Brown co-founded the group known as Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.

Position paper

''Bob wrote the position paper,'' said Coffin, also a co-founder. ''It was 38 pages long, subscribed to by 50,000 people. And the first sentence was, 'There comes a time when silence is betrayal.' Typical, eloquent, Bob Brown sentence.''

In the mid-90s, Mr. Brown joined Coffin, Daniel Ellsberg, and a pastor named G.W. Webber for a weeklong hunger strike outside the United Nations in New York. Mr. Brown, against his doctor's admonitions, wished to protest the American position on nuclear arms control. ''He was a rare person,'' Coffin said. ''All the trumpets have sounded on the other side.''

Today in New York, Union Theological Seminary will establish a scholarship in Mr. Brown's honor; the ceremony has been planned for months. In the next year or so, Westminster John Knox Press plans to publish Mr. Brown's autobiography, tentatively titled ''Reflections for the Long Haul: A Plea for Companions.''

Mr. Brown, whose health had deteriorated the last few years, suffered a broken hip in a fall about a month ago and died at a nursing home in Greenfield, Mass., about 40 miles from Heath. He is survived by two sisters, Harriet and Elizabeth, his wife, Sydney, and their four children: Alison, a family therapist in Richmond; Peter, a photographer and writer in Houston; Mark, a graphics artist in Mountain View; and Tom, an artist and teacher in Chesterfield, Mass.