This week’s newsletter will be a bit shorter due to too many travels to too many funerals. I just returned from one for my beloved Aunt Mary, and tomorrow I head to Washington, D.C., for the funeral of the great interpreter of early Christianity, Robert Wilken. When I get back to Providence, there, alas, will be more.

I knew of Robert before I met him. It was virtually impossible not to if you were a graduate student of theology in the late-1980s. He had written important books on The Myth of Christian Beginnings, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, John Chrysostom and the Jews, The Christians as the Roman Saw Them, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, and Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. Moreover, I had heard that when at the University of Virginia, he led a project to form a department of religious studies constituted by professors who actually believed and practiced the religions they studied and taught. For those outside the academy, it is hard to conceive of just how radical this endeavor was, and how destined it was to fail. Add to that his well-known friendship with Richard John Neuhaus and involvement with First Things. Like his friend, he was a convert from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism. In sum, Wilken was a major player during a period of religious and theological ferment in the United States. You couldn’t miss him.

Since Robert’s death, there have been a number of reflections and remembrances. See here, here, here, and here. There will be more. Someone will reflect in a serious way about his contribution to the study of early Christianity, particularly patristic exegesis. I look forward to reading these. My task here, however, is more personal, a simple reflection on my years of knowing this great man. Along the way, I’ll say something about his place in American Catholicism.