Langdon Brown Gilkey

Langdon Brown Gilkey (February 9, 1919 – November 19, 2004) was an American Protestant Ecumenical theologian.

A grandson of Clarence Talmadge Brown, the first Protestant minister to gather a congregation in Salt Lake City, Gilkey grew up in Hyde Park Chicago. His father Charles Whitney Gilkey was a liberal Theologian and the first Dean of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel; his mother was Geraldine Gunsaulus Brown who was a well known feminist and leader of the YWCA.

Gilkey attended elementary school at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, and in 1936 graduated from the Asheville School for Boys in North Carolina. In 1939 he earned an A.B. degree in Philosophy, magna cum laude, from Harvard. The following year (1940) he went to China to teach English at Yenching University and was subsequently (1943) imprisoned by the Japanese, first under house arrest at the University and later in an internment camp near the city of Weihsien in Shantung Province (where Eric Liddell was a fellow internee).

After the War, Gilkey obtained his doctorate in Religion from Columbia University in New York, being both mentored by and a teaching assistant to Reinhold Niebuhr. He was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University (1950–51), and went on to become a professor at Vassar College from 1951 to 1954, and then at Vanderbilt Divinity School from 1954 to 1963. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 to study in Munich; another Guggenheim in the mid-1970s took him to Rome. In late 1963 he became a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, eventually being named Shailer Mathews Professor of Theology, until his retirement in March 1989. While on sabbatical in 1970, he taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands; in 1975 he taught at Kyoto University in Japan, his lecture series there focusing on the environmental perils of industrialization. After his retirement he continued to lecture until 2001 at both the University of Virginia and Georgetown University. During this last period of his teaching career, he was also for one year a visiting professor at the Theology Division (now Divinity School) of Chung Chi College, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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