R. Melvin and Elizabeth Bassett Keiser, B.D. ‘63

Dear Friends,

 

We are doing well amidst our pill-strewn landscape of older age. Now long retired after teaching thirty-six years in Religious Studies and English at Guilford College, we are active in our Swannanoa Valley Friends Meeting, working for peace and justice in Palestine/Israel, enjoying adult children living near (Megan and Christopher) and grandchildren now in or about to be in college (Christopher’s Jahniya and Ondessa Kiliru, and Megan’s Sophia and Sam Fairbairn), and still writing books. Beth’s is Making Peace with Joy and Sorrow about Taha Muhammad Ali, an extraordinary Palestinian poet we met in Nazareth, and our travels among Jews and Palestinians in the so-called holy land. My Paths to the Personal: Thinkers on the Way to Postcritical and Theopoetic Depths will come out in April exploring how far major religious thinkers (including H. Richard Niebuhr) have included personal experience as the basis of their philosophical reflections. We continue to feel great gratitude for YDS, its two-year launching Beth into a PhD in medieval English literature down the hill, and initiating Mel in a career-long, life-nurturing engagement with Niebuhr.

 

R. Melvin Keiser B.D ’63, S.T.M ’64 - Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Guilford College

Elizabeth Bassett Keiser x-’63; Yale PhD 1972 - Dana Professor Emerita of English Literature, Guilford College