Disciples Divinity House

Alumnus Woodrow W. Wasson died December 10, 2013, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 97. A memorial service was held January 2, 2014, at Woodmont Christian Church in Nashville. As Mark Miller-McLemore, Dean of DDH at Vanderbilt, said at the service: "He was an intellectual, extremely well-educated, a scholar in service of the church, who wrote and led and taught at a high level. He felt the life of faith was a matter of absolute seriousness, deserving of our very best in clear thinking, truth telling, in joyous and full living with the best of all human expression in culture and the arts—all leading to faithful, understanding, discipleship."

Raised in Tennessee in a large family and in the Church of Christ, Woody Wasson attended David Lipscomb Junior College before receiving a BA (1939) and MA (1940) in Sociology from Vanderbilt University. One of his Vanderbilt professors, George Mayhew (himself a Chicago graduate and the founder of the Disciples Foundation, later DDH, at Vanderbilt), encouraged Mr. Wasson to continue his studies in 1940 as a Disciples Divinity House Scholar at the University of Chicago. Among other considerations, Chicago was then the center of the study of religion from a sociological-scientific point of view. Prof. Mayhew wrote to Dean E. S. Ames: I have had Mr. Wasson in one of my classes and regard him as a very superior man. He has a very attractive personality, is good-looking and neat in appearance and has a fine attitude toward life.... [T]his young man has an open mind and has great possibilities for leadership and has the courage to follow his convictions.

Mr. Wasson earned his BD at the Divinity School in 1943 and was ordained at University Church with E.S. Ames, W.E. Garrison, and Irvin Lunger among the ordaining ministers. A few years later, Dean W. Barnett Blakemore wrote to a colleague in a letter of recommendation: Mr. Wasson's own religious pilgrimage has been a significant one. You probably know that he came originally from the Church of Christ.... [I]t was only after a long period of real soul-searching that he left.... In all my experience I have never seen a man approach the problem of his religious affiliation more seriously and with greater penetration of all the factors involved.

Woody Wasson earned a PhD from the Divinity School in 1947 after continuing to study church history and social thought and completing a dissertation directed by historian Sidney Mead. In 1952, he published James A. Garfield: His Religion and Education, an examination of the Ohio Disciples minister, abolitionist, and Union general who became president in 1880; it was a study of the relation of religion and politics that was based on his dissertation.

"Woody was indelibly shaped by his experience of education in religion at Chicago, and it led him down many paths, not all of them easy." Dean Miller-McLemore explained: "Woody's college and graduate studies both examined the history and sociology of religion and sought to understand how religious truths are shaped by and expressed in the particularities of a culture and a time and a people.... The historian and the sociologist in him tried to sift or winnow the grains of what we now call social location in order to find one thing needful, the large truth in common that could bring people of good will, intelligence, and belief together in common faith. But this sincere and rigorous searching after truth, using the latest scientific methods, must have put him greatly at odds with his church of Christ family here.... His family turned their backs on him. The search for truth can lead people apart as well as together."

In 1944, he married Frances Marie Tallmon in Wightman Chapel at Scarritt College in Nashville. They had met as students, and Marie had earned her BS in 1942 from Peabody College at Vanderbilt. While he continued his doctoral studies, she studied medical sciences at the University of Chicago. She later became an Instructor in the Department of Pathology at the Vanderbilt University Medical School.

In 1949, after Mr. Wasson had held two short-term teaching posts in the southwest, the Wassons moved to Athens, Georgia, where he became Professor of Religion and founding Dean of the Christian College at the University of Georgia. There he supervised Disciple students serving in ministry in local churches, raised money for their support, and offered courses relevant to the practice of ministry that also counted for undergraduate credit at the university. He spoke at Disciple gatherings and conventions and authored numerous articles. The position placed him in stressful cross-currents and, eventually, the Wassons returned to Nashville, where they would work and live for the rest of their lives. Mr. Wasson lectured for a year at Vanderbilt University School of Religion. He engaged postgraduate study at Oxford in 1955, and then served as archivist at Vanderbilt University. He received a certificate in Archival Administration in 1962 from American University and a Masters in Library Science from Peabody College in 1967. Later and until his retirement, he was a professor of sociology and religion at Middle Tennessee State University.

"The Christian life as it is lived is expressed in its fullness and simplicity by these three great words [faith, hope, and love]," he preached in a sermon given on a Chicago radio station in June 1944, two days before D-Day. "...They are not theological words to be confined to any system of religious thought or to any dogmatic creed. They best express an attitude. When they are thought of as expressing an attitude, they then become part of the tissue of human living, rather than divorced from the tissue of human life."

The death of Marie Wasson, his beloved wife for 58 years, "was a blow from which he could not escape. He slipped further into dementia, and a fine intellect was lost." He is survived by Susan Hammonds-White, a goddaughter who remained close through his final years, and by the educational institutions he esteemed and helped to shape.