Passing of Prof. R. Lansing Hicks

With sadness I report the death of one of my teachers of Hebrew and Old Testament, Yale's R. Lansing Hicks. Lansing died this morning [late yesterday, the 14th] in Connecticut. Our prayers have been with his dear wife Helen and his whole family since yesterday when we learned that he was gravely ill. The following photo shows Lansing with me at my graduation from YDS with the M.Div. degree in 1987:



Lansing recently reminded me of our mutual connections with both Union Seminary in New York and with VTS here in Alexandria. He earned his Th.D. from UTS in 1954 and he served on the VTS faculty from 1953-1954 and again during a sabbatical in 1986. VTS awarded him the D.D. in 1990.

My colleague in our History Department, Dr. Bob Prichard, has emailed me the following background: Lansing Hicks was one of the members of the Faculty of the School of Theology at the University of the South who resigned in 1953 because of that institution's trustees' decision not to desegregate. Virginia Seminary provided him a short-term home for a year while he searched for a longer term position. He moved the following year to Berkeley Divinity School. When Berkeley merged with Yale Divinity School in 1971, Berkeley faculty were given something like a 5 year period in which to earn tenure. Hicks would be the only member of the former Berkeley faculty to earn that tenure.

Here is an historical photo of the Berkeley Divinity School faculty in 1958-59: