Alumni/ae Notes & News
Fall 2007
Having Fun at 84
by Herb Vetter BD '52 DD '83
What's fun for this alum at 84? Not just my UU website--absurdly named Harvard Square Library but living in cyberspace celebrating UU liberal religion all around the world--100 countries on six continents. No less fun is my free time for writing, editing, publishing books day after day. My doctor, a cardiologist, says that's what keeps me going despite my heart disease.
I've just released several new volumes available worldwide via Amazon. One is Hartshorne: A New World View--a gathering of nontechnical essays by one of my former professors who lived across the street from Meadville Lombard. On Charles's 100th birthday I traveled from Boston to the party at the University of Texas at Austin and was delighted to be invited to visit him at home. One of the precious fruits of my Meadville years is having been permitted to take three private reading and writing courses with this now late Unitarian Universalist philosopher sometimes described as the Einstein of religious thought.
Almost ready for publication in 2008 is James Luther Adams: Blessed Are The Powerful. Along with varied selected JLA papers is the magnificently candid biography of my Meadville teacher and friend written by his doctoral student at Harvard, Max Stackhouse. In Chicago, my wife and I lived on the third floor of the house where the Adams family lived. Also to be released in 2008 is Prayers of Power, a book co-edited by several colleagues, including a former Meadville student who later joined the faculty, Jack Hayward. There is a lively biography of him in my new book, Notable American Unitarians 1936-1960, based on five years of research.
A paperback which I have edited this year, The Harvard Square Book, contains the illustrated story of "The Church in Harvard Square" by the eminent historian of our UU movement, Conrad Wright. The First Parish in Cambridge was founded in the same year as Harvard, 1636.
It is a great joy to me that my little book, The Heart of God: Prayers of Rabindranath Tagore, is now in a new American paperback edition, as well as being available in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish editions.
Finally, what may prove to be my most important book is controversial.
It grew out of my graduate work at Meadville Lombard and the University of Chicago, as well as my five decades of UU ministry. It opposes and exposes the absurd and antiquated but recently bestselling "new atheists."
At 84, its fun to be alive to be able to join the dialogue with my newly released book on the ultimate question: Is God Necessary? No! and Yes!
