 Dr. Rosemary Skinner Keller
Professor Emerita of Church History and Former Academic DeanUnion Community Mourns Beloved Professor, Administrator and Friend Dr. Rosemary Skinner Keller, Professor Emerita of Church History and former Academic Dean at Union Theological Seminary, died on June 5, 2008 after a long battle with kidney cancer.
Announcing her appointment as Dean in 1996, Holland Hendrix (then President of Union) called her "a visionary firmly grounded in the practical challenges of education and theology" whose particular experience would be "ideally suited" to the Seminary's opportunities and challenges at the time. When she came to Union, she had just completed 19 years on the faculty of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. For the last three of those years she served as that seminary's first woman Academic Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs.
While Dean at Union, she was honored as the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the United Methodist Church General Commission on Archives and History for her contributions to the writing of the United Methodist History. The award has been given annually since 1991, and Dr. Keller was the first woman to receive it.
A native of Oklahoma City, Dr. Keller did her undergraduate work at the University of Oklahoma. She held the M.R.E. from Yale Divinity School, the M.A. from Chicago State University, and the Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Focusing her scholarship on religion and American culture and American women's history, she wrote and edited an impressive list of books, among them one co-edited with Rosemary Radford Ruether titled In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women's Religious Writings.
...a pioneer in a man's professional world ...an inspiration to many, many women entering professional ministry and theological education... |
While at Union, Keller − along with Ruether − was the recipient of two major grants for support of the writing and editing of the Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America. The three-volume work, published in 2006 by Indiana University Press, covers the history of women's religious experience in North America over the course of more than four centuries.
More than 150 scholars specializing in the particular materials related to women of faith contributed their expertise, and while the largest number of entries deal with Protestant Christianity (the primary religious movement in America's first 200 years), there are also essays about women from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, along with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and newer religious movements such as Wiccan and post-Christian expressions.
When Keller retired from Union in 2004, she and her husband, the Rev. Robert Keller, returned to Chicago. She continued her research as senior scholar at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University - Purdue University, Indianapolis.
In 2006 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Garrett-Evangelical at their 2006 commencement. At the ceremony she was praised as "a pioneer in a man's professional world and as an inspiration to many, many women entering professional ministry and theological education during the past 29 years" by Dr. Lallene Rector, dean and vice president for academic affairs – positions once held by Dr. Keller.
Dr. Keller is survived by her husband and two children, John and Jennifer, and twin grandsons, Connor and Cameron. She was much beloved at Union, and we grieve her passing.
Read the Chicago Tribune obituary.
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