Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. 90G

I remember reading in the newspapers about a gift made by the Coca-Cola Corporation to Emory University when it was first announced. It seemed like a lot of money. At the time, I was an undergraduate at Duke University, then an aspirational research university that had its competitive sights set on the northeast. Yet here, quite suddenly, there had emerged an apparent academic rival to their south. Little did I know then that this remarkable gift was to have such an important, and indeed life-altering, impact on me personally.

Some years later, as I was completing my masters degree at Duke, and contemplating where to go for my doctoral studies, I was reminded of that upstart rival to our south. I applied to the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, as well as to all the obvious schools on what was by then a fairly predictable list of New England-based graduate programs. Much to my surprise and delight, I was invited to fly to Emory for a campus visit during the weekend reception hosting that year’s candidates for the Woodruff Fellowship, then the most generous graduate support package in the Humanities available anywhere in the country. It too seemed like a lot of money.

The invitation itself came in rather comical circumstances. While completing the draft of my masters thesis, and mainly to get myself out of my own head for a couple of hours each day, I was also training for my first, and only, marathon. The race was held on a raw and bitterly cold morning in early March, starting near the coastal boardwalk in Wilmington, North Carolina.

There were a few veteran long-distance runners, a few first-timers like myself, and a number of Marines from nearby Camp Lejeune. I finished in good time, but poor form; it was all I could do to heap myself into the back seat of my friends’ car and then transfer my aching body to their couch, from which I vowed never to move again.

The phone rang not long after we got home and, weirdly, the call was for me. Extracting myself from the cushions with groans and grimaces, I staggered to the receiver and was informed that I had been selected to join the group of Woodruff finalists scheduled to visit Emory’s campus.

They were interested in booking my flight immediately, and so, my vows of sweet inactivity abandoned, I drove back to Durham, then flew to Atlanta for the weekend. I found the walking tours of campus excruciating, and the endearing comedy of it all was that every one of my generous hosts made a point of taking me to visit the brand-new facilities at the Woodruff Physical Education Center. Of course it was a beautiful track, I admitted, but I felt just then as if I’d never be able to run again. The snail’s pace I was forced to adopt on each campus stroll must have left my hosts wondering how long it had taken my to finish the race... if indeed I had.

The weekend passed in a blur of conversation, conviviality, and the unexpected delight in meeting so many thoughtful, warm and worthwhile people: Emory faculty, Emory students, and my fellow finalists. I felt daunted, as well as inspired, by it all.

As I recall, our last formal event was a banquet in the foyer of the new medical building on Saturday night. Cocktail hour presented an opportunity for those on the selection committee to visit with prospects they’d not yet met. The seating chart for dinner was designed to complete that circle of engagement. I was conscious of wanting to make a good impression, mindful of having told the same stories many times (to different people, I hoped), and generally impressed by the depth of interest shown by everyone on my, and my colleagues’, behalf.

When we were all seated at the large round tables that graced the foyer, and before the meal was served, someone I had not seen before moved to the microphone to offer a word of welcome. It was unforgettable. What followed in those few minutes, seemingly suspended in time, was one of the most moving speeches that I had ever heard, one that still remains as vivid in my emotional memory today as it was then when I heard it then. The speech was brief--but then, so was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. And like that address, this greeting from Dr. James Laney--for I later learned that it was he who spoke to us that evening--moved me nearly to tears.

It turned out that Mr. Woodruff had passed away the previous day; he had intended to join us for this banquet, as was his custom. Jim spoke in eloquent, luminous terms, noting that we represented everything which Mr. Woodruff held most dear: the virtues of scholarly pursuit in the name of human betterment; the creation, the advancement and the sharing of human knowledge; the limitless joy of human discovery; the nobility of universities as institutions linking us moderns to the Renaissance foundations of a humanistic faith; the unique grace of the life of the mind, and the unique gracefulness of its finest practitioners. I had never heard this profession, nor my own only half-formed professional ambitions, described in a more moving way. Feeling the key slip into place, I realized in that instant that this was precisely what I aspired to be, and who I aspired to be. Thus I decided in that same moment that, if I were so fortunate as to be granted the opportunity, then Emory would be the place where I undertook the realization of some small part of those twinned aspirations. There was a casual elegance, a quiet passion, an enthusiasm and an earnestness to the whole evening that was unlike anything I had ever experienced in an institution of higher learning. The ‘higher’ achieved a new level of moral meaning for me in that moment. We were all elevated that evening.

When I was called the next week and informed that a place had been reserved for me, I instantly and gratefully accepted my place at Emory University. I did not need to wait on answers from any of the Ivy League schools to which I’d also applied. Emory had risen to the top of my list for existential and experiential reasons I only dimly understood at the time. But my emotional and intellectual attraction to the place, to how it imagined and described the work in which we are all engaged--the marriage of heart and mind--resonated with me then, and resonates still today.

So it was that a then as-yet anonymous representative of the Woodruff Trust--the man I would later come to know well as Emory’s visionary President, Jim Laney--gave a speech on behalf of Mr. Woodruff, the philanthropist whose passing punctuated our gathering in ways that deepened the intensity of the weekend and added a sober sense of responsibility to its more casual rhythms... it was all of this that decided me on Emory. Or rather, it was all of them--the people, their words, and their evident care for our collective profession.

Which is all to say that, yes, the Woodruff gift seemed like a lot of money. It was a lot of money. But that seeming was not the heart of the matter. It is what Emory did, and has done, and continues to do, with that money--as the virtuous custodian of that gift which constitutes the essence of the Woodruff programs in their entirety. Thus the largesse first gifted by Mr.

Woodruff has inspired immaterial rewards of which I was, and always will be, the grateful recipient.

My career, like my scholarly formation, would have been unimaginably different without it. Of course no one can predict what a graduate program will be like, in the end. In point of fact, a good program will catch you by surprise, not only by nourishing your current interests, but also by creating new desires of which you may have been unaware. Emory was that place for me as well, and I will be ever grateful to my alma mater for that.

There was a boom-town feel to the Emory that I attended. The Woodruff gift had a great deal to do with that, but so too did the visionary leadership of President Laney. Jim had been Dean of the Candler School of Theology before becoming Emory’s seventeenth president in 1977. Thanks to the Woodruff gift, and Jim’s expansive and holistic vision of what Emory could be, new buildings were going up, new programs were being initiated, the hospital seemed to be in a state of constant expansion, the Carlos Museum was in the process of acquiring its world-class collections (with those marvelous plaster casts from the Met), President Carter joined the faculty... there was a pulse of energy that was palpable. There was funding for everything and anything seemed possible. Needless to say, since 2008-2009, no university in the United States has felt that way, and I do not think we will see those days again.

I would soon learn that a commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry had long been a hallmark at Emory; that was another strong draw for me, even before I was awarded a Woodruff Fellowship. Nothing symbolized that commitment better than the Institute for the Liberal Arts, or ILA. Founded in 1952, the ILA began hiring its own faculty in the early 1960s. Perhaps the most famous of them was Thomas Altizer, best known as a leading figure in the “Death of God Theology” movement. Emory’s defense of Tom’s freedom of expression and scholarly inquiry was legendary, and has never faltered in the defense of comparative religious inquiry. In my first semester, I took a course that was team-taught by the late Bob Detweiler, who had served as Director of the ILA from 1973 to 1981, and Vernon Robbins, then a Professor of New Testament in the Department of Religion and the Graduate Division of Religion. It was a crash course in literary theory and interdisciplinary studies and, for me, an inspiring example of how the study of religion could be integrated into other disciplines, with the aid of like-minded students from a wide variety of such disciplines. Years later, the late Jim Gustafson would offer an interdisciplinary faculty seminar each year on this same model.

It bears noting that the ILA was disproportionately well-represented among the Woodruff Fellows. This fellowship has always taken pride in supporting unusual, avant garde scholars, those who look at things from an oblique angle. This, too, was well tempered to Mr. Woodruff’s original vision. Tellingly, the ILA was restructured and largely dismantled in 2012, under the same post-2008 fiscal pressures that have been transforming higher education ever since.

But not then. As I have said, then everything seemed possible. Shortly before my arrival, this upstart Atlanta-based university had poached most of Johns Hopkins’s world-class French Department. Jean-François Lyotard joined the Emory faculty, and Jacques Derrida began paying more regular visits. The conferences the French program hosted in those years on Postmodernism, Deconstruction and the like were legendary. The Classics Department managed to attract (though not to keep) two of the most creative living translators of ancient Greek: Anne Carson and the late William Arrowsmith. I just missed Anne Carson by a year, but I translated ancient Greek for two years with Bill, which was an eye-and-mind-opening, utterly transformative experience. His good friend and colleague, Herb Golder, kept the torch alive after Bill left, until he was eventually prized away by Boston University where he still teaches now, and has revived Bill’s extraordinary journal of Humanities and Classics, Arion.

My own doctoral dissertation, and my committee, hinged on this interdisciplinarity. I wanted to explore the concept of tragedy from Classical Greece, through the New Testament, and on to 19th century German philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche. I profited from courses, and dissertation readers, in the departments of Classics, Philosophy and Religion, as well as the ILA and my own subfield of “Ethics and Society.”

The late Bill Fox, then Dean of Emory College, was a constant presence on campus in those years, and a bundle of endearing energy. It was scarcely possible to walk across the quad without seeing him, an unquenchable earthquake of energy and insight, forever talking with students, urging them, cajoling them, caring for them, inspiring them. Bill was singularly eloquent in insisting that a Woodruff Scholar, and especially the undergraduates, should be characterized most--and instantly recognizable--for their expressions of moral commitment.

To that end, the Ethics Center was established at the Candler School of Theology while I was doing my graduate course-work. It was directed by the late James Fowler, who had made a name for himself by using developmental psychology to suggest that religious faith, too, mapped out a path of maturation and a life-course. Jim recruited all of us in the Ethics and Society program to help inaugurate this initiative. My first teaching experiences, both memorable and formative, took place at the Grady High School where students who had placed out of certain requirements were permitted to take an Ethics elective. You will notice a recurring theme here: namely, how religion keeps popping up, and popping up in unusual places. That too was a distinguishing feature of Emory at the time. Candler was one of the larger Schools at the university, the Law School soon inaugurated its Religion and Law program, Spirituality and Healing became a focus of research interest in the Medical School. President Laney--himself a Methodist minister--well understood that while Protestant Christianity is a religion, not all religions were anything like southern Protestantism. He wanted Emory to be a place that made a scholarly home for them all.

That core insight would gradually lead Emory to a commitment to internationalism that was new. It is one of Emory’s defining features today, and the Religion Department was one of the first places where that commitment bore fruit. It was to have a very personal dimension for me as well.

I managed to save enough of my Woodruff stipend to begin traveling to Greece in the summers. I participated in a two-month Greek archaeology program sponsored by the American School of Classical Studies (ASCSA) in 1987, then returned to the island of Crete the next summer to work on the excavation of a Hellenistic harbor called Phalasarna; I would work there every summer through 1992 (I’ve worked on many digs on Crete since then). When my dissertation proposal was approved, I moved to Greece and was a resident scholar at the ASCSA’s Blegen Library, where I completed the drafting of my dissertation in 1990. None of this would have been possible without the support of the Woodruff program. And there is a direct line to be drawn between what the Woodruff experience enabled and my appointment as Director of Georgia State University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in 2012, and my receipt of the Golden Cross of the Order of the Phoenix from the President of the Hellenic Republic in 2021. You cannot predict what a graduate program will be like, but a good one will change you, often decisively. Emory did.

There are some intellectual and personal debts too vast to repay. My debt to the Woodruff Fellows program, and to Emory University, is such a debt. And that does indeed seem like a lot to me, still, today.

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