A Book Worth Reading: Dear Mr. Brown, by Henry Emerson Fosdick
Although he is not very well remembered today, Henry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) was one of the most important figures in American religion for most of the 20th Century. He first reached national attention in 1922 when he preached a sermon (Yes, a good sermon really could bring one to national attention in 1922, what can I say, it was a different time.) entitled Shall the Fundamentalists Win? In his sermon Fosdick laid out the differences between liberal and fundamentalist Christians, and staked his claim as a liberal. Fosdick spent much of his career as the Minister in the Riverside Church in New York City (which was built for him by John D. Rockefeller after Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Got Fosdick thrown out of NYC’s First Presbyterian Church) and as a professor at Union Theological Seminary. In his spare time, Fosdick was a prolific writer, authoring 44 books and published sermon collections. Dear Mr. Brown is one of the last of those books, as it was published in 1961.
The world Fosdick confronted in 1961 was very different from the one he has confronted when Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Was published in 1922. Yes, it seemed like the sort of liberal religion Fosdick has long championed was ascendant in America, but looking back we can now see that the early 60s was the end of liberal Protestantism’s dominance of American life was at hand. Fosdick must have felt this, because Dear Mr. Brown takes the forms of a series of letters between Fosdick and “Ted Brown,” a young man trying to figure out what he believes. The format gives Fosdick the opportunity to show how his kind of Christianity could meet the challenges of the modern world. Fosdick discusses how one can believe in an unseen God; the challenges of contemporary science; the questions of good and evil, and a host of other issues.
Even though Dear Mr. Brown was written over 60 years ago, it remains a useful boot, because the issues Fosdick addresses in it are issues that we are still dealing with today. These days we live in the aftermath of the liberal Protestant collapse that Fosdick may have been seeing at the time. Which means that in some important ways his world is not that different from ours. The questions Fosdick addresses are questions that lots of people have these days, (maybe even you, who knows) and because of that Dear Mr. Brown is a Book Wroth Reading.
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