Only Online: In Memoriam
James William (Bill) Whedbee, Ph.D.

Nancy B. Lyon Professor of Biblical Studies
September 24, 1938-January 22, 2004

From Leslie Barnard '04

Dear Professor Whedbee, William, Bill & James,

I met you my freshman year in your Critical Inquiry Seminar. The syllabus for the class revolved around one central question: Is Love Stronger Than Death? I was scared to say anything in your class because with your white curls and big, darting eyes you looked like you could be a genius. I was a little afraid of geniuses then because I thought they could think right through me and see my secret mistakes.

In my first paper for you I used every big word I knew just to make sure I was as smart as all the other kids in the class. Just to make sure you knew I knew that you knew everything. You asked me to write the paper again using smaller words.

In each early morning class you managed to stir our sleepy minds into discussion, being careful to coax every voice out of hiding, always asking more than answering, letting silence sit if we needed to find a lost thought. If we were shy and stammering you made us human again by telling us about your long history of love lives, how when you were younger you went to church mainly for the girls. Suddenly I could picture you as a teenager with the same wide eyes and I breathed easier.

I asked you to be my advisor in my junior year because I knew I could tickle your brain with abstract inquiries about the meaning of the universe and the power of the aesthetic, but I could also tell you how I had a habit of driving the wrong way down one way streets or how I missed my family.

Professor Whedbee, you made me feel like a special person with unique talents worth sharing with the world. You showed me that the mark of true genius is not the ability to identify secret mistakes, but the capacity to quietly cultivate hidden beauty.

You teach in a way that makes us almost believe we are teaching ourselves, and makes us know and know again that learning is a journey and a joy.

In keeping with your usual style, you declined to answer the question posed by the title of your Critical Inquiry Seminar. You admitted that you did not know. That’s why you asked us, you said. But as I watched you in Biblical Heritage, your hair tousled and your nose smudged with chalk, scribbling frantically on the board about a passage proclaiming awe and horror at the notion of death, I noticed that every student in the room was leaning slightly forward, poised in anticipation, ready to absorb and respond. This scene, which runs through my head every so often these days, reminds me that life is composed of both length and breadth, and that the scope of you was as wide as the world your students would embrace in your spirit. As I might have mentioned to you if you were here now and we were meeting in your office amidst teetering towers of good-smelling old books, this dimension it seems, confounds death’s linearity, rippling outwards and onwards in infinitely bold and bright permutations.

Thank you for everything that you have given us and for the gifts that continue to flow from your time among us.

Always,
Leslie Barnard