Norbert Schedler
Still, Schedler met with several young members of the faculty in their homes, where they talked about these ideas, especially the notion of "higher criticism", treating the Bible like any other text.
Concordia's student bookstore became a liberal site on campus as Schedler, an employee, ordered books they were told not to read.
With fellow Concordia student Bob Smith, Schedler ventured into the classes at nearby secular Washington University in St. Louis beginning in 1955.
For his thesis, Schedler wrote a Wittgensteinian defense of religious language under the supervision of Albert William Levi, S. Morris Eames, and Huston Smith.
Schedler knew nothing of the Post report, and on the last evening of the course, seven Buddhist monks in saffron robes walked into the church classroom.
While managing Christ Church parish youth events he met the woman who would eventually become his wife, Carol Skeels.
Schedler wrote his dissertation on the method of Austin Farrer and Ian Ramsey under religious scholar George F. Thomas at a time when the history of ideas approach to interpretation of texts characterized most of the faculty.
While completing his thesis, Schedler accepted a call to ministry in the parish of Pilgrim Lutheran Church, Cheltenham, in the Philadelphia suburbs.
Schedler led worship services, but also did experimental things like bringing in advisors from all walks of life — lawyers, psychiatrists, doctors, and accountants — to help parishioners better negotiate their lives.
After a year beginning in his Pennsylvania parish, and before finishing his Princeton Ph.D., Schedler accepted an offer to teach at Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he was an associate professor from 1963 to 1967 and chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1968 to 1969.
The school later closed in the Seminex controversy as Missouri Synod leadership began questioning professors who used historical-critical methods for biblical interpretation or stressed the importance of the Gospel over other scripture.
In 1967, Schedler became a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, replacing Calvin Schrag.
He taught undergraduate and graduate classes, including courses on contemporary ethics, and after one year secured a full-time appointment at Purdue University Fort Wayne branch.
Schedler had written part of a PBS radio script on the ethical values implied by controversies surrounding the channelization of rivers in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, and in 1975, published a now widely anthologized essay "Our Destruction of Tomorrow: A Philosophical Reflection on the Ecological Crisis."
He also was drawn to the meaning-centered, face-to-face scale of life portrayed in E. F. Schumacher's essay collection Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered.
"I think participatory democracy can best be realized in small communities, where people still have control over their destiny," he said in an Arkansas Gazette interview.
On a hot August day in 1981 then President Jefferson Davis Farris Jr. came to rest next to Schedler on a concrete bench under a large oak tree outside UCA's Administrative Building.
Schedler and Kelley argued, first to fellow professor Phillip Anderson and then to administration officials, that the establishment of an Honors College might help UCA recruit and retain talented undergraduates, and improve the stature of the university as a whole.
Other early contributors of time and talent included UCA faculty members James Brodman, Eugene Corcoran, Robert Lowrey, and Helen Phillips.
Schedler's thoughts about the special developmental curriculum offered in the Honors College are outlined in two documents, The Lively Experiment[1] and The Challenge.
He worried when students came up after a lecture and commented not on the ideas but on his bright white New Balance tennis shoes or a snappy bow tie: "Usually, they watch me as if I were a TV show and then say that my talk was 'good' or 'neat.'"
Schedler remained a believer, not a doubter, throughout his life but recognized that questions about matters of faith often arise: "I've always been a pastor, not an iconoclast or idol smasher.
In his class, 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Religion but Were Afraid to Ask,' he said outlandish things not to upset students, but rather to arouse their curiosity and challenge their superstitions.
