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Up for sale the "Harvard Divinity School" Samuel H. Miller Hand Signed 3X5.5 Card.
ES-5802E
Samuel H. Miller, dean of the Divinity School . iller took over from Dean Douglas Horton in 1959, soon after a
successful endowment drive saved the Divinity School from possible elimination.
To an increasingly scholarly school centered on preparing doctoral candidates
for teaching, Miller brought a new emphasis on study for the parish ministry. Miller
was primarily a churchman. He had just come from 25 years as pastor of the Old
Cambridge Baptist Church--with a congregation made up primarily of laborers,
social workers, and students. "I love this Church more than anything else
in the world," he once told a friend. His lifelong concern -- particularly
while he was at the Divinity School--was a ministry alert to society and to
social problems. His aversion to what he once called "ecclesiastical
incest" led him to establish a number of new programs at the School. Forming
a new Department of the Church was Miller's most notable accomplishment. The
Department offers courses in the relationship of the church to society and
sponsors a field work program--in mental hospitals and prisons--for prospective
ministers. Under Miller, the Divinity School sponsored the first major
conference of Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars--in the spirit of the
second Vatican Council--in 1963. A similar conference of Jewish and Christian
scholars was held last year. The administrative details of a practical ministry
never interested him. His photographs of the Maine coast seemed to one
colleague a symbol of Miller's uncluttered life. "He was a free man."
While at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, a friend remembered, he was not
interested in committees or attendance. When the church's spire was in danger
of being condemned, however, Miller rallied the congregation into raising
$45,000 for its renewal and spurred a drive for a new prayer chapel as well. Miller
felt life deeply and was a strongly spiritual man. "The mystery of life--a
word he often used--to him was not mystification but ... a way of openness and
sensitivity," Stendahl recalled. Miller expressed his love of
life through an appreciation of art and literature. He brought artists to
lectures at the Divinity School and sponsored monthly showings.
"Always," G. Ernest Wright, Parkman Professor of Divinity said
yesterday, "he asked--what is he saying about society?" A 1923 graduate of Colgate University with a
B.Th., Miller and received honorary doctorates from seven colleges and
universities.