A Collector of Lenses: Faith, Journalism, and How We View Life

Martin Davis delivered this address to the Fredericksburg Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on April 28. We provide it here as a thank to our paid subscribers.

by Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Henry Samuel Levinson both opened my eyes to the varieties of religious experience and taught me the price of seeking truth in a world more comfortable with stability than justice.

A reform Jew, Henry earned his BA at Stanford and PhD in American Religious Philosophy at Princeton, and he reveled in the ingenuity of American thinkers such as William James, George Santayana, and William Ellery Channing – people I did not know before meeting him; people who have in the 40-plus years since he introduced me to them continue to shape my thinking.

As a university student I was brash, arrogant, and supremely confident in the Baptist tradition I was born and raised in. (As a side note, these are the same traits that I now bemoan in the students that I teach today.)

I won arguments by quoting scripture – though I really didn’t understand what I was quoting. I dealt with challenges by boxing the opposition out with the surety that they were bound for hell, and I was bo…