Rebecca Alpert Jim Biechler Marcus Braybrooke Ellen T. Charry Leobard D'Souza David Efroymson Gabriele Feyler Stefan Feyler Eugene Fisher Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer Krystina Gorniak-Kocikowska Yitz Greenberg Wan-Li Ho Sanaullah Kirmani Reinhard Kirste Hans Küng Lihua Liu Jack Malinowski Patricia Martinez Sergio Mazza Alan Mittleman Ronald Modras Paul Mojzes Malcolm Nazareth Angelika Quade Ida Raming Virginia Kaib Ratigan John Sahadat Simone Schaupp Ingrid Shafer Shu-hsien Liu Thomas Thompson Catherine Berry Stidsen

Catherine Berry Stidsen I first met Len and Arlene (Andie) Swidler shortly after their arrival in Philadelphia in 1964. Len had come to teach in the newly established Department of Religious Studies at Temple University. Arlene was managing director of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies and also doing a variety of other things including work for the National Council of Catholic Women. (I remember looking up the word "ecumenical" and learning that it meant "of and pertaining to the whole world", which I know it still does in Len's understanding despite the fact that it has been co-opted to mean inter-Christian.) I was finishing my undergraduate degree at St. Joseph's College Evening Division where I had planned on majoring in theology until I realized that wasn't offered. So I had taken all the theology courses I could and emerged with a double major in English and Philosophy. In 1965 I took a six month leave of absence from my work as a secretary and went to Rome for the last session of Vatican Council II. This coincided with a five-month course offered by the Movement for a Better World and I joined some sixty more or less English speaking Catholics from throughout the world working to understand the communitarian spirituality of this movement. When I came back to Philadelphia in January of 1966 I talked about this experience at length especially with Arlene. I finished my undergraduate degree and began to teach "religion" at a local Catholic girls' academy from which I was subsequently fired although it was all couched in kinder language than this. In June of 1967 Len offered me the job as his editorial assistant on the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. He also suggested that I could use a system of compensatory time to attend graduate classes at Temple and work on a graduate degree in religious studies. I jumped at the chance although at this time in Philadelphia one was still supposed to get archdiocesan approval to attend a "secular" university. Temple was then, and probably still is, the largest "Catholic" university in the city. The sensus fidelium was winning out over archdiocesan nit-picking! Despite being offered a full scholarship to study theology in the graduate school at Fordham, I knew with all of my being that I needed to be at Temple and I needed to work with Len and Andie. The Roman experience had left me convinced that our Roman tradition had to hold up in the marketplace, that we needed to be learning from and with our world religious neighbours and from all the wisdom traditions. Temple offered me that and working on JES with Len and Andie was icing on the cake. Len's good humour was pure delight. He introduced me to Raimon Panikkar, Hans Küng, Bernard Häring among others, and the potential of Vatican II became something I could taste. Len arranged for me to be Bernard Häring's Teaching Assistant, in fact, and as we left his class of over one thousand in the Baptist Temple on the university grounds, the discussions I had with him as we made our way to tutorials at the Newman Centre are burned into my heart. I had, because of Len and Andie's employment of me, the chance to study with Gerard Sloyan, Paul van Buren, Patrick Burke, Bernard Phillips, and so many others it makes my heart sing now to think of them. Interestingly, I was never in any of Len's classes formally but there was not a day working on a manuscript or chatting with one of our authors that something did not penetrate, grow in me, excite me. In her quiet way Andie began to help me to understand the history of women in our Roman community. She introduced me to things that I really did not want to hear but I am enormously grateful to her now that she did. It was she who first raised with me the whole issue of women deacons and the potential for their ordination. Her book on how to put women's studies into the mainstream was mind-boggling. I was with JES for only eighteen months. In the summer of 1968 I was invited to be the first woman on the faculty at St. Joseph's College Preparatory School in their then 117 year history, and I was invited to teach religious studies. At the urging of both Len and Andie I accepted the position in September of that year. Andie argued that young men in a school like this in particular needed to experience women with theological expertise. She suggested it would likely not hurt the staff to have this experience as well. Len knew how much I loved to teach. I had on occasion supplied for faculty in undergraduate religious studies classes and students were very happy with me. He told me that the ability to teach was a gift and I ought to use it wisely and well. I left JES with a heavy heart but continued my studies at Temple and my friendship with Len and Andie. I subsequently spent thirty years as a religious studies educator in the United States, Canada, and most recently in India. I acquired a doctorate along the way at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where I learned to my delight that Len and others were actively sought for employment there when its department of religious studies opened the same year as Temple's. I have retired from teaching formal religious studies classes but now work with seniors, teaching world religions courses in Elderhostel programmes and with Canadian Lifelong Learning among others. Without the support in my salad days and Len and Arlene's on-going affirmation through the years, I believe I would not have happened. When I am in Len's company, and sadly because of her illness no longer in Andie's, the forty years of our knowing each other vanish. His laughter, hope, and good humour are as infectious as ever although he will admit his knees are less helpful to him than they once were! For all that the Swidlers have been, are, and will yet be, to me and to so many more, tanti auguri and ad multos annos. Catherine Berry Stidsen, Cayuga, Ontario, Canada

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