Tom F. Driver

Tom F. Driver
Tom F. Driver
Born	Tom Faw Driver (1925-05-31)May 31, 1925 Johnson City, TN
Nationality	American
Title	Paul J. Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture Emeritus
Spouse	Anne L. Barstow ​ (m. 1952)​
Children	Kate Driver Murphy, Paul Barstow Driver, Susannah Driver Barstow
Academic background
Education	Duke University, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, Columbia University
Alma mater	Columbia University
Thesis	The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (1957)
Academic work
Institutions	Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York

Tom F. Driver (born May 31, 1925), theologian, preacher, lecturer, author, and peace activist, is the Paul J. Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is best known for his combined interest in theology, theater, and ritual studies. He is equally known for his many publications and speeches in these areas and their intersection; these range from academic and popular articles, books, and lectures to sermons, and culminate in works and speeches denouncing war and advocating justice that stand alongside his activism. He is the photographer and director of two documentary films about violence in Colombia, both films written and narrated in collaboration with his wife, the historian Anne L. Barstow. Since retirement from teaching (in 1991) Driver has worked actively for peace, justice, and human rights in Haiti and Colombia. He has advocated nonviolent resistance to evil and the rejection of war. He and Anne Barstow were the first recipients (in 2014) of the annual Anne Barstow and Tom Driver Award for Excellence in Nonviolent Action in Retirement, given by The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.

Life and Career

Tom F. Driver was born on May 31, 1925, in Johnson City, TN. When he was five years old he moved with his family to Bristol, TN-VA. From an early age he showed an interest in both church and theater. He finished high school during the Second World War (in 1943) and was drafted into the Army of the United States by his own father, who was head of the local draft board. He spent the rest of World War II in uniform, mostly in the army’s Corps of Engineers in Europe. By the time he was honorably discharged in the spring of 1946, he had become staunchly opposed to both war and militarism.

Driver’s life-long advocacy of peace and justice was influenced by the war and his war experience, and, shortly after that, his involvement in the United Methodist Church youth movement while he was a college student. In college, he regularly read motive, a Methodist youth publication focused on justice and other timely social issues. Enrolling at Duke University, a Methodist school, he joined the World Federalists Movement, a democratic movement of the world’s citizens, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international body made up of religious organizations in support of nonviolence. His experiences at Duke continued to develop his engagement in theology as an underpinning of peace and justice; Driver grew up in a liberal stream of the United Methodist Church and always has been at home with its progressive theology and ethics.

While in college, Driver was also active in the Duke Players, the Wesley Foundation, Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, and eventually both Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa. His many onstage roles for the Duke Players included The Glass Menagerie (playing the Gentleman Caller), Angel Street (Mr. Manningham), and Julius Caesar (Mark Antony). In his senior year he founded The Wesley Players, launching it with productions of A Child is Born, by Stephen Vincent Benet, and Aria da Capo, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Upon graduation from Duke in 1950, Driver enrolled in the Bachelor of Divinity (B.D.) program (later known as the Master of Divinity or M. Div. program) at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he studied under Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Muilenburg, and others. He was ordained to the Christian ministry by the Holston Conference of the United Methodist Church in 1953. Meanwhile, in 1952, he had married Anne Barstow of Palatka, FL, whose lifelong Presbyterianism would bring Driver into frequent affiliation with Presbyterian churches and into active work with the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. Barstow herself became an historian. The couple, both professors in higher education, are the parents of three children -- two daughters and one son.

Driver received a Kent Fellowship in 1953 that enabled him to enter the Ph.D. program in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University with a concentration in the history of theatre and drama. He received his doctorate in 1957 with a dissertation soon published as The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama.

Holding advanced degrees in both theology and theater, Driver was uncertain what his future might hold. His multifaceted career began to take shape in August of 1956. Within a single week he received two offers of jobs: from Union Theological Seminary he received an invitation to help initiate a Program in Religious Drama that was being funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, while from The Christian Century, a weekly magazine with national circulation, he received an invitation to become its first-ever theater critic. At the seminary he worked under the drama program's Visiting Director, E. Martin Browne, best known as the director of all the plays of T.S. Eliot in London and New York. During the life of the Religious Drama program Driver directed the first New York City production of David, a play by D. H. Lawrence, as well as an abbreviated version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht.

Also in 1956, Driver was commissioned by the Methodist Student Movement to write the libretto for an oratorio, The Invisible Fire, about the life of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and his brother, the hymnodist Charles Wesley. The oratorio was premiered on January 1, 1957, at Lawrence, Kansas, by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Thor Johnson. Invisible Fire was also performed on CBS TV on May 25, 1958, by the CBS Symphony Orchestra with soloists and chorus conducted by Alfredo Antonini.

By 1958 Driver had become an Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at Union Seminary. He would eventually become the Paul J. Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture.

Driver’s 1960 interview in Paris with author Samuel Beckett was published in 1961 as “Beckett by the Madeleine” and has been much anthologized.

The Reporter magazine hired Driver as its theater critic in 1963, starting with a review of Peter Brooke’s celebrated London production of King Lear. The association ended in less than a year (in the spring of 1964) when Driver ran afoul of the magazine’s founder and publisher, Max Ascoli, by writing a favorable review of James Baldwin’s Broadway play, Blues for Mister Charlie. Mr. Ascoli, an early publisher and advocate of Baldwin’s work, had turned against Baldwin when the latter published The Fire Next Time, a book about black anger at white supremacy. Ascoli thought Baldwin’s defense of that anger was unjustified, and he refused to let his magazine endorse a Baldwin play. Thus rejected, Driver’s review was soon published by three other journals: Christianity and Crisis, The Village Voice, and Negro Digest.

Upon leaving The Reporter magazine, Driver turned his attention to writing a history of the modern theater that he had been commissioned to write for the Dell Publishing Co. It was published in 1970 as Romantic Quest and Modern Query: A History of the Modern Theater. That work superseded a projected work on “Imagination and Revelation,” for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962. Meanwhile Driver served on the editorial board of Christianity and Crisis from 1960 until 1965, when he resigned because of the magazine’s reluctance to condemn the Vietnam War. (It did so the following year.) However, Driver continued to write articles for its pages almost until it ceased publication in 1993.

The polarization of American society was acute during the 1960s, especially in academic institutions. Driver’s political thought moved toward that of the “New Left.” A devoted Protestant Christian throughout his life, he nevertheless became critical of much traditional theology and practice. Although never a parish minister, he is a frequent and eloquent preacher.

During the 1960s Driver’s theater interests were drawn toward offerings off-Broadway, particularly to the avant-garde of the time and its participational forms of theater. In the classroom he developed highly participational modes of teaching. These tendencies resulted in his first theological book, Patterns of Grace: Human Experience as Word of God (1977), followed by Christ in a Changing World: Toward an Ethical Christology (1981).

Driver’s twin interests in theater and theology led over time to the study of ritual. He saw that both religion and theater involve public performance of symbolic actions. Both are present in all human societies. Ritual is not only a preserver of society but also, at various times, a resource for its transformation. Driver contributed to organizing the Ritual Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion; which helped to formalize the study of religious ritual in U.S. universities and seminaries. Ritual study led Driver to a short period of research in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in the summer of 1976. The photographs and audio recordings he made there were later presented at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as well as in classroom teaching.

Driver’s thinking about ritual eventuated in the book, The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites That Transform Our Lives and Our Communities (1991), later revised and re-published as Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual (1998, 2006).

In 1982 Driver did research in Haiti, focused on the ritual life of Vodou, the country’s popular religion. Nine years later, in 1991, his retirement from teaching coincided with a coup d’etat against Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrande Aristide. Driver became an active supporter of Haiti’s beleaguered democratic movement, working with Witness for Peace, for whom he chaired a Task Force on Haiti, leading numerous fact-finding delegations there between 1991 and 2004. Witness for Peace is a grassroots U.S. organization promoting peace, justice, and sustainable economies in the Americas, including the Caribbean.

Witness for Peace also took Driver to Colombia in 2000, where he did the photography for a documentary film entitled Colombia, the Next Vietnam? He returned to Colombia in 2003 with a delegation arranged by his wife, Anne Barstow, and sponsored by Witness for Peace and the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. Once again he photographed and edited a documentary film, this one known as Colombians Speak Out about Violence and U.S. Policy. Like the first Colombia film, it was co-authored and narrated jointly with Anne Barstow. It was screened at the 2004 Mountaintop Human Rights Film Festival in Vermont.

As an advocate of nonviolent action as an alternative to war and militarism Professor Driver edited and wrote (in 2001) the Introduction to a special issue of Church and Society, a journal published by the Presbyterian Church (USA) entitled Rethinking War, Rethinking Peace, Making Peace. In 2005, in the wake of disclosure of the use of torture by American military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he helped write “What's at Stake in Torture? Ritual, Imagination, and the Role of Media in the Construction of State Power.”

In 2011, after living 61 years in New York City, Driver moved with his wife to a retirement community in New Jersey. There in 2017 he became the founding chairperson of Senior Advocates for Justice, a politically active group in resistance to the Presidential administration that began that year. He drafted the group’s Dream for America. Driver continues to write, lecture, and preach. Driver’s papers and photos are archived at the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary in New York; see the Finding Aid. Inquiries may be addressed to burkearchives@library.columbia.edu.

Awards and honors

• D.Litt. (honorary degree), Denison University, 1970
• Omicron Delta Kappa
• Phi Beta Kappa
• Kent Fellowship, 1953
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1962
• Excellence in Ritual Studies award of the American Academy of Religion, 2001
• The Andrew Murray Award of The Witherspoon Society (shared with Anne L. Barstow), 2006
• The Anne Barstow and Tom Driver Award for Excellence in Nonviolent Action in Retirement, given by The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, 2014

Visiting professorships and lectures

• Barnard College
• Columbia University
• Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan
• Fordham University
• Montclair State University
• University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Publications

Books

1958 The Invisible Fire. Libretto for oratorio, with music by Cecil Effinger. New York: H.W. Gray Co.

1960 The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. Paperback edition, 1967.

1964 Poems of Doubt and Belief: An Anthology of Modern Religious Poetry. Co-edited with Robert Pack New York: Macmillan Co.

1966 Jean Genet. New York: Columbia University Press.

1970 Romantic Quest and Modern Query: A History of the Modern Theater. New York: Delacorte Press. Paperback edition, A Delta Book, 1971. Reprinted at Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980.

1977 Patterns of Grace: Human Experience as Word of God. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Reprinted at Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.

1981 Christ in a Changing World: Toward an Ethical Christology. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.

1991 The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives and Our Communities. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

1998 <2007> Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual. Boulder, CO: Westview Press (reissue of The Magic of Ritual, with new Preface and new title).

Films

• Colombia, the Next Vietnam? (2000)
• Colombians Speak Out about Violence and U.S. Policy (2003)

Articles

In addition to the theater reviews that appeared in The Christian Century magazine between 1956 and 1962, Tom F. Driver has authored more than 200 articles for the following publications (among others):

• America
• Christian Thought
• Christianity and Crisis
• Church & Society
• Clio
• Columbia University Forum
• Commonweal
• Congress Monthly
• Critical Review of Books in Religion
• Crossroads
• Educational Theater Review
• Haiti Progres
• International Journal of Religious Education
• Journal of the American Academy of Religion
• motive
• Newsday
• Newsletter of the North American Paul Tillich Society
• Oxymoron: The Arts and Sciences Annual
• Reform Judaism
• Religious Studies News
• Review of Religious Research
• Saturday Review
• Shakespeare Quarterly
• SHOFAR
• Social Action
• Soundings
• The Baltimore Sun
• The Christian Century
• The Christian Scholar
• The Encyclopedia of Religion
• The Living Pulpit
• The Nation
• The New Republic
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Review of Religious Research
• The Tulane Drama Review
• The Women’s Studies Quarterly
• Theatre Symposium
• Theology Today
• Union Seminary Quarterly Review
• United Methodist Reporter

Family, residence, and contact information

Married (1952) to historian Anne L. Barstow. They have three children: Kate Driver Murphy, Paul Barstow Driver, and Susannah Driver Barstow. They have three grandsons and one granddaughter.

Email address: tfd3@utsnyc.edu

Church affiliation: The Dutch Neck Presbyterian Church, West Windsor, NJ.