The Graduate College

Nancy Ellen Auer Falk
and
Arthur E. Falk, Jr.
Sympathetic Student of Religion, Powerful Philosopher

Nancy Ellen Auer Falk and Arthur E. Falk, Jr.

I first saw the Falks in action at the Union, following a talk by a visiting professor of Asian religion. They engaged the distinguished visitor with grace and precision. From discussing friends and colleagues in common, they moved to fine points of philosophy and doxa. In awe, I listened and learned. The Falks bear their learning lightly.

Nancy Falk originates in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Upon graduating magna cum laude in history from Cedar Crest College, she moved to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. There she took an MA and PhD in History of Religions. Her dissertation, directed by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, concerned a study of the lay Buddhist cult of the Buddha’s relics. At Chicago, Nancy Falk served as student secretary and editorial assistant to Mircea Eliade, and she revised the translation of Paul Tillich’s autobiography in the volume, On the Boundary; she also edited the Divinity School’s house journal, Criterion, for three years. Nancy Falk was the second woman to complete a PhD in her program at Chicago, and she came to Western Michigan University in 1966 as the first woman graduate to begin a full-time appointment and a teaching career. Her berth was in the new Department of Religion (later, when it inaugurated an MA program, Comparative Religion). The department, an innovation of Cornelius Loew’s, was on the cutting edge of interest in promoting the study of religion at public universities. Loew, who went on to become Academic Vice President at Western, was educated at the Union Theological Seminary and had been an assistant to Paul Tillich.

Arthur Falk was educated by the Jesuits at Regis High School in New York City. Then he attended Fordham University, where, tutored by the phenomenologist Quentin Lauer, S.J., he was allowed to skip much of Thomist philosophy and proceed at his own pace. Upon graduating egregia cum laude, he went to Yale University as Woodrow Wilson Fellow and then Junior Sterling Fellow. There he studied analytic philosophy under Wilfrid Sellars, until Sellars moved to the University of Pittsburgh. Arthur Falk completed a PhD under Milton Fisk on the early philosophy of nature of Alfred North Whitehead. He arrived as an instructor of philosophy at Western in 1964. Several years later he met and married the new assistant professor of religion, Nancy Ellen Auer.

For more than 40 years at Western, the Falks have built on the heritage of Eliade, Kitagawa, Lauer, Sellars, Fisk, and Whitehead. Nancy Falk rose to chair (for three years) the Department of Religion, in which she then served as professor for 25 years; she has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has traveled widely on fellowships from Fulbright and the American Institute of Indian Studies (funded by the Smithsonian Institution), and she has held many posts in the American Academy of Religion. She was part of the initial working group that eventually resulted in Western’s Women’s Studies Program, and she chaired the committee that designed and then supervised Western’s Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages (now in Foreign Languages). Arthur Falk rose to chair the Department of Philosophy, in which he was professor for 27 years; also recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has traveled to India on a Fulbright with his wife (who also had a Fulbright), holding visiting appointments at Jadavpur University in Calcutta and Utkal University in Bhubaneswar. Arthur Falk served as president of the American Association of University Professors when it organized the faculty at Western and then bargained for its first contract. In America, Nancy Falk has recently taught at Albion College, and Arthur Falk has taught at Indiana University and Kalamazoo College. Between them, the Falks have served on more than a score of honors, MA, and PhD committees.

The center of Nancy Falk’s intellectual interest is the role of women in religion, specifically in Hinduism. Her work led in 1981 to a coedited volume, Unspoken Worlds, translated into French and now into its third, English edition. As emerita, she has published an encyclopedic summation, Living Hinduisms. A national authority, she authored the long entry on feminine symbols in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion and a number of entries for the World Book Encyclopedia. Epistemology and ontology have occupied Arthur Falk. Two recent, major books of his are Darwinism and Philosophical Analysis and Desire and Belief; since 2005, as emeritus, he has published five papers. He continues to teach part-time because, in his words, “the mutual intellectual stimulation between student and teacher is so much fun.”

In a recent essay, Arthur Falk sums up his approach to things. Life is about personal engagement and intention. In his view, “a complete life” relates to organizing daily activities in terms of “all-encompassing goals or purposes, in other words, one’s projects.” His goals are firm but modest. “My own grandiose position is neither the theism of de Chardin nor the atheism of Dawkins, nor even the agnosticism of Thomas Huxley….I completely accept my being a human animal with human ideals. I’m happy with who I am, in my family, in my culture, striving for an excellence my culture has defined, and the ephemerality of it all seems to add to its worthwhileness.” (“Darwinism and the Meaning of Life,” Publications of the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society, 16, no. 4 [2007]). His approach is not a world away from the tale, “Monkey,” by Wu Ch’êng ên, or Tripitaka, recounted by Nancy Falk in an early publication. In the tale, a pilgrim, modeled on the T’ang Buddhist scholar Xuanzang , attempts to cross a river in a bottomless boat with his animal companions, who urge him not to be afraid of death, but rather to welcome it. Transfigured on the far shore, the pilgrim climbs a magic mountain and comes to know wisdom out of time (“To Gaze on the Sacred Traces,” History of Religions, 16 [1977], 281-93, an issue honoring the 70th birthday of Mircea Eliade). Fortunate are the students who sit in classes that have been taught, in their retirement, by these two masters.

Books by Nancy Ellen Auer Falk

Living Hinduisms: An Explorer’s Guide (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 2006).

(Edited, with Rita M. Gross) Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives (1st edition San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981; 2nd edition Belmont CA: Wadsworth Press, 1988; 3rd edition Belmont, CA: Wadworth Press, 2000); La religion par les femmes (Geneva: Editions Labor et Fides, 1993), trans. Jean-François Rebeaud, from the 2nd edition.

Women and Religion in India: An Annotated Bibliography of Sources in English, 1975-1992 (Kalamazoo: New Issues Press, 1994).

Books by Arthur E. Falk, Jr

Desire and Belief: Introduction to Some Recent Philosophical Debates (Lanham, MD: Hamilton, 2004), fully revised edition on the web at http://homepages.wmich.edu/~afalk/db2nd_tableofcontents.pdf.

Darwinism and Philosophical Analysis [Utkal Studies in Philosophy, 9] (New Delhi: Decent, 2003).