Capps, Walter

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CAPPS, WALTER

CAPPS, WALTER . Born in Omaha, Nebraska, of Swedish-American background, Walter Holden Capps (1934–1997) was a professor in the Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1963 to 1996. Beginning with his academic training and intellectual interests in European Christian theology and philosophy of religion, Capps proceeded to develop innovative research and teaching on the intersections of religion with American culture, society, and political life. He emerged as a public intellectual through his academic and administrative leadership of the Council on the Study of Religion (1977–1984), the California Council for the Humanities (1983–1985), and the National Federation of State Humanities Councils (1985–1987). Elected in California to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996, Walter Capps served in the Congress for ten months before his untimely death of a heart attack in October 1997. The Walter H. Capps Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was established in 2002 to continue his legacy by advancing the study of religion and public life.

From the philosophy of religion developed in Uppsala, Sweden, by Anders Nygren (1890–1978), Capps distilled an intellectual program for the study of religion, based on a Kantian framework, that remained remarkably consistent throughout his life. Immanuel Kant's three critiques represented for Capps three different but complementary entry points into the study of religion: with echoes of the ancient Greek trinity of the true, the good, and the beautiful, as Capps often observed, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) raised the problem of theoretical knowledge; his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) focused on ethics; and his Critique of Judgment (1790) engaged the world of aesthetics. Adopting this multidimensional Kantian mandate, Capps pursued these three threads—theoretical, practical, and aesthetic—through his publications and teaching in the study of religion.

Although his earliest books were on contemporary developments in Christian theology, Capps had a consistent interest in theory and method in the study of religion and religions. In part, this interest was informed by Nygren's philosophy of religion, which sought general, formal, and even scientific terms in which "to identify and examine the content of religion" (Capps, 2000, p. 21). But Capps was also convinced that the academic study of religion was a collective, cumulative, intellectual enterprise in asking certain basic questions about the essence, origin, structure, function, and language of religion. From Ways of Understanding Religion (1972), his edited collection of theoretical approaches to these questions, to his landmark history of the study of religion, Religious Studies: The Making of a Disciple (1995), Capps rigorously and perceptively examined the diversity of theoretical approaches to the study of religion.

Moving from the theoretical to the practical, Capps developed work on religion and politics, first through his interest in the impact of the Vietnam War on American society, which produced a groundbreaking book, The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience (1982), and an extraordinary university course, "Religion and the Impact of the Vietnam War," which received national attention in the United States by being featured on the popular television show 60 Minutes. Subsequently, in his research on rightwing, conservative Christian politics, which resulted in the book The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics (1990), Capps emerged as an acute analyst of religious and political tensions in American society. Although his work on the practical implications of religion primarily focused on the United States, Capps's interest in the political, social, and ethical implications of religion was never parochial, as witnessed by his skill in surveying global, cross-cultural, and multireligious relations between religion and society.

Alongside theory and practice, Capps was consistently interested in aesthetics, structures of feeling, and varieties of experience. From 1968 to 1969, as a visiting scholar at one of the world's preeminent centers for art history, the University of London's Warburg Institute, Capps was able to develop his enduring interest in aesthetics. In his studies of religion, this aesthetic sensibility was clearly evident in his abiding theoretical concern that most accounts of religion failed because they were frozen in time—like still photographs—instead of providing moving pictures that might track the dynamic, experiential character of religion. In thinking about religious experience, Capps was more interested in processes of change, as explored by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (1902–1994), who tracked the psychological transitions in the human life cycle, than in establishing deep psychological structures. At the same time, however, Capps's interest in aesthetics, feeling, and religious experience informed his research on the stillness of religious contemplation and religious solitude, as evident in his edited volume on Christian mysticism and his explorations of Christian monasticism.

For the study of religion, these three strands—theoretical, practical, and aesthetic—represent a research program, as Capps argued, that fits the multidimensional character of religion. In a 1997 article on the Czech philosopher, political activist, and creative artist Václav Havel, Capps demonstrated that these three strands could be woven together in a single life. His own life, as academic, politician, and person, was similarly woven.

Bibliography

Capps, Walter. Time Invades the Cathedral: Tensions in the School of Hope. Philadelphia, 1972.

Capps, Walter, ed. Ways of Understanding Religion. New York, 1972.

Capps, Walter. Hope Against Hope: Moltmann to Merton in One Decade. Philadelphia, 1976.

Capps, Walter, and Wendy Wright, eds. Silent Fire: An Invitation to Western Mysticism. San Francisco, 1978.

Capps, Walter. The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience. Boston, 1982; 2d ed., 1990.

Capps, Walter. The Monastic Impulse. New York, 1983.

Capps, Walter. The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics. Columbia, S.C., 1990.

Capps, Walter. Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline. Minneapolis, Minn., 1995.

Capps, Walter. "Interpreting Václav Havel." Cross Currents 47 (1997): 301–316.

Capps, Walter. "Introduction to Religious Apriori." In Anders Nygren's Religious Apriori, edited by Walter H. Capps and Kjell O. Lejon, pp. 17–35. Linköping, Sweden, 2000. Available from http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/rel/2000/002/rel002-contents.pdf.