In Memoriam

Lindsay Jones (1954-2020)

Professor Emeritus Lindsay Jones passed away on March 28, 2020, after an extended struggle with cancer. He spent his entire career in our Department of Comparative Studies from the time he graduated from the doctoral program at the University of Chicago in 1989 until his retirement in 2016. During those years he played a major role in the early development of the religious studies program at OSU, setting a high standard of student engagement and undergraduate teaching. Despite his demanding assignments and insistence on rigor, students seldom complained as they realized how much time and effort he spent on preparing and grading the assignments. His door was open to any student seriously interested in discussing religious studies and he was the campus authority on the traditional “Chicago School” methodology in the history of religions. That method was represented by such eminent figures as Mircea Eliade, Frank Reynolds, Lawrence Sullivan, Wendy Doniger, and Charles Long — all mentors with whom he had personally studied. From Lindsay students learned that the study of religion is a study about those who study religion as much as those who practice religion.

Although he spent so much of his time on teaching, that did not diminish his scholarly output. His scholarship won him accolades from around the world, most notably for his undertaking the enormous task of editing the second edition of Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion. His work on the Encyclopedia placed him at the center of a worldwide network of religion scholars, coordinating their work into a masterful whole. Still, Lindsay’s real scholarly passion, the only work that rivaled his love of teaching, lay elsewhere. It was in his fieldwork studying ancient religious architecture, especially that of Mesoamerica. He relished working alongside archeologists and indigenous peoples in often primitive conditions (for which his youthful experiences as a lumberjack working solo in the backwoods prepared him well). In the era of the Indiana Jones movies, Lindsay seemed to some students to be our own Buckeye Jones. Those field experiences yielded a cache of anecdotes on which Lindsay could draw to enliven his classes about the religious life of people, both those living today and those from far away and long ago.

Not surprisingly, Lindsay Jones was one of the first recipients of the College of Humanities special prize for undergraduate teaching, the Botomon Award presented to him in 1997. He will be missed, but his imprint on his students will persist long after his death.

Thomas Kasulis (Professor Emeritus, University Distinguished Scholar, The Ohio State University). Thomas Kasulis is past Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies and also of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. He was the founding director of the Humanities Institute and served as the director of the Center for the Study of Religion.

In May of 2019, Barry Shank and Melissa Curley brought a group of fifteen OSU students registered for The Japan Popular Culture Study Tour to the campus of the University of Tsukuba. The Japan Popular Culture Study Tour was Barry’s remarkable idea to strengthen the international collaboration between Comparative Studies/OSU and the College of Comparative Culture at Tsukuba. The collaboration between the two programs had its original seeds in a conversation between myself and Lindsay at a meeting of the American Academy of Religion.

I don’t remember when and why I became interested in finding out more about the department where Lindsay Jones taught. OSU was a familiar name to me since my graduate school academic advisor, Gary L. Elbersole, had moved from OSU to Chicago.  Toward the end of the first decade of the new millennium, higher education was becoming more globalized and internationalized. So, I was interested in finding out which universities and which programs would be a suitable match for the undergraduate program at Tsukuba. In checking the homepage of Comparative Studies website, I was surprised to note that the College of Comparative Culture at Tsukuba and Comparative Studies at OSU share similar majors and concentrations, both defined by their engagement in “comparative” work.

Knowing that Lindsay had taught for several years at Tsukuba a long time ago, I mentioned my idea to him when I saw him at the AAR, probably around 2012 or 2013.  He responded with support and encouragement, suggesting that I should contact Tom Kasulis since Tom was an expert on Japanese Philosophy and knew Japanese higher education institutions better. That conversation between Lindsay and myself was the origin of the broad collaboration between the two institutions today.

I am not sure when I met Lindsay for the first time, but probably it was at the Mesoamerican Archive conference on the campus of the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1991 or 92. He belonged to the older generation of scholars trained in Chicago’s History of Religions, to which I partly belong via the late Michio Araki of the University of Tsukuba, who had invited Lindsay to Tsukuba as a visiting faculty. I might have met him in Japan while he was teaching at Tsukuba. But my meetings with him mainly took place at the AAR and sometimes at the Chicago Divinity School Reception, where I talked with Gary Elbersole and Lindsay together since they were graduate students at the same time at Chicago, and colleagues at OSU. Lindsay once told me that in his course on the study of religion at OSU, he mentioned my essay, “Bearing the Bare Facts” (published in Numen) to his students. Looking back now, I think it was from memory of this conversation that I asked him about my idea to start an international educational collaboration between Comparative Studies and the College of Comparative Studies at Tsukuba. 

Since that time, OSU and the University of Tsukuba have established the Campus-in-Campus Initiative agreement. Through the process of designing and developing the CiC agreement, Philip Armstrong and Barry Shank have contributed to the initiative greatly by visiting the University of Tsukuba campus. Comparative Studies occupies a very special place in the CiC plans. Unfortunately, the plan for three Tsukuba faculty and myself to visit the department in early March of 2020 was cancelled due to the coronavirus. 

I hope that the international collaboration between Comparative Studies and the College of Comparative Culture at Tsukuba will continue and develop more fully in the coming years. In his own obituary, Lindsay expressed his mixed feeling about Comparative Studies. When the faculty and students welcome Tsukuba delegates to OSU campus in the future, I hope that they will remember and honor the name of Lindsay Jones, who helped sow the seeds of this exchange. I believe that Lindsay would have been somewhat surprised to see the growing relationship between OSU and Tsukuba, greeting both institutions in which he taught with a smile.

Takeshi Kimura is Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, Japan