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In Memoriam - 1926-2009
Frederick Crosson, editor of this journal from 1976 to 1982, died on December 9, 2009. Nearly two years earlier he had suffered a brain-damaging fall that left him confined and weakened in ways that painfully removed him from normal communication with family and friends. In full health, he had been not only a remarkably warm and gregarious person marked by a probing and ranging intellect and a rich spirituality, but also one who especially delighted in the significant exchanges and the specific public trust of academic life. He was among a handful of the intellectual and moral leaders on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame in the second half of the twentieth century.
Fred taught at Notre Dame from 1953 until 2007 and held endowed chairs first in the Department of Philosophy and later in the Program of Liberal Studies, the University's Great Books Program. He published more than forty-five scholarly articles, edited five books and reviewed countless others, the latter especially in his capacity over many years as Philosophy and Religion reporter for national Phi Beta Kappa's The Key Reporter. He was the first Catholic to become President of PBK (1997-2000).
Fred was also the first layman to serve as Dean of Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters. He was on leave, regaining his scholarly momentum after seven years as dean, when he was asked to become editor of The Review. Fred's tenure as editor was the shortest among those five editors who have led The Review, because a serious decline in the health of his wife precipitated his reassessment of what he could handle well. As he left the Deanship in 1975 he had been called upon not only to lead The Review but also to become first director of the Center for the Philosophy of Religion, which he had worked to found.
Only once during his editorship did Fred make any kind of editorial statement. The occasion was the fortieth anniversary issue of The Review in...