obert Ellwood was the author of over twenty-five books, ranging from textbooks in religious studies (including Many Peoples, Many Faiths, a popular world religion textbook) to books of religious history (The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening, and Islands of the Dawn, among others) to inspirational books written from a theosophical perspective (Finding the Quiet Mind, The Pilgrim Self, Theosophy, The Cross and the Grail, Finding Deep Joy, Frodo's Quest). He was a professor of world religions at the University of Southern California for thirty years, from 1967 until his retirement in 1997. He passed away in 2025.

Robert Ellwood was born in Normal, Illinois, in 1933. He was educated at the University of Colorado, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and the University of Chicago Divinity School. He received his Ph.D. in History of Religion at Chicago in 1967. He has been an Episcopal priest and a chaplain in the U.S. Navy. He was a member of the Theosophical Society in America and a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church, a small denomination using traditional Catholic styles of worship while presenting an esoteric interpretation of Christianity. He has two grown children, Richard, a teacher at Besant Hill School in Ojai, and Fay Ellen, who teaches English and Religious Studies at Hope University, Fullerton, CA.

Robert Ellwood passed away on June 5, 2025.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Robert Scott Ellwoood, Jr.

Supplemental to information in the Wikipedia article, CV, etc. online. Some of these are attached.

I was born July 17, 1933. To the best of my knowledge, my genetic heritage is entirely English and Scottish. The Scottish part is represented by my paternal grandmother, Evelyn Scott Ellwood. Her father, The Rev. Walter Scott, was an Episcopal clergyman who served parishes in Indiana and Ohio over much of the 19th century. His spouse, my great-grandmother, Susan Ruth Anderson Scott, lived to be 100, quite an achievement in those days. She was said to be of the Scottish-descended Anderson family of Kentucky, which played a significant role in the early history of the Republic. Richard Clough Anderson Sr. was an officer in the revolutionary army under Washington, then an aide-de-camp to Lafayette in the battle of Yorktown. One of his sons, Richard Clough Anderson, Jr., was in the Kentucky state House of Representatives and the U.S. House, then was appointed by President Monroe the first U.S. minister (ambassador) to a Latin American country, Columbia, after they won their independence from Spain. Unfortunately, in 1826 he died en route before he could take up his duties. Another son was Robert Anderson, army officer and commander of the Union forces at Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor during the battle which marked the outbreak of the Civil War; in the end he had to surrender to the Confederates.

Another relative on this side was Isaac Ellwood of McComb, Illinois, co-developer and entrepreneur of barbed wire. His fine Victorian mansion in McComb is now a visitors' attraction, offering tours.

My mother was from a Missouri farm family; her father was a Shanks and her mother a Gooch, both from Virginia via Kentucky, and both deeply shaped by the Civil War like the Andersons. The Shanks were pro-southern and the Gooch's pro-Union; my great-grandfather Gooch was a veteran of the Union army (I have his GAR medal); he survived the war and lived to be 97.

The Shanks are said to have come by boat from Louisville to Missouri at the time of the war, after being warned that their warehouse business in the Kentucky city was going to be scorched by Union raiders; the old rocking chair we still have is supposed to have been brought with them on that trip, to have sunk at St. Louis but retrieved.

Missouri was bitterly divided by the war, dominated by factions from both sides that were no better than armed gangs fighting and causing havoc. When my mother was growing up in the early 1900s her two grandfathers, Gooch and Shanks, often ate with them and she recalls repeated re-fought the war around the dinner table — she got very tired of it.

My parents married in 1928, after meeting at the Missouri State College in Kirksville, where they were both preparing for a career in teaching. My dad had gone to several colleges and was troubled in his life until Kirksville. Earlier, my mother had taught in a small country school in the Ozarks, and after 1928 my dad at several high schools in Missouri and Illinois. He then got a job at the J. Sterling Morton High School in suburban Cicero, Illinois, a town until very recently headquarters to Al Capone and his gangsterism. But by then the Great Depression had hit, and in 1932-33 they were in a very difficult financial position. The School District could not pay teachers in cash, only in promissory notes offering to pay if the city ever got the money. At the time those had to be sold to a speculator willing to take the chance on them at much off their already-minuscule salary.

But then my father, who was already making an impact in his profession by promoting social science field like sociology (for which he later coauthored two high school textbooks) in the oft- classical curriculum of the day, was fortunate enough to get a position in the teacher training high school at Illinois State Normal University in Normal, near the center of the state, and be paid in real money. Among other advantages, this enabled them to have their first child, myself, in 1933.

It’s worth noting that fewer babies were born that year than in any other year of the 20m century. If I am not exceptional in any other way, at least this is a mark of distinction. 1933 was also the year Roosevelt and Hitler came to power; I believe my father thought the country was closer to revolution in 1933 than most people later believed, and that if FDR had not been elected the nation might well have gone Fascist or Communist.

Normal was a good town in which to live. My sister Audrey Ann was born there in 1937. I went to a fine teaching training school at ISNU, and had good friends. I early became very interested in astronomy, starting with a children’s book on the constellations called A Dipper Full of Stars, bought or made a series of telescopes, and thought I wanted to be an astronomer when I grew up.

After 1941 my years in Normal were also war years. I remember selling war stamps at school, and following the battle-lines carefully in the newspaper and on maps; I have always had a special love of maps. One interesting event was that in 1944 I guessed the right date of the Allied invasion of Europe, June 6, in a contest sponsored by the local radio station, won a $25 war bond, and got to explain my method on the radio and in the newspaper. One pointl made was that as an amateur astronomer I had checked the tides and phase of the moon.

I went to Sunday School at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Bloomington, IL, sister city to Normal. (Curiously, my teacher there was also the director of the radio station than awarded me the prize.) But thought I had no particular objection to it, I was much more interested in astronomy than religion.

This changed after we moved from Normal to Chadron, Nebraska, in the far northwestern part of the state, in 1945. My father had accepted a position as chair of the Education Department in a Nebraska State Teachers College there, a real promotion for him and he developed a fine career. But I think the move had mixed effects on the rest of the family. With one or two exceptions I did not make friends as easily in Chadron as in Normal. It was too much of a sports/cowboy culture for me and I did not always fit in. I continued interest in astronomy for a couple of years, but then in the summer of 1947went to an Episcopal summer camp and was swept away by it, deciding I wanted t0 be an Episcopal priest rather than a Stargazer. (The change may have been fortuitous, since if I had continued much further in astronomy I would have had to get into the serious math which is essential to that discipline, and math was definitely not my long suite. In religion you can appreciate the wonder and drama of the universe, what grabbed me, without doing the math.)

I’m sure all the new feelings involved in becoming an adolescent had to lot to do with it. But think also that the church, even modest Grace Church in Chadron, with its romantic medievalism as I saw it, appealed because it was such a contrast to everything else in Chadron, and gave me a private world. The rector during most of my high school years, Chandler Sterling, was easy to talk with and a big influence. He, together with my parents and the Bishop of Nebraska, signed me up as a postulant for Holy Orders and pre-enrolled me in seminary, when I was a sophomore in high school about 1949. This was probably not a good idea; I believe now one is too young at that age to make such a major commitment. But it must be recalled that these were some of the coldest years of the cold war, with the Korean war hitting the next year, and that the military draft was a major factor in the lives of young men. One consideration I think was important to my parents was that postulant status enabled me to get a 4D, divinity deferment, from the draft.

After high school I did a year and several extra courses in Chadron State; Ivaguely remember introductions to psychology and various social sciences. I had to major in Education since that’s about all there was in this teacher training school. For my last two years Chan Sterling persuaded my parents that I should go to a university where I could take classics and philosophy (not offered at Chadron) in preparation for seminary. The University of Colorado at Boulder was the choice. For one thing, it had a very active Canterbury club for Episcopal students, lead by the legendary Rev. Balfour Patterson, a charismatic figure on campus said to have presented more men to the priesthood than any other cleric in the Anglican communion.

I did take Latin, Greek, and philosophy, and I truly loved the social life of CU. This was my first time living away from home, an experience that led me to feel I could now be who I really was. Those were the days, especially in Education circles, when being “normal” and engaged in “life adjustment” were considered ideals to be enhanced by “mental hygiene”; personally, I did not want to be normal but just to be myself. My father insisted that I take Education as a major so I could use the credits I had from Chadron and graduate from the university in three years. One of the Educ professors at Boulder had written a line of education textbooks called the “Life Adjustment Series” and spent classroom time, as I recall, ridiculing the study of Latin. Itended to doze through those classes and spent a lot of my time reading books other than the texts, managing a B for a final grade. (To his credit, I should say that this professor was also a leading critic of McCarthyism, a major issue at the time.)

I tried to persuade my parents to let me go to UC three years instead of two and major in classics, but without success. However, during my senior year I was admitted to an honors program, which involved special seminars from which I learned a great deal, including one on philosophy of history and another on astronomy and culture. I finally graduated magna cum laude in 1954, based on honors exams not grades.

After a summer washing dishes in a resort hotel in the Black Hills of South Dakota just north of Chadron, I started Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut, that fall of 1954. Iwas the youngest in my class of about 30, all men of course. BDS was virtually on the Yale campus but at the time an independent Episcopal seminary. (In 1971 it joined Yale Divinity School to become a unit within that prestigious ecumenical seminary. I received a letter saying that, ex post facto, I was no longer a B.D. from Berkeley but instead an M.Div. from Yale; the easiest way to become an Ivy League alumnus of which I have ever heard.

I greatly enjoyed seminary; a lively community and classes in topics interesting to me; I especially liked church history as taught by the brilliant and eccentric Edward R. Hardy. During my first seminary summer I went back to Nebraska to serve a small rural church, a great experience. During the second summer I had the exceptional experience of being able to travel to Europe. I received a grant given annually from a clergyman’s widow in New Haven enabling a Berkeley seminarian to travel around, Visiting cathedrals and other sites. Ivisited atttractions in England and France, including the famous shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, plus attended three short sessions available that summer: a summer school for Anglican seminarians and clergy from England and Ireland at St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury; a session for seminarians from around the world, Protestant and E. Orthodox, sponsored by the World Council of Churches and held near Geneva; and back in England a conference of the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius, Anglican and Orthodox clergy, seminarians, and laity interested in relationships between those two traditions, plus a few others.

One of the others was a young woman named Hilary who was a convert to the Roman Catholic Church. As soon as she met me she decided two things: that I would convert to the Roman church also, and then that she would marry me. In my youth and naivete I hardly knew what to make of this situation, though I had no doubt that my professional calling was still to be an Episcopal cleric. This relation continued in a sometimes difficult correspondence for two or three years. Then, while I was at my first church, in Central City, Nebraska, Hilary came from England to Omaha and the relationship continued until it finally had to be given up. She went back to Urbana/Champaigne Il where she married someone at the University of Illinois a few months later. I don’t know what the story of this relationship was; perhaps that gentleman was second choice.

It was while I was seeing Hilary in Omaha that Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, and we talked about that some. I have sometimes wondered how she responded to all the changes of mood and practice the council wrought. When I knew her she was very much committed to the mentality 0f what is now sometimes called the Old Church: Thomistic, authoritarian (especially about marriage), a final Catholic answer to every question, Latin liturgy, conspicuous statues of saints, the rest. She would have had to deal in the Council atmosphere with unprecedented diversity of opinion in the church and an English liturgy that looked far more like the Anglican than the Old Church rite. Did she quit the church, become an ultra-traditionalist, go with the Council changes, or what? I lost track of her and will probably never know.

After seminary I returned to my home Diocese of Nebraska and was given a small church, Christ Church, in a rural town called Central City. I no doubt did some correct things and made some mistakes, but in general it was a good experience. It was a great time for ecclesiastical building, given expanding numbers, the baby boom, and postwar prosperity, and we build a parish hall for Christ Church. After a few months I was also given an another small rural church, St. John’s, Albion. I went there Sunday afternoon and one day a week.

Central City was a bit unusual in that until recently it had a Quaker school on its outskirts. There was still a Friends Church in town with members carried over from that institution. I got to know the minister of that church and was very impressed by his quiet spirituality.

I also got to know the youngish Presbyterian minister, who was a reserve chaplain in the Navy. He persuaded me to become a reserve chaplain also; thereafter once a month we drove to Great Lakes Navy base just north of Chicago for a day’s training. We picked up a couple others on the way, a Lutheran and a Methodist.

(This may seem a bit inconsistent with my Quaker admiration, given their well-known pacifism, and perhaps it was. I was young enough to want to try a lot of things. But I held then and later that as a chaplain I was not a proponent of militarism, but was there simply to give pastoral ministry to those given to my charge, like one would in any other church.)

My dream was always to be a seminary professor, and to that end I decided I would leave Christ Church after three years and go to graduate school. I planned to leave in June 1960, and had gotten accepted for graduate work in theology at General Theological Seminary in New York, then the pre— eminant Episcopal seminary; I also got a part-time assistant job in a New York parish to help with expenses. Then things changed. The church in Albion decided they wanted to build a parish hall too, and I feltl should stay till the end of 1960 to be there for the building and dedication. Also, Ithink I had a sort of vague feeling something else was supposed to happen before I did graduate work. As 1960 drew to an end, I rather impulsively signed up to two years active duty as a Navy chaplain rather than graduate school. It turned out to be one of those decisions that changes everything for the rest of one’s life.

I left Central City the day after Christmas, 1960, and drove to the Navy Chaplains School in Newport, RI. I enjoyed the school; there were exciting nautical adventures like sailing in submarines, destroyers, and a carrier, as well as a visit to the main Navy brig in Portsmouth, NH. I also liked the city of Newport with its gilded-age mansions and colonial churches; my favorite city in the East. At the end of the two-months school I was assigned to the Marines at Camp Pendleton, CA. Ileft Rhode Island and drove from north to south and then east to west across the country. It was the first time I had been in most of the southern states — then still Jim Crow — and, at the end of the long journey, the first time I had been in California, which I loved.

Not too much to say about my actual ministry as a chaplain; as in the parish, no doubtl did some good and made some mistakes. But the effect of these two years on me was tremendous. The various chaplains at a base were much closer socially than clergy in the average town. For the first time I had good clerical friends who were Jewish, Catholic, E. Orthodox, and various Protestants from ultra-conservative to ultra-liberal. Diversity was true of the Marines as well; for the first time I mixed with young men who were not the kind I was used to from Midwestern small towns, but from the inner city, mining and factory towns, even Hawaiians and Native Americans.

Then I was sent from Camp Pendleton to the island of Okinawa south of Japan for a year. Here, and also in trips to Japan proper on leave and training missions, I had the experience of being in a nonChristian culture for the first time. Ivisited Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and also saw whiterobed noro, priestesses, of the indigenous Okinawan religion. (Some anthropologists believe this faith is the only longstanding traditional religion in the world truly led by women, as its administrators and priests, in which men are just the laity like women in most others.)

At some point during the year in Okinawa I happened to see a review of a book by Mircea Eliade, the distinguished historian of religion. Iwas immediately struck by his comparative religion use of categories like sacred space and time — the church or temple space, the time of festivals and ritual. I ordered the book and eventually it reached me on my faraway island. I had been used to thinking of religions mainly in terms of theology — the Catholics believe this, the Methodists believe that, the Buddhist believe the other. Here was an entirely other way of looking at the religious world — I could see that an Episcopal church, so far as sacred space and time were concerned, was not entirely different from a Buddhist temple, with its sanctuary in front and the special atmosphere of Christmas or Wesak (the Buddha’s birthday). I became very intrigued by these ideas. Having decidedl did not want to stay in the Navy, and now ready for graduate work, I applied to the program in History of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School in which Mircea Eliade taught, starting there in January 1963.

I registered for History of Religion classes and also Japanese, since I assumed because of my background I would do my specialized work in the religion of Japan. This meant that my advisor was Prof. Joseph M. Kitagawa, a very kindly and helpful mentor.

(I would like to say a few words about Kitagawa and his background. Born in Japan, his father was a priest in the Japanese Episcopal Church ~Nihon Koseikai. In the late 19305 Joseph Kitagawa was a student at the Anglican university in Tokyo and intended to go to seminary to become a priest like his father. But these years were the heyday of the extreme militarism and nationalism that led Japan into the Second World War, and Kitagawa got into serious trouble for distributing some pamphlets criticizing the regime, no doubt spurred by the notorious “thought police” of the time. (Fortunately, Kitagawa had an uncle, a colonel in the imperial army, who was able to pull some strings to get him an exit visa so he could come to America to study at the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, CA. But while he was at CDSP (Church Divinity School of the Pacific) Pearl Harbor hit, and he was immediately interred as an enemy alien, despite his prior opposition to the Japanese regime, and sent to one of the concentration camps where all Japanese from California were put for the duration of the war.

(It should be noted this indicates how racist the US war with Japan was. Many German and Italian exiles in the US, often considered heroes, got homes and jobs, but never Japanese to the best of my knowledge. However, in 1945 Kitagawa was released. He completed his seminary training, was ordained, got a Ph.D. in History of Religion from Chicago and joined the faculty. As well as teaching he also served a small Japanese-speaking Episcopal church in Chicago.)

I generally enjoyed my years in graduate school. I met my spouse of nearly 60 years now, Gracia Fay Bouwman, and we were married in Alaska, where her family was then living, in 1965. She had been a student in Religion and Literature in U Chi. We lived in Evansville, Indiana, 1965-66, where she was teaching English at Evansville University, and I commuted to Chicago. In 1966-67 we spent a year in Japan were I was doing on my dissertation, on a text from medieval Shinto. I worked mainly at a Shinto study center in Tokyo and used its library, and we had a nice house in a suburb with a gorgeous View of Mt. Fuji on clear days. Generally the year was good, with wonderful days on a Presidents Line steamer coming and going, and fabulous sightseeing and Visiting shrines in that exceptionally beautiful country. However, I had a few moments of despair from difficulties with the language, not being a natural linguist, and from a growing desire to follow the Quaker religion.

I was fortunate in being in the academic job market in one of the last years it was still a buyers market, with more positions available than candidates, so I had several opportunities, including Indiana State University and the University of Miami. (FL). One, the School of Religion at the University of Southern California, definitely appealed more than any other because of the excitement of California and especially Los Angeles. I started teaching there in the fall of 1967.

I had two classes, Religions of India and Religions of East Asia. These last years of the 19605 were boom years of the famous 19603 counter-culture, a big part of which involved enthusiasm for Eastern religions; enrollment in my classes was strong and not a few students were clearly on a personal quest. For a while I served as faculty advisor for a transcendental meditation group. I also became interested in unconventional religious movements, from Builders of the Adytum (western occultism) to yoga and zen, any number of which were present in Los Angeles, long famous for such phenomena. My first book, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, featured some thirty, all of which I Visited personally. I also initiated a class on these groups, which was featured in an article in the Los Angeles Times and was also popular.

However, in the 1970s the counter-culture produced its own reaction in the Jesus movement; enrollment in my Eastern classes decreased and that in New Testament classes burgeoned. However, I did do a short book on the Jesus movement, One Way, also based on personal visits to communes and sites like the original Calvary Chapel.

It was in 1970 that I resigned from the Episcopal priesthood and joined the Quakers, in the Los Angeles Friends Meeting, in the liberal Quaker tradition. I had increasingly felt a conflict between my teaching of other religions, which I always did empathetically since I feel one cannot understand a religion unless one can inwardly feel with one to whom it is important, and my other professional commitment to the Episcopal church, especially coming out of its rather high church, doctrinaire style characteristic of the midwest. To me then Quaker non-sacramental universalism based on the Inner Light was much more appealing. (It is true that these were the years of the intense anti-war movement in which many Quakers were involved, and I did take part in a few demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the “Peace Testimony” was not a major part of it for me, though I accepted it in my own understanding thereof.) I think the biggest reason was again just wanting to be myself as a young man on my own spiritually and in every other way. I felt I had been pushed into the priesthood too young, hated looking different by wearing a clerical collar, disliked the Episcopal bishops and bureaucracy.

However, all that changed again when I went back into the Episcopal priesthood a couple of years later. I thought the Quakers were too negative: to me it seemed that although so much headway had been made in the anti—war and civil rights movements in recent years, I kept hearing Quakers talk about how bad things were because they were not perfect. Also, I somehow dropped into an Episcopal Good Friday service and felt again the power of liturgy to focus worship.

I might add that in 1976, while I was in Japan doing some research on one of the Japanese new religious movements, I decided to join the Theosophical Society, one of the groups I investigated in my earlier study. I was particularly drawn by the teaching that each of the great religions was founded by a Master of the Wisdom for a particular time and place, or culture. That somehow helped me deal with the tension of teaching a series of religions enthusiastically, one after the other. I also found appealing Theosophical belief in long-term spiritual evolution; this helped me to accept the world positively even if it is not perfect rather than getting depressed as it seemed to me some Quakers did. Laterl realized that my position had quite a bit in common with that the Teilhard de Chardin.

I left the Episcopal priesthood and joined the Quakers again in 1980, as did Gracia Fay also. Butl still had some yearning for liturgical worship, expressed it seems in a series of rather Jungian dreams in which I descended to some very deep underground chamber which was set up like a liturgical church. I found there is a church informally affiliated with Theosophy, the Liberal Catholic Church, which offers Christian teachings interpreted Theosophically ( i.e. as metaphor) and eucharistic worship using the traditional western rite (pre-Vatican 2 Roman Catholic and Anglican). I joined it and was ordained a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church in the early 19905. I might add that my son Richard is also now a priest in this church, to which he is very devoted.

I think this is enough. Later events, books, teaching, family life, etc. are all recorded in my c.v. and Wikipedia article.

Blessings to all.

Robert