Neal Caldwell 1932–2018
On the day Neal Caldwell died, I was doing something that reflected his importance to me, and something that would have made him happy.
From my youth, I knew Neal and Alice Caldwell as friends of my parents. We would meet for dinner occasionally, or have them over to the house. For the most part, I was like any kid, uninterested in the goings-on of the adults, but with Neal it was different: Neal invited me into conversations about things that were interesting, exciting, vital, and showed me how to talk about them.
My early memories of Neal — indeed, all my memories of Neal — involve conversation. In a lifetime of conversation, what keeps these particular encounters floating at the surface of my memory is Neal’s exuberance: he loved so many things, and took delight in so many things, and wanted to talk about them.
And so I remember talking with him about his inventions, about politics, about theology, about the relationship between science and faith, about art, about opera, about his quest for clean water for Africa. And every one of those conversations was marked by his love of the subject, by his learning, and by the absence of any condescension toward me. Neal showed me, by example, how an active mind could pursue many things, how a cultivated soul could love many things, and how a vibrant faith could engage the world.
We spoke often about the dance between scientific knowledge and theology, about the ways in which openness to all truth as God’s truth opened up the study of the world, about the ways in which that study enriched faith in the Creator. We spoke about his love for Frederica von Stade, the soprano he adored, and whom he delighted in having met. We spoke about the water filtration he hoped would bring health to vast populations across the world. In later years, we spoke often about his art collection, as I came to work at the little college to which he gave so many pieces.
One of my favorite memories of Neal, in fact, was being given the art tour of the beautiful home he and Alice shared. To see his animation, his pure joy, in showing the paintings he studied daily, was to see a mind transformed by beauty.
The conversations never changed; in my 40s, when I would see him at Board dinners for King, or when we worked together on the search committee for a new president, we kept talking about matters of culture and faith with vigor and enthusiasm, when I had finally become a better conversation partner for him. Yet he never changed towards me: always encouraging, always welcoming, always a model of how I wanted my mind to work.
He did have an unfair advantage, of course; as he once told an interviewer, he had 70,000 extra hours to read and think thanks to his sleeping only four hours a night.
I think the most useful image for Neal’s vibrant mind comes from the place that gave rise to his success as an inventor and businessman: it comes from Alice’s gardens. As she brought so much growth from the soil in front of their Williamsburg-style house, he invented the owls, the dropcloth, the inflatable snakes, the netting to make it flourish. And he cultivated his mind as a garden, tilling deep to find truth, planting seeds of many varieties, fertilizing them with immense reading, and delighting in their fruits — and sharing those fruits with others, like me.
Thanks to my education and my profession, I have had many years of conversations like those I enjoyed with Neal. Most of those fade into happy but indistinct memories for me, but Neal’s stand out: they were among the first, and they continued for four decades.
And I know that it gave him pleasure to see me come to King, Alice’s alma mater, for which he served a trustee since 1991. And he would have been doubly pleased to see me last night, addressing a group of people from King and the Bristol community about joyously applying our minds to the intersections of faith and culture. We remembered him at this event, sharing stories of his mind, his generosity, his loves. And through those memories, it was clear that we loved him.
My last email interaction with Neal was to introduce him to the work of a scientist I have invited to King to speak next year, on the intersections of science and faith, and on the beauty of creation. I hope he saw, in my enthusiasm, the reflection of his own cultivated mind, and my great appreciation for him.
