McKendree Langley (1945-2005)

The Westminster Theological Seminary website carries an obituary of McKendree Langley, who died last week of a heart attack at age 60:

Langley taught history for 35 years at the high school, college, and seminary levels. He was associate professor of history at Dordt College (Sioux Center, Iowa); history teacher at Phil-Mont Christian Academy (Erdenheim, Pa.); and chair of the history department at City Center Academy (Philadelphia, Pa.). Since 1989, he was an adjunct faculty member at Westminster, and throughout his career lectured at Barrington College (R.I.); Free University (Amsterdam); Gordon College (Wenham, Mass.); Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, Miss.); Delaware County Community College (Media, Pa.); and Eastern University (St. Davids, Pa.). For five years, he worked as a journalist for Eternity magazine, New England Church Life, and The News (Southbridge, Mass.).

He was considered an expert in Christian democracy and the theology of Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper. A graduate of Gordon College (B.A.), Northeastern University (M.A.), and Westminster Theological Seminary (M.Div., Ph.D.), his P.D. dissertation was entitled “Emancipation and Apologetics: The Formation of Abraham Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands, 1872-1880.” In 1984, he published the book The Practice of Political Spirituality. He also wrote numerous articles on U.S. and Eastern European worldview politics.

I first came to know of Langley through his 1984 book, as I was researching my dissertation. I met him only once, in 1998 at an international conference on Abraham Kuyper at Princeton Seminary.