Thomas Griffin Sanders, a religion and international relations scholar, former ICWA fellow and dedicated runner, died on July 7 at the age of 93 in Asheville, NC, according to an obituary in The Asheville Citizen Times. He was also a 20-year veteran of ICWA’s sister organization the American Universities Field Staff.
Tom grew up in West Asheville, NC. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in three years from Duke University in 1952 with a bachelors degree in history. He was also a star runner, a sport he credited for keeping him healthy into old age.
After a year at Columbia University’s Union Theological Seminary, Tom went to Denmark on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Copenhagen. He returned to Columbia to finish a doctorate in the history of religions in 1958. He was graduate assistant to the leading theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
Tom went on to teach religious studies at Sweet Briar College and then Brown University, where he became a tenured associate professor and one of seven recipients in the United States in 1965 of the Danforth Associate Award for outstanding young professors, especially with impact on students.
He became an ICWA fellow in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Ecuador and Mexico from 1967 to 1968 studying religion and modernization. His fellowship upended his interest in a university career. Instead, he became a Latin America associate for the American Universities Field Staff (AUFS). For the next 20 years, he wrote in-depth reports about Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru. He was the first American to extensively describe the transitions of military to democratic governments in the region. He also lectured at universities in AUFS’s 30-plus member consortium.
“ICWA changed my life from a tenured professor of religious studies at Brown to Latin American-Pol Sci-international Studies-ist and author of over 150 articles,” Tom said last year. “Why the change? More interesting. My ICWA reports were very important at the time in describing dramatic change in Latin American Catholicism that almost no one in the US except me knew about.”
He was particularly proud of his last ICWA dispatch in July 1968, which he called a “classic article in the sociology of religion.”
The conventional wisdom at the time was that the Catholic Church was a reactionary force throughout South America. But Tom discovered a changing mood in the leadership, making it more progressive. “In Chile,” he wrote, “the contemporary bishop has a difficult tension within his diocese, between two types of functions: on the one hand, the traditional authority respected, not easily accessible (which, as a matter of fact, is the common image he has among the faithful), and on the other hand, what most of the bishops would like to be—helpful, approachable, a pastor.”
Today, the appearance of popes Francis and Leo may also be shaking old assumptions.
When AUFS shut down in 1988, Tom went on to teach political science and international studies at the University of Connecticut, Earlham College and Tulsa University, where he was a Ford Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Studies. He retired to Asheville in 1992.
Tom is survived by six children, the Citizen Times reports: Dorcas Sanders of Manchester, CT; Charles Sanders of Brimley, MI; Thomas Sanders Jr. of Brooklyn, CT; Ida Sanders of Portland, OR; Joel Sanders of Clarksville, TN; Aaron Sanders of Swansboro, NC; and eight grandchildren. He is also survived by Mary Lasher, his college sweetheart and companion of 30 years.
Top photo: Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral, Copiapó, Chile (Nadki, Wikimedia Commons)