Macalester College - Alumni Relations - Alumni Awards

The Rev. Donald Beisswenger ’52
Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa

The Rev. Donald Beisswenger: Presbyterian Minister. Scholar. Teacher. Social Activist. Macalester Alumnus, Class of 1952. Throughout your distinguished career you have lived your life and served your community in accordance with the principles of your faith and with your deep sense of justice.

You earned your divinity degree from Yale University and pastored churches for seven years. In 1962 you and your wife Joyce moved to Chicago, where you worked on assembly lines and developed a business-industrial ministry. You also traveled to the South to register African American voters. You said that “I put my shoulder to the plow of overcoming racism and economic injustice.” Once, when black friends were prevented from buying a house, you and your wife bought it and then resold it to them, despite threats and harassment.

“I am a post-Holocaust Christian who learned that Christian nations can too easily ignore brutality and atrocities done in their name. We must always seek to obey God rather than humans. Thoreau once said that protest without resistance is consent. I think we consent if we don’t protest.”
Rev. Donald Beisswenger ’52

Your work was a family affair. Your six children joined in the family mission of raising eight foster children. Your sons Thomas and Philip carried on the family tradition by attending Macalester. In 1968, you joined the Vanderbilt Divinity School and became a professor and director of field education, where you guided students to connect religious faith with personal and social existence. Your work brought national recognition to the divinity school for the excellence of the field studies program.

A respected author, you have co-edited five volumes of Theological Field Education: Key Resources. You have also been active with the Association of Theological Field Education, including a term as president.

In 1983 you and Joyce founded the Penuel Ridge Contemplative Retreat Center in Tennessee.

After your retirement from Vanderbilt in 1996, you continued to work on behalf of the poor and homeless in Nashville and to study the oppressed poor in Latin America. Your activism led to your arrest and subsequent prison sentence for protesting U.S. military policy in 2004 at what was then The School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

You have described your calling as working on the global war against the poor.

At your sentencing you said, “I am a post-Holocaust Christian who learned that Christian nations can too easily ignore brutality and atrocities done in their name. We must always seek to obey God rather than humans. Thoreau once said that protest without resistance is consent. I think we consent if we don’t protest.”

In 2002, Macalester honored you as a Distinguished Citizen. Because of your lifelong commitment to social justice, your work on behalf of the poor, your abiding faith and your efforts to make the world a more humane place, Macalester College today is proud to bestow upon you the Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.