Skip to main content

Charles Teel Lectureship in Christian Social Ethics

Dr. Charles Teel, Jr., passed away on September 1, 2017, after a brief battle with West Nile Virus, just two months after his retirement as Professor of Religion and Society at La Sierra University.

Professor Teel’s association with La Sierra began over fifty years ago. His active role as a member of the faculty began in 1972, but his actual appointment began in 1967. Though he lived and worked elsewhere at various times during his career, La Sierra was his professional home, where he established The Ana & Fernando Stahl Center for World Service and touched countless lives.

Tributes

Should anyone wish to contribute a written tribute to Dr. Teel to be read by his family and colleagues, stored in a scrapbook to be placed in The Stahl Center on campus, either mail them to The Stahl Center, La Sierra University, 4500 Riverwalk Parkway, Riverside, CA 92505 or email them to .

Donations

In lieu of flowers, friends are invited to contribute to a fund at La Sierra University that will support a Charles Teel Lectureship in Christian Social Ethics the issue to which Dr. Teel devoted his teaching, research, and influence.

Online Donations

$
.00


Your donation is tax deductible and you will receive a emailed receipt following the completion of your donation. For the purposes of strengthening the development program at La Sierra University 5% of all gifts will be used to partially defray related fundraising costs. We welcome your feedback as we steward the essential gifts necessary to fulfill the mission of La Sierra University.

Other Donations (Checks/Cash)

In order to send an offline gift (checks) we ask that you please follow these instructions:

  1. Make a check payable to "La Sierra University"
  2. On the memo line of the check, please indicate that the donation is for "Charles Teel Lectureship in Christian Social Ethics"
  3. Please mail your check to:

La Sierra University Advancement Office
4500 Riverwalk Pkwy, Riverside, CA 92505

 

All contributions will be gratefully acknowledged and are tax deductible. Once your check has been received, you will be mailed a receipt within 3-5 business days. Please contact us with any questions you may have!

More about Dr. Charles Teel

Born on July 11, 1939, he spent his adolescence in Loma Linda, CA, where his father served as pastor of what is now the Loma Linda University Church.

He attended Pacific Union College in Angwin, CA, also spending a year at Newbold College in England. He graduated from PUC in 1961, serving as student government president during his senior year and planning initially to become a dean of students. After completing some graduate coursework in sociology at the University of Southern California, he earned an MA in theology at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. After four years as a teacher at Newbury Park Academy, he enrolled at Boston University, where he completed a PhD in the sociology of religion. Reflecting his budding interest in religion and social change, his dissertation built on surveys and interviews of members of the clergy arrested for participation in civil rights protests and related activities. During his time in Boston, he also qualified for a Master of Theology degree in Christian Ethics at Harvard Divinity School, where he studied under noted theologian Harvey Cox.

Professor Teel began to make his mark soon after his arrival at La Sierra. Quickly selected as a member of the faculty in the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, he helped during the program’s short life to stimulate and challenge multiple cohorts of exceptionally capable students. He played a similar role as a founding member of the faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies’ successor, the Honors Program, where students encountered him as one of the instructors responsible for a demanding team-taught freshman course that helped to serve as a boot camp for budding scholars.

Utterly enthusiastic about teaching, Professor Teel inspired undergraduates with courses in Christian ethics and in Ellen White’s relationship with Adventism, and explored Christian social ethics and Christian engagement with culture with graduate students. He engaged students in challenging, stimulating dialogue with biblical passages and contemporary texts, capturing their intention with memorable intensity. One of the first crop of three La Sierra faculty members to receive Zapara teaching awards, he was a truly outstanding teacher who motivated, delighted and reshaped generations of students.

An active participant in the life of what is now the H.M.S. Richards Divinity School, Professor Teel also served as chair of the School’s Department of Christian Ethics in the 1980s. He also led out in efforts to enhance the participation of faculty members in university governance and to achieve market compensation for faculty.

Passionate about connecting students with the wider world, he led international tours for decades. He helped students explore the connection between religion and society in Latin America and Africa. His passion during the last three decades of his life was the contribution of Adventist global mission to social transformation. After a Maryknoll priest alerted him to the fact that Adventist missioners Ana and Fernando Stahl had played a dramatic role in the economic, political, and social empowerment of previously marginalized residents of Peru’s highlands, he began a period of intense historical research. Aware that the Stahls had been lauded for their missionary work in South America, he had had no idea of their societal impact. His research led him to the work of numerous non-Adventist writers—sociologists, historians, politicians, and others—who had commended the Stahls’ social mission. To celebrate their work and to encourage the Seventh-day Adventist Church and Adventist young people to re-vision the ways in which Adventist missionary activity could touch the world with God’s grace, he opened the Stahl Center for World Service at La Sierra. Under the Center’s umbrella, he led repeated tours to South America, while also creating a museum housing artefacts related to Adventist mission and organized campus programming related to the future of mission.

He also sought in various other creative ways to engage the imaginations of students, colleagues, and members of the university, inspiring active participation in social change. He envisioned Global Village, a program in which campus visitors, including thousands of elementary school students, examined replicas of habitats—populated by La Sierra student volunteers—typical of those occupied by vulnerable people around the world. Global Quilting highlighted the plight of children with HIV/AIDS and encouraged people to craft quilts for these children. Path of the Just is a key feature of the La Sierra University campus's central pedestrian mall. It honors individuals whose lives of service have fostered human rights and religious tolerance. Granite boulders placed on the Path identify individuals, including South African cleric and change agent Desmond Tutu, author Pearl S. Buck, Third Reich resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Adventist missioners and educators Horace and Rosayle Kelly and Lorna and Paul Allred.

At a time when there was little encouragement for faculty members to engage in scholarship, he modeled reflective, serious intellectual activity. Qualifying for a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, crafting thoughtful prose marking the development of Adventist identity, and exploring the role of missioners in transforming lives in Central and South America, he built on his early work on Martin Luther King's protesting pastors to make clear to other academics, church members and church administrators that religious communities could be actively and positively engaged with their cultural surroundings without losing their identities—indeed, while building on, acknowledging and celebrating those identities. He edited Remnant and Republic: Adventist Themes for Personal and Social Ethics, a book emerging from a lecture series he organized during the 1987-88 academic year, and authored scholarly articles on a variety of aspects of the interconnection between religion and social change. A new collection of published and unpublished articles is forthcoming.

Professor Teel is survived by his brother, Donovan, his wife, the former Marta Pastor, and his daughters, Alma and Melanie. A service celebrating his life and his contributions to the church, the university, and the world will take place at 4:00 PM on Sabbath, October 28, 2017, in the La Sierra University Church, 4937 Sierra Vista Ave., Riverside, CA. For memorial service live streaming options, please visit http://www.lsuchurch.org.

For further information about the lectureship fund, please call 951-785-2500.

--- Life sketch by Dr. Gary Chartier, Zapara School of Business Associate Dean and Professor of Law and Business Ethics

Contact US

Office of Advancement

Phone: (951) 785-2500

Go to Top