I first met Phil Mullins the summer before I started my senior year in a small, midwestern state college. Phil had just moved to town from Berkeley, CA, to become the first full-time professor of religion at the college. Since I was planning on attending Golden Gate Seminary in Mill Valley, CA, upon my graduation, we hit it off immediately.
That year, I took a class on Modern Religious Thinkers with Phil. We didn’t read Polanyi (though Polanyi was there tacitly), but reading H. R. Niebuhr, Tillich, Buber, and others in that class opened my mind to thinking and seeing in fresh, new ways—and Phil was incredibly generous with his office hours to help me, a recovering Southern Baptist, sort through it all.
We stayed in touch as I made my way to California, where he connected me with his mentor across the bay, Charles McCoy. During my later graduate work in theology and ethics, Phil sent me issues of Tradition and Discovery and slowly brought me into the life and work of the Polanyi Society. I am grateful for that because the Society is the most intellectually stimulating of my professional societies. In all this, Phil has been and remains a valued teacher, mentor, and friend.
Paul Lewis