Haverford College

Haverford College emerges as a formative Quaker institution where intellectual study, personal crisis, and religious commitment intersect. Through its connection to Rufus Jones and its community of teachers and students, it shaped Howard Thurman’s understanding of his vocation, provided Douglas Steere with a lasting academic and spiritual home, and supported Thomas Kelly after a painful failure. The book presents the college less through its physical setting than through the people whose lives and work converged there.

A Quaker college and a network of teachers

Haverford’s importance is conveyed chiefly through relationships. Rufus Jones invited Douglas Steere to join the faculty in 1928, and Steere later became his successor as chair of the philosophy department. Jones also became a mentor to Howard Thurman, who came to Haverford for a semester of independent study in 1929. Years later, Kelly’s Haverford appointment brought him into friendship with both Jones and Steere. Across these different stories, the college appears as a place where religious experience could be approached through scholarship, conversation, teaching, and communal practice.

That role did not make Haverford a setting separate from the wider world. Its Quaker commitments included silent worship, pacifism, and social justice, concerns that mattered to the choices its teachers faced and to the work they pursued beyond the college. The evidence emphasizes the connections among people and ideas rather than buildings or campus geography: Haverford’s character in these accounts is made legible through mentorship and intellectual companionship.

Howard Thurman’s semester with Rufus Jones

Thurman’s path to Haverford began with a book. While attending a conference on religious education, he bought Rufus Jones’s Finding the Trail of Life in College and read it straight through while sitting on the church steps. The encounter made him determined to study with Jones. After a friend made an inquiry, Jones invited him to Haverford for one semester of independent study. Thurman resigned from his pastorate to accept the invitation. His wife, advised by her doctor to seek a warmer climate, returned to her family in Atlanta to recover from illness, taking their daughter with her.

Thurman arrived in January 1929. Supported by a grant from the National Council for Religion in Higher Education, he lived in the graduate student dormitory for the semester. He later explained the inward urgency of the decision: “I wanted so desperately to nourish the inner regions of my spirit, which even then were clamoring for attention.” At Haverford, he attended all of Jones’s lectures and joined a seminar on Meister Eckhart, which he found “exciting and stimulating beyond anything I had known before.” He also attended Quaker meetings on Wednesday evenings, where he was often asked to speak. Jones assigned readings in mystical religion, and the two held regular discussions; Thurman wrote several papers on well-known mystics.

The semester became a turning point rather than a discrete period of study. In his evaluation, Thurman called it “a crucial experience, a watershed from which flowed much of the thought and endeavor to which I was to commit the rest of my working life.” Its influence carried into his subsequent ministry: a deep awareness of God’s presence would become important in many aspects of his work. When the semester ended, he returned to Atlanta and took teaching appointments at Spelman College and Morehouse College. Haverford’s role in his story is thus both concentrated and far-reaching: a single term of study redirected the intellectual and spiritual resources he brought to his later service.

Douglas Steere’s academic and religious home

Steere’s connection to Haverford began before his later prominence as a Quaker thinker. Rufus Jones invited him to the faculty in 1928, after Steere had discovered the Quakers at Oxford and pursued graduate study. He received a Harvard PhD in 1931, writing on Baron Friedrich von Hügel, whose book The Mystical Element of Religion addressed a field central to Steere’s own interests. At Haverford, he built an enduring scholarly relationship with Jones and eventually succeeded him as chair of philosophy.

The college’s Quaker identity also stood behind Steere’s religious decision. During a later period of reflection, the spiritual resources of Catholic monastic life impressed him, but he was also a professor at a Quaker college. He valued Quaker silent worship, pacifism, social justice, and mystical heritage, as well as the faith of his Quaker colleagues. After wrestling with the uncertainty, he became a convinced Quaker in 1933, finding the faith of Jones impossible to resist. Haverford was therefore not merely his place of employment: its intellectual and religious community formed part of the context in which he chose a tradition to guide his life.

Steere’s work also extended the college’s reach beyond its immediate academic setting. He and Jones helped found Pendle Hill, a Quaker resource and retreat center. Steere later became a widely recognized scholar, theologian, and philosopher, and participated in ecumenical work through both the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. These later activities do not turn Haverford into their sole cause; they show instead how a faculty relationship and a Quaker institutional setting belonged to a larger pattern of teaching, religious exchange, and service.

Thomas Kelly and the experience of setback

Haverford entered Thomas Kelly’s life after an unsettled period of work and illness. Following a nervous breakdown in December 1934, he accepted a one-year appointment at the University of Hawaii, hoping both to earn a larger salary and to study Eastern religion and philosophy. While in Hawaii, he received an offer from Haverford, which seemed to him an opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to fulfill his dreams and reconnect with the Quakers. At the college, he formed friendships with Rufus Jones and Douglas Steere, who shared his interest in the mystical tradition.

The promise of the appointment coincided with a severe academic disappointment. Kelly hoped to defend his dissertation at Harvard before leaving for Hawaii, but the faculty advised him to wait until his return. The examination eventually took place and was a disaster. The failure struck him hard; his son described it as a moment when “the world had caved in on him.” His wife feared a fatal breakdown, suicide, or a depression from which he might not recover. Steere and Haverford’s president assured Kelly that the result would not affect his standing at the college and would not be made public. Their response gave practical protection at a moment when the outcome threatened both his confidence and his future.

By late 1937, Kelly described “being shaken by the experience of Presence, something that I did not seek, but that sought me.” In January 1938, when he spoke to a Young Friend’s group, his son noticed that he was no longer speaking only as a professor describing experiences he had read about or observed in others. He was sharing his own intimacy with spiritual experience. The account does not attribute that change simply to Haverford or to the examination’s failure, but it places both in the circumstances of Kelly’s transformation: the college offered continuing work and supportive colleagues while his relationship to the subject of mysticism became personal.

Institutional significance

Taken together, these biographies make Haverford a setting for formation rather than a backdrop to a single event. Thurman’s semester joined structured study with Quaker meetings and personal discussion; Steere’s appointment grew into a long academic partnership and a decision about religious belonging; Kelly’s position and colleagues helped preserve his standing after a crushing examination. The college’s significance lies in these distinct consequences, not in an identical outcome for everyone who encountered it.

The stories also show how Haverford connected contemplative inquiry to practical responsibilities. Thurman carried his study of divine presence into ministry and teaching; Steere combined scholarship with Quaker service and ecumenical engagement; Kelly’s later work and testimony developed amid a community that had supported him through a professional crisis. In the book’s account, the institution’s influence is therefore relational and cumulative: teachers invite students, colleagues sustain one another, and ideas studied in an academic setting continue into religious and public life.