I was saddened to hear of the news of the death of William P. Alson, September 13, 2009. News came to me via an announcement in an Evangelical Philosophical Society news bulletin, October 6.

I’ve known of his role and place in the Society of Christian Philosophers since my first trip to Wheaton College for the Annual Philosophy Conference in 1992, my first year of teaching at Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota. His work in philosophy of language and perception was so centrally important to the project of “giving a reason for the hope within,” that I knew I had to include some of his papers in my first anthology, Philosophy of Religion, An Anthology of Contemporary Views (Jones and Bartlett/Wadsworth), which also appeared in a Chinese edition in 1996. The essays I included are: “Religious Experience and Religious Belief,” “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” “Divine Foreknowledge and Alternative Conceptions of Human Freedom.”

His “being absent from the body and present with the Lord,” means a tremendous loss to the practice of apologetics in the West, and now the East. He was a presenter here in China at the first gathering of the Society of Christian Philosophers, at Peking University, the fall term, 1994. For that first meeting in China, I had picked a dream team of Christian philosophers. While it was his only visit, from that time on his work has become known among those who give attention to the best in scholarship. Since our first meeting at Wheaton, that fall of 1972, he impressed me as a very warm-hearted, wholly-committed Christian, with a giftedness recognized on the highest levels in the practice he loved so well.

His life will be missed, but his legacy through his writings so well-known in the Western world and now in Asia, will live on long into the future.

I regret that I could not attend his memorial service, but I do know that the spirit of his life and writings are very much present here. He was eminently a model of “being ready to make a defense to anyone who asks for an accounting of the hope within with gentleness and reverence.”

Melville Y. Stewart
Visiting Philosopher
Tsinghua University Beijing, China
stemel03@yahoo.com