When most of us think of Christian evangelization, we might imagine missionaries in far-flung lands preaching the Gospel and establishing foundations to spread the faith; we might be less likely to imagine a scholar in an office editing manuscripts. And yet when William R. Burrows died last week, many a theologian and missionary remembered him as an important voice—and a valuable intellectual support for many decades—for his work in publishing and promoting works in the study of mission.

“Much of what he does may not be noticed,” said Robert Ellsberg, editor in chief and publisher of Orbis Books, at Burrows’s retirement from that press in 2009 after 20 years. “It includes thinking and learning; it means tireless networking; it has meant doing more than any editor in the world to foster a community of dialogue about mission, world Christianity and the deepest issues facing the church in the 21st century.”

William R. Burrows was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in 1942. At the age of 15, he enrolled in a high school seminary of the Society of the Divine Word (the Divine Word Missionaries) in East Troy, Wis. After three years there and two years of junior college in Duxbury, Mass., he entered the S.V.D. novitiate in Conesus, N.Y. 

After taking vows in the Society of the Divine Word in 1966, Burrows taught high school seminarians in Conesus for a year before moving to Techny, Ill., to study theology at St. Mary’s Divine Word Seminary. That school of theology closed in 1969, and Burrows (along with his lifelong friend and the distinguished scholar of missiology, Stephan Bevans, S.V.D.) was sent to the Gregorian University in Rome, where Burrows was ordained in 1971 and awarded a licentiate in sacred theology in 1972. 

As an international missionary order, the Society of The Divine Word has apostolates throughout the world, with a specific focus on evangelization and mission work. “To be an SVD missionary, it was stressed, you needed to cultivate your talents, grow in the spiritual life, and foster a willingness to go where your superiors sent you,” Burrows wrote in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research in 2015. “That would be a place where the church was not yet planted or, if planted, was not yet able to stand on its own.” 

Burrows was assigned to Papua New Guinea, where he would spend the next five years, a period he later called “the most challenging and rewarding step in my pilgrimage in mission.” Working with the incredibly diverse Melanesian cultures present on the island (where more than 800 languages are spoken), Burrows began to question the Eurocentric nature of much of Catholic evangelization. “I found myself formulating a basic missiological judgment,” he later wrote. “Since the beginning of the modern missionary movement in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church has failed to establish a fully self-financing, self-ministering, self-directed local church. Instead, the new churches are in constant need of help from outside.”

Readers can find Burrows’s views on contemporary mission fleshed out in greater detail in his 2016 essay, “Tension Between ‘Roman’ And ‘Catholic’ In Catholic Missiology.”

Burrows returned to the United States in 1977 to begin doctoral studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School and to teach S.V.D. seminarians. He also published his first book, New Ministries: The Global Context. He left the Society of the Divine Word in 1985 and married his wife Linda; two years later he completed his doctorate in theology. “I found, though, that, as Pope John Paul’s regimen took hold, Catholic universities were not interested in hiring former priests and that I was too ‘theological’ for secular university departments of religion,” Burrows remembered years later. Instead, he worked for three years at the American Medical Association, an experience which, he later wrote, “cleared my head of any lingering ideas that institutional Christianity was at the center of laypeople’s lives.”

In 1989, Burrows was hired at Orbis Books, an apostolate of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers with a long tradition of publishing books on mission and evangelization. (Full disclosure: I was an acquisitions editor at Orbis from 2012 to 2017.) In two decades at Orbis, he acquired and edited more than 300 books, including works by some of the most esteemed names in missiology and interreligious dialogue: the Rev. David Tracy (whom he also interviewed for America in 1995), the Rev. Peter Phan, Michael Amaladoss, S.J., Raimon Panikkar, Robert Schreiter, C.P.P.S. and Jacques Dupuis, S.J. 

I met Bill Burrows during my own time at Orbis, where I also worked with the American Society of Missiology on their publication program. Bill, a former president of the society, was an esteemed figure in the A.S.M., and was honored at his retirement with their Lifetime Achievement Award. Every year at their annual convention, I met more of his friends and heard more stories of his enthusiasm for mission, his care for scholars in the the field of missiology and his willingness to take on any academic exploration of the subject, no matter how financially unfeasible (sometimes to the consternation of folks back at Orbis Books who were watching the bottom line, I suspect).

Burrows was a member of the International Association for Mission Studies and a contributing editor of the International Bulletin of Mission Research. He oversaw the U.S. publication of the international theological journal Concilium for a number of years, and also served as Senior Fellow in the Walls Center for the Study of African and Asian Christianity at Liverpool Hope University in Great Britain and as Research Professor of Missiology at New York Theological Seminary.

Burrows’s friendship and scholarly partnership with Father Dupuis would lead to him working informally as the latter’s champion when he was summoned to Rome in 1998 by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) to answer questions about his book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. The Vatican’s methods during the investigation drew widespread criticism from theologians and others in the church, including the editors of America. 

Burrows played a similar role with other theologians over the years, including the aforementioned Father Phan. “He was responsible for publishing many books on Christianity as a world movement, on theology from a global perspective, and on religious pluralism. A few of these books earned ecclesiastical censure, but Bill’s commitment to a new way of doing theology never wavered,” Father Phan told me over email. He cited one specific moment:

During my troubles with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and with the Committee on Doctrine of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bill, a brilliant theologian in his own right, assured me that my thinking on religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue remained well within the bounds of orthodoxy. To Bill, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, not only for his scholarly support, without which I would have remained a theological nobody, but also and above all, for his genuine friendship and his modeling of total and uncompromising devotion to Christ and Christian discipleship.

Burrows died on March 3 after an accidental fall; he was 83 years old. Among the many friends and scholars to offer praise and remembrance was his friend for more than six decades, Father Bevans. “I believe that Bill was one of the great theological editors of our time,” he wrote in an email. “He was quick to critique, but also quick to encourage. And he always brought to his work a profound sense of faith and of theology.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Bad Timing,” by Scott McConnaha. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.