During his long and storied career, Brown wrote 28 books, ranging from the ubiquitous Sunday school primer, The Bible Speaks to You, to ringing defenses of the liberation-theology movement in Latin America.
Brown gave voice to a generation of Presbyterians who fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He was jailed as a freedom rider, and arrested as a war protester and at the New York headquarters of the United Nations as a hunger striker against nuclear weapons.
His life was as varied as his books. He taught at Amherst College, Stanford University, Union Seminary in New York and the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. He was a mentor to dozens of men and women from coast to coast, a dedicated ecumenist and a prolific writer.
Brown’s approach to life can be summed up in the introductory sentence he wrote upon co-founding the group known as Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
Brown was accompanied on his sometimes-tumultuous journeys — sometimes led in them — by his wife Sydney, a renowned labor activist and teacher he married in 1944.
Brown was born in Carthage, Ill., in 1920. His grandfather, Clellan B. McAfee, was moderator of the 1929 General Assembly. His father, George W. Brown, was a Presbyterian minister in Summit, NJ. He graduated from Amherst College and from Union Seminary in New York. He also was an Oxford-trained Fulbright scholar.
After a year in the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II, Brown began teaching at Amherst in 1946. In 1962 he moved to Palo Alto, Calif. (where he lived until his death) and taught at Stanford until 1978. He then was a professor at Pacific School of Religion until 1985, when he “retired,” resolving to devote more time to his writing.
At the time of his death, Brown was completing work on his autobiography, tentatively titled Reflections for the Long Haul: A Plea for Companions, which will be published sometime in the coming year by Westminster John Knox Press.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by their four children: Alison, a family therapist in Richmond, Va, Peter, a photographer and writer in Houston, Mark, a graphics artist in Mountain View, Calif., and Tom, an artist and teacher in Chesterfield, Mass.; and two sisters, Harriet and Elizabeth.
