Langdon Brown Gilkey (born 1919) was the preeminent American ecumenical Protestant theologian in the last half of the 20th century. A thinker of diverse interests and profound existential, ethical, historical, and scientific insights, his theology mirrored the rise and fall of the dominant Protestant neo-orthodoxy of the middle years of this century and proposed a theological agenda for the new religious and cultural pluralism appearing on the horizon toward the end of the century.
Langdon Brown Gilkey, Shailer Mathews Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School since 1977, formally retired in March 1989 after 25 years at the school where he taught with distinguished theologians and students of religion as Mircea Eliade, Bernard Loomer, Bernard Meland, Paul Ricoeur, Joseph Sittler, Paul Tillich, and David Tracy. The author of fourteen books and more than one hundred articles, Gilkey's theological method, like Tillich's, was "correlational," a discussion that reflected a more basic pattern of thinking, namely, "to ponder the character of our existence, both personal and historical, before God in the light of the historical and social situation, the massive contours of events, in which we find ourselves." He characterized the half-century in which he self-consciously matured and worked as a "theologian" as a "Time of Troubles," the apparent beginning of a process of social disintegration and historical decline.
