Beverly Allen Asbury

February 14, 1929 — August 22, 2018

Beverly Allen Asbury died on August 22, 2018, at age 89. He was born on Valentine's Day, 1929, in Elberton, Georgia. Several male ancestors had borne his given name. He lived as gracefully as he could with the gender confusion produced by his first name, but he had his limits.

He married and became father to two daughters and a son, and later, as stepfather to the daughter and son of his beloved wife of 38 years, Vicky Hake Asbury. Their progeny includes ten grandchildren who live in various regions of the country.

Bev Asbury, an ordained Presbyterian minister, served for thirty years as the Vanderbilt University Chaplain, Adjunct Professor of Divinity, and Lecturer in Religious Studies. Earlier in his career, he held appointments in North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio.

He requested that obituaries omit any mention of degrees, awards, honors, accomplishments and publications. He noted that in his life and work he made many friends and not a few enemies. He wanted most to be remembered for his work for racial justice, for interfaith understanding and respect, and against acts of totalism and genocide. Intellectually, he was committed to the principle of uncertainty.

Asbury once described himself as both an 'agnostic Christian' and a 'post-Holocaust Christian'. While he considered himself 'incurably religious', both modern thought and human atrocity had left him profoundly skeptical of all religious doctrines and dogmas. In his lifelong inquiry into and study of ethical monotheism, he ceased to describe himself as a Christian. He came to believe that although Christianity's truth claims were false, its values of love, knowledge, justice and morality were to be embraced and lived as 'true', and were to be found in the religious experiences of humans in other faith traditions.

He hoped to be remembered for being a loving husband, father, and grandfather, a wise teacher, an intellectual and liberal, an open-minded man committed to racial justice, respect for human beings, and with deep regard for the care and welfare of children. Asbury thought of himself as a warm, loving, humorous, difficult, cantankerous, thought-provoking, fair, kind, complex person who lived fully and gave freely of himself to others. He claimed, perhaps extravagantly, that he had never voted Republican.

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Beverly Allen Asbury

February 14, 1929 — August 22, 2018

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