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SHELDON VANAUKEN R.I.P.

By Jack Taylor

This Rock Volume 8, Number 2   February 1997     Up Front By Karl Keating   Letters   Dragnet   HOW PIUS XII PROTECTED JEWS By JAMES AKIN   WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WEB? By TERRYE NEWKIRK   GETTING YOUR TOES WET   CHAPLAIN AND FRIEND By KARL KEATING   Dispatches An Inexplicable Love   Classic Apologetics Rome Through Three Spectacles By Arnold Lunn   Fathers Know Best Confession   In Their Own Words Baptismal Regeneration By James Akin   East & West The Epiphany of the Roman Primacy By Ray Ryland   Reviews   Sidebar Sheldon Vanauken R.I.P. By Jack Taylor   Quick Questions    Subscribe    Permissions

Sheldon Vanauken passed away on Monday morning, October 28, 1996, from terminal cancer which had been diagnosed a few weeks earlier. I visited him the previous Friday. That visit was not unlike many previous trips to his tiny cottage, "Vancot," in Lynchburg, Virginia, except this time I mixed the Scotch and soda, and he did not stand on his front porch to watch my departure.

We talked about his just-released book, The Little Lost Marion and Other Mercies.. He was quite pleased with the look and the feel of the book; it has a painting by Davy on the cover, a picture of her on the spine, and several more pictures and illustrations inside. He was also pleased that many of the essays were strongly Catholic. I went home that weekend to finish a review of it. Monday morning, as I was preparing to send him a copy of the review, I received a call that he was dead. He was eighty-two years old.

Vanauken had degrees from Wabash College, Yale, and Oxford. He and his wife, Davy, had become Christians while at Oxford in the early 1950s, partly owing to the friendship and influence of C. S. Lewis, who was teaching there at the time. After Oxford, Vanauken returned to Lynchburg College, Virginia, where he taught history and literature. He lost his wife in 1955.

Vanauken is the author of a number of books, including the highly acclaimed A Severe Mercy and its sequel, Under the Mercy. He was a contributing editor of the New Oxford Review and a frequent contributor to Crisis magazine, as well as to other periodicals and newspapers. He maintained a running correspondence, answering letters from people who were influenced by his writing, particularly A Severe Mercy. He converted to Catholicism in 1981, but always retained an appreciation for the beauty and tradition that he had found in the Church of England.

May the soul of Sheldon Vanauken, through the mercy of Christ, rest in peace and in the company once more of his beloved Davy. The last words of an obituary that he wrote himself were "He put his faith in the Risen Christ." The words applied especially well to him.