Charles Reynolds

Charles Reynolds received his BA from Birmingham Southern College in 1961, his BD from Southern Methodist University in 1964, and his PhD in religious ethics from Harvard in 1968.  He spent the 1968-69 academic year on a Harvard Travel Fellowship studying with H. E. Toedt at Heidelberg and with R.M. Hare at Oxford.

Reynolds joined the Department of Religious Studies as an Assistant Professor in 1969, became Associate Professor in 1974, Professor in 1979, and Department Head from 1980-2000.  In 1969 Dean Nielsen named Reynolds chair of the first Black Studies Committee charged with developing a minor and major in what is now Africana Studies, and in chairing a special committee to search for and appoint a Director for this program.

In 1973 Reynolds was the founding editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics, now the preeminent international journal for this field of study.  Reynolds co-chaired a Campus Institutional Review Task Force with Vice President John Prados from l984-86 that restructured the graduate School Administration and established the Office of the Provost.  Reynolds worked with President Joe Johnson and leaders of the local Jewish Community in a successful fund raising effort that started in the mid-eighties and later enabled the department to hire Dr. Gilya Schmidt to begin developing Jewish Studies at UT in l993. He has published articles in The Journal of Religion, The Harvard Theological Review, and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and a book with The University of California Berkeley Press.  Reynolds was a visiting professor at The University of Bonn in l991-92. He was UT Macebearer in 1993-94.

In 1979 Reynolds arranged for UT to become the sponsor of the interdisciplinary journal, Soundings.  Reynolds organized several major symposia at UT that were published in Soundings, including The Challenges of Religious Pluralism in America (1978), on Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart (1985),on Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness (l989), and on Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition in America (2004).

 

Contact Information

Charles Reynolds
Professor
1113A McClung Tower
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0450

Phone: 865-974-2466
Email: creynol2@utk.edu