MY BUDDY BRUCE JOHNSTON

            When I taught at the College of St. Rose my closest friend there was my fellow philosophy professor, Bruce Johnston. He was what he called an “EX Fundagelical”, which was his way of indicating that he had come from a fundamentalist background and worked his way through Evangelicalism to his own current what I would call, for lack of a better term, “Middle of the Road Liberalism”. Bruce came from a Fundamentalist home and started out with his higher education efforts at a place in Moose Jaw, Canada called Prairie Bible Institute. There male students had to publicly ask for permission to speak with a given female student.

     Bruce transferred to an evangelical school in southern California called Azusa Pacific College. He did well there and went on to earn his Ph.D. at the University of New York in Albany, NY where he got a job teaching philosophy and religious studies at The College of St. Rose. He was hired, partly because of his diverse background, by a “Retired” Catholic Priest named Bert Fey. Together these two renegade thinkers formed the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department which hired me when I was pretty much at the end of my rope jobwise. The three of us got along famously and made a wonderful, energetic department.

            Bruce was a brilliant and creative thinker and teacher. He devised several “alternative” courses for the regular college students to take when fulfilling their religion requirement, such as “Religion and Pop-Culture” and “The New Testament for Dummies”. Many seniors took one of these courses to help fulfill their religion requirement. Bruce always took students seriously, both as students and as persons. Our student body was largely Roman Catholic, so his own background both interested and dumbfounded them. Bruce was very musical and often spent his lunch hours playing the piano in a private room in the Music Building. He and his young family lived some twenty miles away from the college in an old estate owned and rented by the State. He also was always working on a manuscript of some kind, though I do not think he ever thought of publishing any of them.

            Bruce and I used to meet once a week for a couple of hours to share our weird ideas and set the world straight. We tried publishing a paper together which argued that the burden of proof with respect to God’s existence lies with the atheists rather than with the believers. It was their responsibility to “prove” that God does not exist, rather than the other way around. Bruce supported my ideas of starting a Philosophy/Religion club for undergraduates and a regular monthly Faculty Forum, with lunch provided by the college, where different faculty would present their current research, etc. Together we initiated a regional Philosophy Club for the faculty at local colleges, such as SUNY at Albany, Siena College, and our own College of St. Rose.

            To say the least, Bruce was a source of both personal and intellectual life and inspiration for me during those years at St. Rose. After a few years Bruce’s wife developed breast cancer and coming through it was a tough struggle for both of them. Eventually they divorced and after a while Bruce began to date other women, most of whom were themselves academics. A couple of times after I left the college Bruce was able to put together an opportunity for me to speak there once again. He was a true buddy. After he retired with his new wife to Canada we got back in touch and I dedicated one of my later books, a survey of the history of Western philosophy of religion, entitled Philosophy and Religion, to Bruce, whom I liked to call “The Brewster”.