- Date Of Birth: December 1, 1930
- Date Of Death: February 15, 2014
- State: Michigan
Richard L. Means, Ph.D., minister, beloved father and husband, Richard L. Means died at home on Saturday morning, February 15th, surrounded by friends and family. Means, a professor at Kalamazoo College for over thirty years, was an incredibly unique, wonderful soul who over his eighty-three years of life, committed himself to his family, his students, and to society. He was an ordained minister, a professor of sociology, the author of The Ethical Imperative, and a born teacher whose love of sharing knowledge, of searching for the truth, fueled his engagement with life. Means was born on December 1, 1930, at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
He spent his early years in Galva, Illinois, where his father was a country doctor who made house calls. Eventually, he moved to Ann Arbor and Toledo, Ohio. Means came to Kalamazoo College as a student in 1949, where he met the love of his life, Joyce Allen. At Kalamazoo College, he won the Hodge prize in philosophy and was president of the student body. He was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1953, Richard married Joyce. They moved to Rochester, New York, where he attended Colgate-Rochester seminary and Joyce taught first grade. After three years of study, they moved to Ithaca, New York, where he was ordained as an Associate Minster of the First Congregational Church and also became an Associate Chaplain at Cornell University.
After several years in the ministry, Richard, who audited courses at Cornell on the side, became deeply interested in sociology in particular, race relations. He began graduate work, finished his MA degree, and was able to continue for a PhD degree with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and the “wonderful cooperation of his wife” who worked part time in the admissions department. In 1960, when finishing his graduate work, his first child, Julia Ann, was born. He was trying to decide between positions at Carleton or Grinnell College when Dr. Hicks and Dr. Hightower called him from Kalamazoo College and stressed the fact that they were starting a new quarter program coupled with foreign study. He joined the Kalamazoo College faculty in 1961. During his academic career he published articles in professional journals as well as “The Saturday Review of Literature,” “America,” “Nature,” and regular articles and book reviews in “The Christian Century.” In 1970, Doubleday published his book on social ethics, The Ethical Imperative. In 1972 he wrote, along with William Birch, The Limits of Ecological Optimism. Richard long had a strong interest in environmental issues and he was a visiting professor at Yale in 1967-68.
When he returned to Kalamazoo College, he introduced the first course on Man and the Environment. In 1975-76, he was a visiting professor at University of Virginia. Upon retirement from Kalamazoo College in 1992, he served as interim minster of the First Congregational Church of Kalamazoo. He then served as interim minster of the First Congregational Church of Coloma, Michigan. He always claimed–with one of his light-hearted chuckles–that these experiences taught him more about the true and realistic dynamic of church life than thirty-five years of research and reading the sociology of religion literature. He is survived by his wife of sixty years, Joyce Allen Means, and daughter Julia and her companion Marques DeCorte of Kalamazoo, son David Means and Geneve Patterson-Means and grandchildren Max and Miranda Means of Nyack, New York, daughter Martha Upjohn and Henry Upjohn and granddaughter Maggie Upjohn of Kalamazoo and a surviving brother Dr. Ronald and Jane Means of Bath, Michigan, along with many nieces and nephews.
