Philosophical Horizons, by Krysta Rexrode Wolfe
Dr. Hull did not lecture like any other professor I had. He was up with hands in the air and down speaking in soft tones, oscillating between the blackboard and lectern. He was pure energy. After watching him speak like this class after class, I realized Rob possessed the only motivator strong enough to sustain passion like that: he believed every word he said. He believed that an examined life was a life with purpose, and he wanted us all to live with purpose.
I guess I don’t have to say it, but I loved his course. He assigned Philosophical Horizons as our main text; it was a philosophical primer, and I ate it whole. A whole new dimension of reality seemed to have been cracked open. One day Rob drew a comic book styled illustration of Plato’s allegory of the cave, and I knew this was a discipline I wanted to study for the rest of my life. I started going to his office to pump him for extra reading. (Looking back, I feel sorry for all the people who got surprise visits from me—Dr. Mallory, Dr. Long, Dr. Coston, Dr. Creasman. God bless them all).
Dr. Hull never seemed bothered by all the extra attention I demanded. In fact, he rose to the challenge by introducing me to philosophy of religion, and to the very thinkers that followed me through graduate school—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I had caught his disease. I believed the examined life was a life with purpose.
After one particularly bad day for me, close to the death of a friend, I went to his office. I asked if he had any wisdom for a person in grief, a person crawling out of their own skin. He said one word. “Liminality”. He pulled a folder from his bookshelf and handed it to me. It was an article about a man named Arnold van Gennep explaining that liminal space is the time that exists between what has been and what will be. Liminality is a state of being in which a person experiences transition, waiting, ambiguity of the deepest discomfort. Rob told me that without liminal space there is no transformation.
Dr. Hull was a good man. A man with an examined life.
I didn’t keep in touch like I should have, but that doesn’t mean his lessons or influence diminished. In the last ten years I’ve moved nine times. I’ve trimmed down my book collection every time, but Philosophical Horizons and the article about Arnold van Gennep have survived. They remind me of Rob, sure, but they also remind me the moments I find most difficult are usually moments pregnant with transformation.
I can’t imagine Rob is resting in peace, doesn’t seem the thing for a man who could never sit still. I prefer to think, instead, he’s experiencing liminality in all its profound glory, pushing through to a new place with all his creative will.
Written as a tribute to Dr. Robert Hull, who died unexpectedly on January 30, 2019.
Krysta Rexrode is a 2010 graduate of WVWC. She went on to study at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and to become ordained in the West Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. She currently serves the Cross Lanes United Methodist Church.