DOUGLAS, J(ames) D(ixon) 1922-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born December 23, 1922, in Glasgow, Scotland; died August 13, 2003. Minister, editor, educator, and author. Douglas was a minister in the Church of Scotland who became a well-known lecturer and editor of Christian publications. After serving in the Royal Air Force Signal Corps during World War II and seeing action in Europe, he attended St. Andrews University. He received his S.T.M. from Hartford Theological Seminary in 1954, and a Ph.D. the next year. Returning to his native Scotland, Douglas served briefly as a minister and lecturer in church history at St. Andrews. However, he left these duties in 1958 to become a librarian at Tyndale House in Cambridge. There he edited the New Bible Dictionary (1962) before joining the staff at Christianity Today. Douglas hit his stride with this weekly religious periodical, writing widely read columns and articles and being a mentor to younger staff members. He left the newspaper in 1983, spending many of his later years lecturing and, from 1988 to 1998, teaching church history, journalism, and ethics at Singapore Bible College. In 1997, Douglas was hired as an associate editor for the New Dictionary of National Biography. He also worked on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in his final years, as well as his autobiography, The Half that Can Be Told, which he had not completed at the time of his death. Douglas edited, wrote, or cowrote about two dozen other books—mostly religious reference texts—during his lifetime, including The New International Dictionary of the Bible (1987), Who's Who in the Christian Church (1992), and The Twentieth-Century Dictionary of Christian Biography (1995).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), November 7, 2003.