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We are pleased to present this Festschrift in honor of retired Baylor University professor Rosalie Beck: scholar, teacher, mentor, colleague, lay leader and friend.

For four decades, Dr. Rosalie Beck helped students, scholars, pastors, and church leaders learn to love God with their minds. Dr. Beck has taught Christian history and Baptist history not as a collection of names and dates, but as a living story—one that shapes communities, forms convictions, challenges assumptions, and calls each generation to faithful remembrance.

Dr. Beck’s story is itself a Baptist story. After earning a degree in biology from the University of California at San Diego, she pursued theological study at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and then doctoral work in religion at Baylor University, concentrating in church history.

In 1984, she completed her Ph.D. and became the first woman hired as a faculty member in Baylor’s Department of Religion. Dr. Beck’s career at Baylor stretched across 35 years. Her love for Baptist history has always been connected to her love for the church, and she has shown, in her own life, that scholarship and congregational faithfulness need not be separate callings.

Guest edited by Dr. Karen Bullock, whose editorial introduction pays tribute to Dr. Beck’s life and legacy, this collection of articles reminds us what Baptist history can be at its best: careful, generous, critical, faithful, and expansive. Articles include:

◆ Dr. Judith Bishop, “Metaphor and Meaning in Hildegard’s Causae et Curae”

Explores one of Beck’s favorite Daughters of the Church, twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen, and the interconnectivity between Hildegard’s cosmology and the metaphorical constructions of her medical work, Causae et Curae.

◆ Dr. Bill Pitts, “A Voice for the Gospel: Willie Turner Dawson’s Achievement”

Introduces readers to Willie Evelyn Turner Dawson, an influential Baptist woman whose life and work helped shape Southern Baptist history.

◆ Dr. Doug Weaver, “Shantung Revival: The Boon and Bane of Baptist Missionary Experience”

Continues the missions conversation about the Shantung Revival, bringing to life the struggles of Pearl Caldwell and William Carey Newton, both important figures in the history of revivals in the Baptist story.

◆ Dr. Jill Cabal, “One Hundred Years of Foreign Missions Training for Single Women”

Investigates transformations in the training of single women for missionary service at Beck’s seminary alma mater, lifting up little-known English and American missionaries alongside Lottie Moon, Dorothy Carey, and Ann Judson.

◆ Dr. Michael E. Williams Sr., “The ‘Worst Strain I Have Ever Passed Through’: W. W. Melton and Ministry in Natural Disaster”

Researches the life and ministry of W. W. Melton, longtime pastor of Seventh and James Baptist Church, where Beck has been a faithful member for almost 50 years, and tells the gripping story of twin tornadoes that bookended Melton’s pastoral career.

◆ Academic Profile of Rosalie Beck

Concludes with a profile of Dr. Beck’s education, teaching, scholarship, leadership, honors, publications, professional service, and public presentations.