Life
Nicholl was born on 23 July 1923 into a poor working-class community in Halifax, West Yorkshire. He was the son of a brass finisher, William Nicholl. Academically able, he won a Brackenbury scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied political philosophy under A D Lindsay and was tutored in medieval history by Maurice Powicke.
He left Oxford after a year, to serve in the British Army, in World War II. He served in the ranks of the infantry, then in intelligence, largely in Asia and the subcontinent. Upon his return to Oxford in 1946, he converted to Catholicism as a result of his wartime experiences.
From January 1948 until 1953, Nicholl taught history at the University of Edinburgh. In 1953 he moved to the University College of North Staffordshire (later Keele University), where he taught for over twenty years, being promoted to a professorship in 1972. In 1974 he left the UK to become professor of religious studies and history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where, for three years he chaired the religious studies department. He returned to England with his wife in 1980, but was appointed rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies at Jerusalem from 1981 to 1985. He retired to Betley, near Keele in Staffordshire, becoming senior research fellow at the Multi-Faith Centre, Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, and continuing to write.
In addition to his academic pursuits Donald Nicholl taught church history to the Poor Clares in Aptos, California and to novices in the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa's order, in London. More informally he conducted a class in the "Penny University" at the Caffe Pergolesi in Santa Cruz, reading through Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
Alongside his wife Dorothy Nicholl, he was active in the co-workers of Mother Teresa. A regular contributor to The Tablet, a compassionate intelligence shone through his articles, providing a source of relief in conservative times and of compassionate impartiality in times of conflict. Perhaps his skill in listening respectfully to wildly variant points of view, acknowledging authentic distinctives unobscured by mollifying generalisations, was most widely known in his work at Tantur, but it was certainly experienced by his students as well.
Nicholl died of cancer, at his home in Betley, on 3 May 1997. He is buried in Keele churchyard.
Read more about this topic: Donald Nicholl
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide ones life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when ones official duties are at an end.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (18841962)
“The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of an oyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion.”
—David Hume (17111776)