Daniel L. Overmyer, Phd, FRSC August 20, 1935– November 24, 2021: Founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions

Daniel L. Overmyer, Phd, FRSC August 20, 1935– November 24, 2021Founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions Philip Clart Daniel L. Overmyer (Chinese name: Ou Danian 歐大年) passed away in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, after a short but intense battle with multiple cancers. I am commemorating him here in a double function—both as his student and as his successor as editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions. Dan Overmyer was born in 1935 in Columbus, Ohio, but grew up in many and diverse places, traveling with his parents on a missionary assignment to China in 1940, when he was five years of age.1 The family lived in different places in Hunan province, moving several times when military actions of the Second Sino-Japanese War required it. In 1944, the Overmyers had to leave Hunan province, and Dan’s mother took him and his sister on a circuitous route (via Kunming, Burma, India, and Australia) back to the United States, where they went to live on his grandparents’ farm in Lindsey, Ohio. His father’s work as pastor, missionary, and teacher of theology necessitated further moves, including a second stint in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, from 1946 to 1948. In 1948, Dan was sent to a missionary boarding school in Hong Kong. After leaving China ahead of the advancing Communist army, the Overmyers relocated to the Philippines, where Dan’s father taught at the Union Theological Seminary in Manila and Dan attended high school from 1949 to 1952. Dan continued and finished his high school education in Princeton, New Jersey, where his father studied for his master’s degree at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Dan Overmyer’s academic career began at the small, church-affiliated Westmar College in Iowa (BA in Biology, 1957), and after interludes as a medical student at the University of Iowa and a divinity student at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Naperville, Illinois, he entered the graduate program in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago in 1965. He earned his PhD degree in 1971 with a dissertation whose revised version was published under the title Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China by Harvard University Press in 1976. Building on earlier Chinese, Japanese, and limited Western studies (e.g., by J.J.M. de Groot), this book effectively created the modern research field of “Chinese popular sectarianism” in Western academia and Dan Overmyer’s reputation, which he solidified with his equally influential monographs The Flying Phoenix: Aspects of Chinese Sectarianism in Taiwan (co-authored with David K. [End Page iv] Jordan, Princeton University Press, 1986) and Precious Volumes: An Introduction to Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harvard University Asia Center, 1999). In the teaching of Chinese religions, his textbook Religions of China: The World as a Living System (Harper & Row, 1986) was a popular choice for undergraduate introductory classes in the 1980s and 1990s and thus helped to shape a wider readership’s understanding of religious life and history in China. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Daniel L. Overmyer in 2002 He received his first academic appointment as instructor in the Department of Religion at Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio) in 1970, moving up to assistant professor in 1971. In 1973 he accepted an offer from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, B.C.), where he completed his tenure track and was promoted to associate professor in 1976. For the remainder of his long and fruitful career, he remained on the faculty of the UBC Department of Asian Studies, retiring at the end of the year 2000. He became full professor in 1980 and served as head of the department from 1986 to 1991. He held visiting appointments at Princeton University, the University of Heidelberg (Germany), National Chengchi University (Taiwan), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he taught from 1996 to 1998, including one year as acting head of the Department of Religion. After his retirement he continued to research and publish for a number of [End Page v] years, his last major monograph being Local Religion in North China in the Twentieth Century: The Structure and Organization of...

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