Abstract

Robert Cummings Neville1 first came to my attention when I was a senior in college. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now," as Bob Dylan crooned at the time. Serious and studious, I was reading scholarly journals in the stacks one Saturday night. Among them was the journal Theological Studies, and in the March 1969 issue was the most effusive book review I had ever read. It was of Neville's very first book, God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God. The Dominican reviewer was suitably impressed by the "brilliant" argument, but more than that, he was astonished to think that "Neville, at the time of publication, was twenty-eight."2 Curious about a brilliant author who was still...