Gerald Wang Cooke

Gerald Wang Cooke died December 24, 2014 in the Rehabilitation Unit at River Woods in Lewisburg after a brief illness.  He was born October 18, 1925 in Colorado Springs, Colorado to Alfred B. and Frances Cooke.

After graduating from Cheyenne Mountain High School, he continued his education at Colorado College where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and then at Yale Divinity School, graduating with the degree of Doctor of Divinity.  Cooke was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the national academic honor society.

Cooke served three years in the U.S. Coast Guard as a pharmacist’s mate on a troop carrier in the Atlantic during World War II.  But when he was ordered to report for the draft in 1948, he had come to oppose all war on religious grounds and served a night in jail for his refusal even to apply for conscientious objector status.

Cooke began his career in the ministry, serving at a Congregationalist church in, Middlefield, Connecticut where he lived with his wife, the former Brigitte Maria Cossmann and their first son, David Bainton Cooke.

His ambition to teach religion at the university level took him first to Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio where he taught as Assistant Professor of Religion and he and Brigitte became parents to two more sons, Mark Julian and Johannes Christopher (John).  Cooke was a member of the National Association of Biblical Instructors and the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegisis.  In 1960, he was a staff member of the University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeological expedition to the site of Old Testament Gideon in Jordan.

By 1962, Cooke and his family had moved to Lewisburg where he took up a position teaching religion at Bucknell University.  His first of several sabbaticals took Cooke and his family to Bangalore, India in 1963 where his study of Hinduism was underwritten by a Fulbright fellowship.  Returning to his teaching duties at Bucknell in 1964, he chaired the Religion Department until 1969.  Cooke’s subsequent sabbaticals took him to Japan where his studies focused on Buddhism and specifically Shin Buddhism.  At the time of his retirement from Bucknell in 1988, Cooke continued to write about Shin and to translate Shin texts into English.

After his retirement, Cooke was active as a volunteer with the Lewisburg Prison Project and a baritone with the Buffalo Valley Singers.  He was a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), first in the New Haven Monthly Meeting in Connecticut, and for more than 25 years in the Lewisburg Monthly Meeting which he served for many years as clerk.

Cooke was preceded in death by brothers Davey and Bruce and by his former wife, Brigitte.  He is survived by three sons, David Bainton (Susan) of Ellicott City, MD, Julian (Heather) of Austin, TX, and John of Washington, D.C. and by former wife Lila Wang of San Francisco.  Also surviving are grandchildren Sarah, Emily Shreve, Andrew Cooke, Gregory Cooke, and Zora Ellis and great grandson, Isaac Moore.

The family requests that any donations in memory of Gerald W. Cooke be made to Right Sharing of World Resources, a Quaker microcredit organization working in the developing world, or to a charity of the donor’s choosing.

Memorial service arrangements are pending.