I have two outstanding memories of Professor Wright:

First of all, for those of us studying with him in the early 80's, his "early adapter" work with computers, specifically in connection with the Psalms of Solomon. I'll never forget the computer fair he put together, which featured an amazing array of PC's, Apples, kit computers, etc. which the visitor could try out "hands on." Today most of those machines would be museum items. After trying a few of the devices out I became convinced that this computer thing was not just for hobbyists and math geeks, and ultimately decided to do my dissertation on one. We won't mention all the "widows" and "orphans" he found in it during my defense (word processing programs didn't protect against such blemishes at that time); my advisor, Gerry Solyan, mercifully took me aside after it was over and told me not to bother to correct them since we were running up against a deadline for submission the next day.

Second, his exacting standards of scholarship have proven to be of inestimable value for me as a preacher. Check your sources! Don't make any statements which you can't document! And avoid "parallelomania" (I'm not sure that's spelled correctly or if the word's even in the dictionary): the assumption that just because two texts, ancient religions, or other phenomena we were currently studying had one feature in common we could make a logical jump and conclude that they were closely related in other ways as well. The implications are obvious; translated to our time the parallelomania warning will stand politicians, clergy, professors of religion, and anyone else for that matter in good stead.

Best wishes for many more productive years in Arizona, Bob!

John Schweitzer Ph.D., 1984
Pastor, First English Lutheran Church
1603 Monument Avenue
Richmond, VA 23220
pastor@felcrichmond.org

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