Sociologist Wade Clark Roof dies at age 80
Sociologist Wade Clark Roof, who helped Americans grasp the spiritual lives of the baby boomer generation, died on August 24 at the age of 80. Perhaps best known for his 1993 book, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation, he wrote widely on religious pluralism, generational change, contemporary spirituality, and civil society. He was a frequent commentator on the shifting current of mainline Protestantism.
Roof taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for 19 years before moving in 1989 to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he founded the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life.
“That was an extraordinary labor on his part,” recalled Shawn Landres, a former student of Roof’s. “Public understanding of religion was a relatively new idea.”
