James Dixon Douglas

Background

James Dixon Douglas was born on December 23, 1922, in Glasgow, United Kingdom. His father was a shipyard laborer, and his mother died when he was two. He had an elder brother Alex.

Education

James Douglas attended Hyndland Secondary School in Scotland. After serving in the Royal Air Force Signal Corps during World War II and seeing action in Europe, he received a Master of Sacred Theology degree from Hartford Theological Seminary (now Hartford Seminary) in 1954 and a Doctor of Philosophy the next year.

Career

James Douglas, after his studies, returned to his native Scotland. Douglas served briefly as a minister and lecturer in church history at the University of St Andrews. However, he left these duties in 1958 to become a librarian at Tyndale House in Cambridge. There he edited New Bible Dictionary (1962) before joining Christianity Today.

Working for this weekly religious periodical, Douglas wrote columns and articles and was a mentor to younger staff members. He left the newspaper in 1983 spending many of his later years lecturing and teaching church history, journalism, and ethics at Singapore Bible College from 1988 till 1998.

In 1997 Douglas was hired as an associate editor for the New Dictionary of National Biography. He also worked on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in his final years, as well as his autobiography The Half that Can Be Told which he had not completed by the time of his death.

Douglas edited, wrote, or cowrote about two dozen other books - mostly religious reference texts - during his lifetime, including the New International Bible Dictionary (1988), Who's Who in Christian History (1992), and The Twentieth-Century Dictionary of Christian Biography (1995).

Achievements

• James Douglas is particularly remembered as a minister in the Church of Scotland who became a well-known lecturer and editor of Christian publications. He hit his stride at the weekly Christianity Today. He also approved himself as an outstanding author of books on religious themes.

Works

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• book

  • Who's Who in Christian History

    (Containing over 1,500 entries, this biographical dictiona...)

    1992
  • The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church

    (The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church ...)

    1974
  • Twentieth-Century Dictionary of Christian Biography

    (This volume covers about 750 men and women whose lives an...)

    1995
  • New Bible Dictionary

    (The New Bible Dictionary is a reference work ideally suit...)

    1962
  • Light in the North 1964
  • Completing the Course: the Story of Lindsay Glegg 1976
  • Evangelicals and Unity 1964
  • The Calling of an Evangelist 1987
  • New Twentieth-Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge 1991

Connections

James Douglas was married to a woman, named Doris. The marriage produced two daughters, Jess and Sandra.