The president may have begun the year as an unknown, but the yearbook editors wrote that his religious views “were, by the end of the year, well-known to all.”

And in a year when, as the editors wrote, “above all else loomed the issue of McCarthy, the senator and the ism,” Pusey emphasized adopting a faith appropriate to the realities of the twentieth century.

In his address at the Divinity School, Pusey said, “Let me state as a personal conviction that though our predecessors in President Eliot’s generation were unquestionably men of great faith, their faith will not do for us, if for no other reason, because events of the Twentieth Century have made its easy optimism unpalatable.

“It is not that we do not have faith, but that certainty escapes us, and that all things have been brought into doubt; that fearing to be victimized, we are inclined not to believe at all.”

And yet, he continued, “Churches and creeds and metaphysical complexities persist, and we have need of them still.”

—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu.