Dr. Vincent Paul Miller, Jr. passed away quietly on Monday, August 31, 2020, 9:22am, at St Andrew’s Assisted Living Facility in Indiana, Pennsylvania.  He was 88 years old.

After a normal morning rising early and finishing breakfast, Dr. Miller felt tired, sat in his favorite chair and fell asleep, never to wake again.

Dr. Miller is survived by his wife of 60 years, Alida Field (Ward) Miller who is 86 years old and resides at St. Andrews Full Care Facility.  He is also survived by his son, Bradley Cleland Miller who maintains homes in New York City and in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China.  Dr. Miller’s son was 55 years old at the time of his father’s death.

Dr. Miller was born on May 11, 1932 to Vincent Paul Miller and his wife May Eleanor (Reed) Miller in Edgewood, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  His father’s family owned industrial companies in Pittsburgh and drove the technological transformation of the global glass and pottery manufacturing industries that took place from the late 1800s through the 1950s.

He completed his undergraduate studies at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio in 1954 with a major in Geography and Geology along with studies in Music.  He obtained a Masters in Geography from the Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania.  His Masters thesis was titled, “A Geographical Analysis of the Locative Factors of the Pulp and Paper Industry in Eastern Canada.”  It focused particularly on the Gaspesie peninsula in the Province of Quebec.

Following his Masters studies, Dr. Miller was drafted into the army and spent most of his military service working at an army research facility located in Natick, Massachusetts.  He had good memories of his experience in the army and often spoke of it with enthusiasm.

Following his service to his country, he took a teaching position in Geography at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio.  It was there that he met his future wife, Alida, at a church meeting. Alida graduated from the College of Wooster in 1956 and at the time was working in the Wooster Alumni Office.  Alida had studied religion at Wooster and was planning to enroll in seminary at Union Theological Seminary in New York City to become a minister.  After she met Vincent, her plans changed and not too many months later, on July 23, 1960, they married in the same church in which they met.

The young couple relocated to East Lansing, Michigan where Dr. Miller then commenced his PhD studies at Michigan State University.  As part of Dr. Miller’s research for his dissertation, the young couple lived in Oslo, Norway where Dr. Miller spent time at the University of Oslo and became fluent in Norwegian.  

Following his classroom studies at Michigan State University, he accepted a teaching position at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania, in Geography and Regional Planning.  It was in Indiana, Pennsylvania that Bradley, their son, was born on September 1, 1964.  Dr. Miller completed his dissertation and attained his PhD from Michigan State University in 1970.  

The title of his dissertation was “The Spatial Impact of Isolation on Urban-Rural Relationships in Setesdal, South Norway.”  Setesdal was an isolated valley in Norway that preserved traditions and a lifestyle from the Middle Ages.  Dr. Miller’s thesis explored the spatial impact that the geographical features of mountains and the limited transportation grid had made on the isolated valley.  The terrain preserved an old way of life and insulated the valley from the changes that time and technology had brought to the rest of Norway and the rest of Europe.  To summarize his thesis, the spacetime of the valley had remained unchanged while all around it, time had moved forward.  Expressed conversely, the ability of populations to use technological innovation to overcome geographic limitations accelerates the movement of time in spatially proximate locales in terms of cultural development.  Dr. Miller’s research demonstrated the clear link between geography and terrain and the developmental warp in time and space they imposed on the people of Setesdal and, by association, on regional development in similarly situated locales throughout the world.

In the late 1970s Dr. Miller realigned his practice of regional development from the Nordic regions to focus on the developing world, the Caribbean in particular.  Dr. Miller acted as a consultant to a Christian missionary group called Ministries in Action.  He helped design their practice of holistic missions which combined the preaching of the Christian faith with the action of developing the economies of the communities the mission organization worked in.  He developed a model program built around an Evangelical church in a small village in southern Haiti.  The mission organization replicated this model in its work throughout the Caribbean.  His research focused on the further definition and implementation of these development projects and on regional development throughout the developing world.

Dr. Miller wrote frequently about the integration of Christian faith with the study of Geography during a time period when this type of discussion was distinctly out of sync with many colleagues in the geographical profession.  As part of this research, he began to work closely on the Philosophy of Geography from a Christian perspective with faculty members in the Department of Geography at Calvin University, a university located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is owned and operated by the Christian Reformed Church.  The philosophy engaged an approach from a Reformed Christian, also termed Calvinist, perspective.  An influence on Dr. Miller’s philosophical work included a special reference to the Christian philosophical thought of a Dutch Calvinist named Hermann Dooeyweerd.

Dr. Miller and his wife were both lifelong members of the Presbyterian Church.  In Indiana, Pennsylvania, they were members of the Graystone Presbyterian church for approximately 55 years and more recently moved across the lawn that separated two large Presbyterian churches in town and are now members of Calvary Presbyterian Church.

They were active supporters during the early days of a campus Christian ministry called the Coalition for Christian Outreach.  Graystone church was one of its founding churches and through that organizational relationship Dr. Miller came to work with Dr. Peter Steen during the formative years when Dr. Miller began developing a Philosophy of Geography from a Christian perspective.  Dr. Miller and Alida were regular attendees of the Coalition’s Jubilee Conference that sought to integrate Christian faith with academic pursuit.  The annual conference was founded at Graystone Church and subsequently moved to downtown Pittsburgh.

Dr. Miller and his wife were loyal to the institutions that helped shape them and were important donors to Muskingum University, the College of Wooster, and particularly so to Calvin University, which is the alma mater of their son Bradley.