WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Charles W. Fox of Williamstown was elected president of the North American Paul Tillich Society at the recent meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Tillich Society in Chicago.

The Tillich Society was founded to honor and extend the theological and philosophical work of Paul Tillich, considered one of the two or three greatest theologians of the 20th century.

Tillich was the first non-Jewish professor to be fired from a German university when Hitler took power in 1933, given Tillich's sustained theological critique of facist tendencies in the decade after World War I in Germany.

Soon after his academic termination in Frankfort, Tillich was brought to this country by Reinhold Niebuhr to teach at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University.

In that role, Tillich began to publish his Systematic Theology, one of the most influential theological works published in the 20th century.

After his retirement from Union/Columbia, Tillich became a professor at Harvard University, where Fox had the opportunity to work closely with him as one of his teaching assistants.

Fox received his doctorate in philosophy of religion from Harvard, and he subsequently taught at Williams College and the State University of New York until his retirement from academic tenure.

Fox was elected to a three-year term as the society's president.