News & Events

View a special exhibit on Beck Chapel in the IU Archives Reading Room in Wells E460 (East Tower). The exhibit runs through September 2011.

Retiring from a 25 year career as a teacher, minister, and social worker in 1934, Frank O. Beck (A.B. 1894, A.M. 1895) and his wife Daisy (A.B. 1899) returned to their alma mater to serve as unofficial counselors to the student body and the administration. In 1937, at the request of President Wells, Frank Beck began work to organize what would become the University Committee on Religion which consisted of representatives from various religious faiths and sought to ease prejudice with tolerance and understanding. The related Student Religious Cabinet formed shortly thereafter.

As the programs grew, the Becks began a nearly twenty year campaign to build a place of worship on the Indiana University campus for those of all faiths, and in 1957 thanks in large part to their own vision and financial support Beck Chapel was dedicated. Today the chapel stands as a symbol of religious unity, but not, according to Beck, as “a chapel of a universal religion but a chapel that recognizes the claims of all religions – a chapel that avows that ‘light is good in whatever lamp it burns.’