James & David Orr Lecture on Culture & Religion
The James and David Orr Memorial Lectures on Culture and Religion bring to Dartmouth each year scholars and writers whose achievements are at the highest level, but whose main fields of interest are not necessarily religion. Past Orr Lecturers include historians, anthropologists, novelists, biologists, and philosophers.
In 1972 James H. Orr, a Boston financier and supporter of the Religion Department at Dartmouth, provided the funding in memory of his son, David, for a lecture series now known as the "James and David Orr Memorial Lectures on Culture and Religion." The initial "Orr Lecture" was given that year by Mircea Eliade of the University of Chicago who lectured on "Sacred City, Sacred Time." Past Orr Lecturers include Lionel Trilling, Mary Douglas, Edward Said, Carolyn Bynum, Edward Shils, Rodney Needham, Donald Davidson, Amartya Sen, Gita Mehta, Judith Butler, Karen Armstrong, and Steven Pinker.
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Leela Prasad, St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies
Brown University
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
5:00 PM
Moore B03
Reception to follow
Free and open to all
Lecture title: Freedom & Vigilance: Four Meditations
Abstract: In a deepening climate of erosion and erasure, we must keep asking what each of us can do to resist inhumanity, fear, and disenchantment, and to keep searching for more livable futures. This talk offers four meditations—on the forest, the sanctuary, the carceral web, and the heart—to discern a practice of vigilance more sovereign and sustaining than the brute vigilantism of the state and other oppressive structures. What does it mean to be alert to threat, but also to be vigilant for justice; vigilant for the smallest acts of dignity; vigilant for freedom in the ordinary and the everyday? What forms of agency does an ethics of vigilance reveal? What hope does it trace, what freedom does it offer, and what does it demand of us?
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Julia Smith, Emeritus Chichele Professor of Medieval History, All Souls College
Oxford University
Thursday, October 15, 2026
4:30 PM
Carson L02
Reception to follow
Free and open to all
Lecture title: Saints and Silks: The global reach of Latin Christianity in the early Middle Ages
Abstract: This illustrated lecture uses the contents of Christian reliquaries from the first half of the European Middle Ages to reflect on how relics accumulated in medieval churches and how their textile wrappers enhanced their sacred aura. In so doing, it offers a focussed way of thinking through some of the implications of the global turn for study of medieval Europe. Utilising textual sources such as relic labels and inventories on the one hand and, on the other, material evidence, especially textiles, it takes an ‘object biography’ approach to emphasise the rich complexity of ecclesiastical relic collections. While the examples chosen will span Eurasia, the argument emphasises the local contexts in which relics accumulated and thus the distinctive profile of each collection. The lecture replaces conventional textbook accounts of the early medieval West with a dynamic picture of contingency, mobility, and repurposing which sustained the religious capital of early medieval churches in the Latin West.