The Geisel School of Medicine News profiles noted physician-researcher Andrea Hayes-Jordan D'87, MED '91, a Religion major at Dartmouth who worked in a leukemia lab at the medical school as an undergraduate and is now professor and chief of the Division of Pediatric Surgery at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Read more about her in Dartmouth Medicine and the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

On Tuesday, April 9, 2019, at 4:30pm in Moore B03, Edward Slingerland will give the James & David Orr Memorial Lecture on Culture & Religion at Dartmouth.

At the 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. employee breakfast Monday, Assistant Professor Vaughn Booker Jr. ’07 drew on the words of King and fellow civil rights leaders James Lawson and Mary Lou Williams to talk about the transformative value and dignity of work. View Prof. Booker's talk here.

Booker quoted King from a sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1965: “What makes a job menial? I’m tired of this stuff about menial labor. What makes it menial is that we don’t pay folk anything. Give somebody a job and pay them some money so they can live and educate their children and buy a home and have the basic necessities of life. And no matter what the job is, it takes on dignity.”

Why is money so important to us? In his recent TED-type talk, "Greed and God," in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Prof. Devin Singh points to Christianity for an explanation. From the start, he claims, Christian thinkers have connected ideas about God to economic concepts. In doing so, money gained an important, because godly, status. Watch the video of his talk:

Nancy Frankenberry, John Phillips Professor in Religion Emeritus, has published “The Fate of Radical Empiricism and the Future of Religious Naturalism” in Pragmatism and Naturalism: Scientific and Social Inquiry After Representationalism, a volume edited by Matthew C. Bagger and published by Columbia University Press (2018). Matthew C. Bagger is the contributing editor of this collection of essays by leading scholars, is Dartmouth class of 1986 and a former Religion major, and in 1996-98 was a Visiting Professor in the Department, and is now in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. His essay is entitled “Religious Apologetic, Naturalism, and Inquiry in the Thought of William James.” Terry F. Godlove of Hofstra University, who has been a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth over the years, also contributed an essay on “Non-Conceptualism and Religious Experience: Kant, Schleiermacher, Proudfoot.” The book has received acclaim from Cornel West, Richard J. Bernstein, James Kloppenberg, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Vincent Colapietro.

Religion major Andrew Nalani '16 spoke at a September 25, 2018, Gates Foundation Goalkeepers Event. Nalani, originally from Uganda, spoke about the transformative role of education at an event hosted by the foundation's Goalkeepers campaign and timed to coincide with the 2018 U.N. General Assembly. Read more about Nalani in Dartmouth Alumni News. You can also view his talk here (he comes onstage at about 1 hour, 37 minutes).

Gil Raz, Associate Professor of Religion, has received a $350,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a four-year project entitled Advancing Daoism: Epigraphic and Archeological Materials as Sources for Daoist Lived Religion. In cooperation with several Chinese partners, this collaborative project examines religious artifacts such as statues, stone inscriptions, cave shrines, and grave goods in order to research the history of traditional Chinese religion, especially Daoism, between the 5th and 16th centuries. For more about Professor Raz, please also see his profile webpage: https://religion.dartmouth.edu/people/gil-raz

Professor of Religion Reiko Ohnuma has just been named Chair of the Dartmouth Department of Religion, effective July 1, 2018. Prof. Ohnuma is a specialist in the Buddhist traditions of South Asia (with a particular focus on narrative literature, hagiography, and the role and imagery of women), but also teaches courses on Hinduism. She holds a B.A. from the University of California (Berkeley) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She is the author of Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (Columbia University Press, 2007); Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2012); and Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017). She will be teaching Rel. 41.03, “Women, Monasticism, & Buddhism” (identical to WGSS 44.07), in Winter Term, 2019. (Professor Ohnuma's key to building a successful writing practice? Yoga!

Graduating Religion students were awarded prizes at the Department's Commencement Reception on Saturday, June 9: