Alumni Stories: John Helmiere '05

It was 9/11/2001, and I had just flown into Manchester for my freshman DOC trip. The pilot on my flight from Tampa to Manchester had told us we could look out our windows and see smoke rising because a plane had just accidentally flown into one of the World Trade Center buildings. Over the next four years as a Religion major, while the misuse and misunderstanding of religion catalyze war and fuel empire-building, my studies enabled me to gain a critical grasp of religion as an immensely complex and phenomenally influential force in the world. My Dartmouth education helped free me from certain assumptions about my own religious tradition, which resulted in a personal experience of interior spiritual revolution. I am now an ordained minister (affiliated with the United Methodist Church) and founded a church-cum-social-change incubator that practices mystical Christian spirituality and is dedicated to subversive political activism in solidarity with the oppressed and disinherited in our neighborhood.