News and Events

This lecture by Jason Springs (Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame) introduces a novel understanding of what restorative justice is and how it should be implemented. It explores the ways in which restorative justice ethics and practices exhibit moral and spiritual dynamics, and what difference such “lived religious” dynamics can make in transforming structural violence.

R. Ward Holder (Associate Professor of Theology at St. Anselm College) will deliver the final talk in the 2025 Scott Lecture Series. Christian nationalists insist that the US was founded by and for Christians. As a resurgent populist movement in contemporary American politics, Christian nationalism aims to establish the legal, moral, and cultural dominance of an ultra-conservative, exclusivist interpretation of the religion, and it views diversity and pluralism as existential threats to that objective. This year’s Scott Lecture Series, sponsored by the Religion Department, will invite a range of scholars to help us understand this movement, its roots, its adherents, and the consequences it poses to American public life.

Daniel Miller (Professor of Humanities at Landmark College) will deliver the third talk in the 2025 Scott Lecture Series. Christian nationalists insist that the US was founded by and for Christians. As a resurgent populist movement in contemporary American politics, Christian nationalism aims to establish the legal, moral, and cultural dominance of an ultra-conservative, exclusivist interpretation of the religion, and it views diversity and pluralism as existential threats to that objective. This year’s Scott Lecture Series, sponsored by the Religion Department, will invite a range of scholars to help us understand this movement, its roots, its adherents, and the consequences it poses to American public life.

Mark Douglas (Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary) will deliver the second talk in the 2025 Scott Lecture Series, which invites a variety of scholars to explore the theme of Christian nationalism. 

Christian nationalism does more than rely on social media to promote its message; it is getting changed by social media in ways that make it both more difficult to address to and (slightly) easier to dismantle.  One set of resources that may prove effective in dismantling it as it is being changed are those related to developments in theologies of parody and camp. This lecture explores Christian nationalism, the impacts of social media on it, and how parody and camp may shape responses to it. 

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affair Global Fellows Program presents “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” with Katherine Stewart. 

Journalist Katherine Stewart new book “MONEY, LIES, AND GOD: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” (February 18, 2025) exposes the inner workings of the “engine of unreason” roiling American culture and politics, but aims at a bigger and more challenging target: how did we get to the point where there is an organized political movement within the United States that is working to destroy American Democracy? Furthermore, why have so many Americans turned against democracy?

In this talk she’ll discuss her findings with a compelling analysis of the authoritarian reaction in the United States. She demonstrates that the movement relies on several distinct constituencies, with very different and often conflicting agendas. Stewart’s reporting and comprehensive political analysis helps reframe the conversation about the moral collapse of conservatism in America and points the way forward toward a democratic future.

For more information on the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs and events visit here.

This talk by Emma McDonald Kennedy, Ph.D (Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Villanova University) considers the history of the eugenics movement and its links to contemporary biotechnological innovation. With resources from Christian ethics, reproductive justice, and disability rights, this talk will sketch a more inclusive vision of social progress and argue for regulation and public consultation in biomedical research.

Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at CUNY. He is also a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, a political commentator on MSNBC, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents. Over the years he served as Editor of The New Republic and wrote for publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Die Zeit, and the Financial Times. He is the author of four books including The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (Harper, 2010) and The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012). He will speak at Middlebury about his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (Knopf, 2025), which challenges a dominant narrative of Jewish victimhood and argues for a new concept of Jewish identity that links Israeli and Palestinian safety and places equality above supremacy.

Sponsored by: Office of the President; Office of the Provost; Jewish Studies; Middle East and North Africa Studies; International & Global Studies; Departments of History, Philosophy, English, Religion (Charles P. Scott Fund); Writing and Rhetoric Program; Axinn Center for the Humanities

The Religion Department at Middlebury College will present the Scott Symposium titled “What Is Religious Studies?: Two Examples from India” on the afternoon of Thursday, April 4 in the Orchard Room (Hillcrest 103) at 4:30 p.m. Community members are welcome. Sponsored by the Department of Religion with generous support from the Charles P. Scott Memorial Fund.

The symposium consists of Middlebury religion department faculty members, Jenn Ortegren and Bill Waldron, who will present on their recently published books,Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism andMaking Sense of Mind-Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters. They will talk briefly about the content of their books, their similarities and differences in research and writing, and how their work reflects the diversity of the broader field of Religious Studies.

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs program on Global Health and Medicine presents Professor Lucinda Ramberg, sociocultural and medical anthropologist at Cornell University

In this talk, Lucinda Ramberg considers the politics of caste radicalism in contemporary India. What are the diverse forms of bodily work that Dalits (ex-untouchables) do to become touchable in the face of caste Hindu accounts of “untouchability,” “dirtiness”, “smelliness”, and contamination by meat? Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, Ramberg considers the recent history of customary forms of Dalit labor, citizenship projects, and social transformation. In a moment when “cow vigilantism” and beef criminalization are gaining ground in India, she argues that the sensate body is at the very heart of emancipation from caste.

Lucinda Ramberg is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist at Cornell University working at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial and queer theories, religion and secularism, medicine and the body, and South Asia. Her research focuses on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of sexual subjectivity, social transformation, and citizenship. Her first book “Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion” (Duke University Press, 2014) received the Michelle Rosaldo prize in Feminist Anthropology, the Ruth Benedict prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology, and the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her second book project, “We Were Always Buddhist: Dalit Conversion and Sexual Modernity” turns to the revival of Buddhism in South India and questions of religious conversion, caste radicalism, social transformation, and sexual politics.

In person event in AXN 229. Middlebury College Campus. Please click here for more information regarding the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs.

Erin Durban and Lucinda Ramberg, two feminist, queer, postcolonial scholars, will have a conversation about queer anthropology: What does it mean to queer anthropology? How can we do anthropology, as well as ethnographic methods more broadly, in a queer way and for queer purposes?

Erin Durban, a scholar of queer anthropology, will discuss their book The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti. Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. As Durban shows, two discourses dominate discussions of intervention. One maintains imperialist notions of a backward Haiti so riddled with cultural deficiencies that foreign supervision is necessary to overcome Haitians’ resistance to progress. The other sees Haiti as a modern but failed state that exists only through its capacity for violence, including homophobia. In the context of these competing claims, Durban explores the creative ways that same-sex desiring and gender-creative Haitians contend with anti-LGBTQI violence and ongoing foreign intervention.