The Edward A. Puff Sr. and Edith Kottmyer Puff Memorial Lecture in the Study of Christianity was endowed in 1986 by Rev. Edward A. Puff Jr., of Dayton, and his brother, Harold F. Puff, emeritus professor of management at Miami University. The memorial lecture is named for Edward and Harold's parents, in gratitude for the sacrifices they made that enabled the brothers to attend Miami during the Depression years.

This annual lecture is free and open to the public.

2022-2023 speaker

Willis Jenkins
University of Virginia
"Undoing Dominion: Contemplative Arguments for Creaturely Rights"

March 2, 2023 (Thursday)
5:30-7:00 p.m.
FSB 0025

Or watch the lecture via livestream. (Register for free to get the link.)

Does protecting human dignity require human dominion over the rest of Earth? Amid the climate and extinction crises of the "Anthropocene" era, this lecture examines three religious arguments, each rooted in a form of contemplative practice, in which realizing human dignity requires recognizing rights of nonhuman creatures.

Dr. Jenkins is a professor of ethics and chair of the department of religious studies at the University of Virginia. His most recent books include The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity and the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (of which he was a co-editor).

Co-sponsored with the John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship.

Past speakers

2021-2022

John Swinton
University of Aberdeen
"Hearing Voices: Theology, Psychiatry, and the Lived Experience of Hearing Voices"

Randall Poole
College of St. Scholastica
"Is Religion Good for Human Rights?"

2020-2021

Laura Stivers
Dominican University of California
"Hospitality as Justice: Christian Approaches to Homelessness"

2019-2020

Jeremy K. Everett
Baylor University
"Solving America's Hunger Crisis"

2018-2019

Matthew Avery Sutton
Washington State University
"Evangelicals, the End Times, and the Religious Right in Modern America"

2017-2018

Charles Mathewes
University of Virginia
"American Christianity After the Religious Right"

2016-2017

Sylvester Johnson
Northwestern University
"American Religion and National Security: Race, Religion, and the Security State"

2015-2016

Paula M. Kane
University of Pittsburgh
"Medieval Manhattan: An Antidote to the Jazz Age"

2014-2015

Katharine Wilkinson
Director of Strategy and Activation, BrightHouse LLC
"Between God & Green: How Evangelicals are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change"

2013-2014

Timothy Matovina
University of Notre Dame
"Latinos and the Transformation of American Catholicism"

2012-2013

Jehu J. Hancile
Emory University
"The Promise of God: New African Immigrants and Transformations in the American Religious Landscape"

2011-2012

Daniel Buxhoeveden
University of South Carolina
"Christianity and Science in Dialogue"

2009-2010

Amy DeRogatis
Michigan State University
"Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism"

2008-2009

Rev. Dr. John Chryssavgis
Theological advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch
"Beauty Will Save the World: Spiritual Insights into an Ecological Worldview"

2007-2008

David L. Holmes
College of William and Mary
"The Religion of the Founding Fathers"

2006-2007

Gabriel Moran
New York University
"Religious Diversity: Christians and Muslims in a Common World"

2005-2006

Peter J. Thuesen
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
"The Idea of Predestination in American Religious History"

2004-2005

R. Marie Griffith
Princeton University
"Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity"

2003-2004

David Morgan
Valparaiso University
"The Visual Culture of American Piety: Absent Fathers and Women with Beards"

2002-2003

Charles H. Lippy
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
"Challenges to Christianity in the Twenty-First Century"

2001-2002

Daniel Sack
Associated Colleges of the Midwest
"Eating at the Table of the Gods"

2000-2001

Catherine Brekus
University of Chicago
"Sarah Osborn’s World: Popular Christianity in 18th-Century America"

1998-1999

Anne C. Rose
Penn State University

1996-1997

Felicitas D. Goodman
Denison University

1995-1996

Stephen A. Marini
Wellesley College
"Sacred Song in Contemporary America"

1994-1995

Robert Orsi
Indiana University
"Hopeless Cases: The Women Who Prayed to St. Jude, 1929-1965"

1993-1994

Randall Balmer
Barnard College
"Thy Kingdom Come: Apocalypticism in American Culture"

1992-1993

John W. Cook
Henry Luce Foundation
"Varieties of Christian Sacred Space"

1991-1992

Sandra Zimdars-Swartz
University of Kansas
"Encounters with the Virgin Mary: Issues of Personal Religious Experience"

1990-1991

Mary Jo Weaver
Indiana University
"Being Right: Roman Catholic Fundamentalism"

1988-1989

Albert J. Raboteau
Princeton University
"A Hidden Wholeness: Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, Jr."

1987-1988

Samuel S. Hill, Jr.
University of Florida
"Is Black Religion Evangelical?"

1986-1987

Charles Curran
Catholic University of America/Southern Methodist University
"The Social Mission of the Church in Contemporary America"