Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes will be presenting this year's Mendenhall Lecture on Monday, October 10th at 8pm at Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church. Entitled "Justice Notes," her lecture explores the ways in which individuals and communities might create greater spaces of understanding and justice.
Distinguished scholar and author, Townes is the dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, where she also serves as the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society. Her areas of expertise include ethics, postmodernism, and cultural theory. Townes, an ordained American Baptist clergywoman, was the first African American woman elected to the presidential line of the American Academy of Religion, which she oversaw in 2008.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
Established in 1905 by the Rev. Dr. Marmaduke H. Mendenhall, (a Northern Indiana pastor who joined the University's Board of Trustees in 1878), the lecture series bearing his name brings to campus “persons of high and wide repute, of broad and varied scholarship,” to address issues related to the academic dialogue concerning Christianity.