Marjorie Hall Thulin Lecture on Religion And Contemporary Culture

Marjorie Hall Thulin
(1910 – 2009)

Marjorie Hall Thulin graduated from the University of Illinois in 1931. She enjoyed a successful career in advertising. She also published poetry and children’s literature, and edited a book on the history of Glencoe, Ill., where she was a longtime resident and active community member. Mrs. Thulin’s desire for students to understand how religion grows and functions in a complex society, especially Christianity in American society, led her to endow a fund that makes it possible for an internationally known scholar of religion and contemporary culture to be resident on the Champaign-Urbana campus for several days each academic year. One of the main duties of the Marjorie Hall Thulin Scholar of Religion and Contemporary Culture is to deliver the annual Thulin lecture, which is a major public event on campus. In 2009 Mrs. Thulin's friends and admirers at the university established in her honor two new undergraduate awards: the Marjorie Hall Thulin Prize for Excellence in the Study of Religion and the Marjorie Hall Thulin Scholarships for Study Abroad and for Student Research in Religion.

2010 Thulin Lecture

Dr. Sabina Alkire
Director, Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI)
University of Oxford
"How an Adequate Notion of Human Flourishing Challenges Economics"
April 7, 2010

Dr. Sabina Alkire grew up in Champaign, Illinois and was educated at the University of Illinois and at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford she completed masters degrees in Theology and in Economics for Development, and a doctorate in Economics. She coordinated the Culture and Poverty Learning and Research Initiative at the World Bank, served as Research Writer for the Commission on Human Security at the United Nations, and was a research associate at the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University. She now directs the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, a research center within the University of Oxford that was launched in 2007. She is the author of Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford University Press, 2002) and numerous publications that focus on Amartya Sen’s corpus of writings, dimensions of human development, and multidimensional measures of poverty and well-being.

Past Thulin Lectures

Jon Butler
Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies
Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Yale University
"The Surprise of Religion in Modern America"
March 10, 2009
Photographs, video, and audio from the event can be found here.
FOCUS 580 WILL radio interview with David Inge

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School
"Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire"
April 10, 2008
Photographs, video, and audio from the event can be found here.
FOCUS 580 WILL radio interview with David Inge

Charles E. Curran
Elizabeth Scurlock University Professor of Human Values, Southern Methodist University
"The Church and Politics"
March 29, 2007
Photographs from the event can be found here.
FOCUS 580 WILL radio interview with David Inge

Stanley Hauerwas
Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke University Divinity School
"Sacrificing the Sacrifices of War"
April 6, 2006
A set of web pages developed by David Suryk devoted to Prof. Hauerwas's visit to UIUC that include an audio recording of the Thulin Lecture by Professor Hauerwas can be found here.
Photographs from the event can be found here.
FOCUS 580 WILL radio interview with David Inge

David R. Loy
Professor at the Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University
"The Religion of the Market"
April 5, 2005
FOCUS 580 WILL radio interview with David Inge

Diana Eck
Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Harvard University
"America's Religious Pluralism: Challenges for the New Century"
April 15, 2004
Focus 580 WILL radio interview with David Inge

Farid Esack
Visiting Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Hamburg
"Between Playing Dead and Asserting Faith: Progressive Islam and the Clash of Civilizations"
April 3, 2003
Focus 580 WILL radio interview with David Inge

For more information, please contact:
Department of Religion
3080 Foreign Languages Building
707 South Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801

Telephone: (217) 333-0473

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