The Twentieth Annual David and Marilyn Knutson Lecture
“The Healing Arts: A Virtuous Science in Christian History”
Dr. Susan R. Holman
Valparaiso University
Wednesday October 29, 2025
7:00 pm (Pacific time)
Scandinavian Cultural Center (in the Anderson University Center)
PLU
The lecture will be live-streamed on PLU’s YouTube channel
Contact: Dr. Agnes Choi, Chair of the Religion Department, choiaa@plu.edu
Free and Open to the Public
The twentieth annual David and Marilyn Knutson Lecture will be given by Dr. Susan R. Holman, Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University. The title of her lecture is, “The Healing Arts: A Virtuous Science in Christian History.” Dr. Holman will speak at 7:00 PM.
Health is fragile, especially in times of social and environmental troubles. What might religious history offer our world today in essential, positive models and tools to improve medicine, public health, and healthcare efforts?
Ancient writers called medicine one of the highest arts because it aimed at whole-person wellness, body and soul. The best healers should base care, said Galen, on “the logical, the physical, the ethical,” that is, he meant, on philosophical virtues and observation-based evidence that understood healing as a public good, practiced with equity rather than for personal gain.
In the Christian traditions of late antiquity, such virtuous healers included professional physicians as well as women and men attentive to architecture, painting, poetry, scripture, music, and liturgy, insofar as these nurtured environmental and incarnational wholeness.
An arts-based approach to health care may seem irrelevant to the modern STEM focus on high-tech, cost-contained biomedicine and sometimes-fragmented clinical care. Yet in fact, Dr. Holman will argue, practices that can sustain community health and embodied human flourishing are possible only when healers are also grounded in thoughtful, informed, constructive, and creative understandings of religious history as a healing art.
Biography
Dr. Susan R. Holman is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University, where she also served until 2024 as the John R. Eckrich endowed Chair and Professor of Religion and the Healing Arts.
A graduate of Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and of Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Holman received her Ph.D. in religious studies from Brown University, with research on fourth-century Christian sermons on poverty, hunger, and disease. She worked for more than twenty years in healthcare settings, as a dietitian, medical and global health writer, and editor.
Her publications focus on issues of social welfare and health disparities, ancient and modern. In addition to several co-edited volumes, her books include:
- Essentials of Nutrition for the Health Professions;
- The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia;
- God Knows There’s Need: Christian Responses to Poverty; and
- Beholden: Religion, Global Heath, and Human Rights, winner of the 2016 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
Previous Knutson Lecturers
2015 – Darren Dochuk
2014 – Monica Coleman
2013 – John Collins
2012 – Robert N. Bellah
2011 – Marcus J. Borg
2010 – Mark Brocker
2009 – John Dominic Crossan
2008 – Susan Ross
2007 – John Pahl
2006 – Martin E. Marty
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