Peters offers Goodspeed Lecture at Denison University

Religious Studies faculty member, Rebecca Todd Peters, offers endowed lecture at Denison University on the topic of abortion and reproductive justice.

Professor of Religious Studies Rebecca Todd Peters on Sept. 13 offered the Goodspeed Lecture at Denison University on the topic “Abortion is Not the Problem: Why We Need Reproductive Justice.” 

The lecture was based on Peters’ recent book, “Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice” (Beacon Press, 2018), in which she argues “the starting point of our ethical conversation about abortion should be women’s lives” yet the problem we face in this country is “our failure to trust women to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents.”

In addition to the lecture, Peters visited with faculty and students and was a guest in Associate Professor Christine Pae’s religion class that was reading her book, “Solidarity Ethics: Transformation in a Globalized World.”

The Goodspeed Lectureship was endowed with funds donated to Denison by the brothers Edgar Johnson Goodspeed (1871-1962) and Charles Ten Broeke Goodspeed (1869-1949), both of whom graduated from Denison in the Class of 1890. The Lectureship is named after Edgar Goodspeed, who was a scholar of Greek and the New Testament, and one of the most important American Biblical scholars of the 20th century.