Leela Prasad, St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies
Brown University

Tuesday, September 22, 2026
5:00 PM
Location: Moore B03 (tentative)
Free and open to all

Reception to follow

Lecture title: Freedom & Vigilance: Four Meditations

Abstract: In a deepening climate of erosion and erasure, we must keep asking what each of us can do to resist inhumanity, fear, and disenchantment, and to keep searching for more livable futures. This talk offers four meditations—on the forest, the sanctuary, the carceral web, and the heart—to discern a practice of vigilance more sovereign and sustaining than the brute vigilantism of the state and other oppressive structures. What does it mean to be alert to threat, but also to be vigilant for justice; vigilant for the smallest acts of dignity; vigilant for freedom in the ordinary and the everyday? What forms of agency does an ethics of vigilance reveal? What hope does it trace, what freedom does it offer, and what does it demand of us?

The James and David Orr Memorial Lectures on Culture and Religion bring to Dartmouth each year scholars and writers whose achievements are at the highest level, but whose main fields of interest are not necessarily religion. Past Orr Lecturers include historians, anthropologists, novelists, biologists, and philosophers.