In-person For Alumni For Students General Audience

Dr. Dayna Bowen Matthew, dean of George Washington University Law School, will give the 2024 Payne Lecture in Faith, Justice, and Health Care. This lectureship and award highlights and honors academic, clinical, and lay leaders who in their work and research embody the late Dr. Payne’s spirit of caring for the whole person.

This event is free and open to the public. Following Dean Matthew's lecture, we invite attendees to a cocktail hour and reception. Registration is required. 

Justice In Health as a Faith Imperative

America has grappled with its commitment to equal justice for all since our nation's founding. While countless community leaders, legislators, judges, scholars, politicians, presidents and activists have all worked tirelessly over 400 years to realize the truth of our founding aspirations, we have yet to live up to the truth that "all are created equal [and] . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the deeply divided health outcomes that separate us by race, ethnicity, geography, ability, mental health status, gender identity, and more. In fact, this lecture begins from the premise that our society is only as just as it is healthy. Missing from our quest for equality, is a full appreciation of the biblical mandate for justice in each of the social determinants that predict health outcomes. This lecture will explore how achieving justice in American health is the imperative of all believers and the key to achieving liberty and justice for all.

Dayna Bowen Matthew

Dayna Bowen Matthew, J.D., Ph.D.

Dayna Bowen Matthew, J.D., Ph.D., is the Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. A leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on disparities in health, health care, and the social determinants of health, Dean Matthew joined GW Law in 2020. 

She also is the founder and inaugural faculty director of GW’s newly chartered Equity Institute, an interdisciplinary research hub dedicated to addressing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic injustice. A prolific writer, Dean Matthew is the author of two bestselling books, Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care, and the recently released Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America, and the co- author of a case book on public health law, ethics, and policy.

This event is sponsored by the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School and co-sponsored by the Center on Law, Race & Policy at the Duke University School of Law, the Purpose Project at Duke, and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine.

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