On Nov. 13, Dayna Bowen Matthew, J.D., Ph.D., dean of the George Washington University Law School, was recognized as the 2024 Richard Payne Awardee and Lecturer in Faith, Justice, and Health Care. This prestigious honor highlights academic, clinical, and lay leaders who embody the late Dr. Richard Payne’s spirit of caring for the whole person. 

Dean Matthew is a leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on disparities in health, health care, and the social determinants of health. She also is the founder and inaugural faculty director of the newly chartered Equity Institute at George Washington University, an interdisciplinary research hub dedicated to addressing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic injustice. 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 is the co-author of a case book on public health law, ethics, and policy.

Dean Matthew’s lecture on Nov. 13, titled “Justice in Health Care as a Faith Imperative,” was distinct among her public presentations to date. Emboldened by the work and legacy of the late Dr. Payne, an internationally esteemed pioneer in pain relief, palliative care, oncology, and neurology, Dean Matthew greeted her audience with scripture. She began with the announcement of Jesus’ ministry in Nazareth from Luke chapter four, in which Jesus reads a scroll from the prophet Isaiah concerning his commission:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Christ announces his ministry by reminding his community, and readers across history, of the kinds of people God is most concerned for. “If we will allow the principles that Jesus announced: we care about the poor, the oppressed, the prisoners, the blind,” Dean Matthew affirmed, “If we reflect the priority that the Old Testament places on the foreigners among us…should we choose it, the spirit of the Lord would be upon us also.”

Throughout the lecture, Dean Matthew expounded upon three concepts from her research that she suggests are required to bring about justice and equality as lived realities in the U.S.: Just Medicine, Just Health, and Just Nation. In the spirit of Dr. Richard Payne, Dean Matthew argued that Just Medicine is not simply about treating diseases, but requires that medicine and its practitioners attend to the whole person. A fulsome and scriptural conception of the patient pushes beyond the all-to-common notion that the patient is a machine that must be diagnosed and fixed, but that each person is a dignified human being created in the image of God. Just Medicine cannot be practiced, however, without addressing the systemic drivers of structural inequities and disparities in our healthcare institutions–what Dean Matthew describes as Just Health. Good education, stable housing and employment, safe communities, and consistent access to clean food, air, and water influence health outcomes more than one’s heritable risk of a particular disease. 

Dean Matthew noted that “unjust discrimination characterizes most of the distribution of social determinants of health.” As a legal scholar and lawyer, she emphasized the role of law as a tool for bringing about (or impeding) the trajectory of health equity in our country: “…the law is useful for whatever moral purpose you want to put it to. Whatever moral purpose, whatever informs your convictions and principles, you can reflect and implement through law. It's a very, very powerful tool, and it's the reason I love being a lawyer. It's the reason I love being here today to talk to you, because I get to bring my Christ-follower self to bear on the law tools that I know how to use and implement them for justice.”

Concluding her lecture, Dean Matthew urged her audience, comprised of administrators, faculty, staff, alumni, and students across Duke University, including the Divinity School, School of Law, and School of Medicine, to take action: to litigate, to advocate, to teach, to minister, or to conduct research addressing structural racism and disparities. Solutions to the structural inequities inherent to U.S. health systems and the striking disparities unique to our country among top global economies, she posited, stem from the integration of justice with faith. In closing, Dean Matthew said, “The message I want to leave with you, is that health is a byproduct of justice, and justice is a byproduct of [] faith.” 

The 2024 Richard Payne Lecture in Faith, Justice, and Health Care featured welcome remarks by Dr. Warren Kinghorn, co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative and associate professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center; Dean of Duke Divinity School Edgardo Colón-Emeric; Dr. Patrick T. Smith, associate research professor of theological ethics and bioethics and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University; and Dr. Trina Jones, director of the Center on Law, Race, and Policy at the Duke University School of Law. Alana Jackson, a Duke University graduate alumna in public health and the performing arts, and current lecturer with the University of Florida's Center for Arts in Medicine, wrote and performed a spoken word piece to honor the occasion.