Niagara University Announces Fall 2025 Endowed Lecture Series

The residential schools system, loving your enemies, theories about reality, finding your path, and religion and political polarization will be the topics of discussion during Niagara University's Fall 2025 Endowed Lecture Series. All presentations take place in the Castellani Art Museum on the Niagara University campus and are free and open to the public.

Dawn Cheryl Hill launches the series at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 30, with her presentation, "Memory Keeper-Residential Schools, Indigenous Healing, and the Path to Reconciliation." The talk is sponsored by Niagara University's Every Child Matters Day Committee, the Office of Academic Affairs, and the Castellani Art Museum.

Hill (Mohawk, Turtle Clan) is the daughter of two residential school survivors. Her book, "Memory Keeper," is a collection of anecdotes and stories from her life, living on the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. It has been nominated for an Indigenous Voices Award, received the 2022 First Nation Communities Read Long-list Award, and was selected as a recommended read by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Hill is a registered social worker with her own private practice, Sacred Circle Therapy, and also serves as an ambassador for the Chaney-Wenjack Foundation, a member of the North American Indigenous Women's Association, and a member of the board of the Six Nations Library.

The series continues at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 2, when Dr. Russell P. Johnson presents the McNulty Endowed Lecture, "Peace, Protest, and Polarization: Loving Your Enemies in Divided Times." Dr. Johnson is an assistant instructional professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on disagreement, antagonism, and how groups imagine and treat their enemies, drawing from rhetorical theory, Christian theology, peace and conflict studies, and dialogical philosophy to explore how the "good guys versus bad guys" mindset distorts people's perceptions of themselves and their opponents. His first book, "Beyond Civility in Social Conflict: Dialogue, Critique, and Religious Ethics," discusses the ethics of communication and how to challenge people's views in a compassionate and disruptive way. Dr. Johnson is a monthly columnist for "Sightings," a digital magazine that explores how viewing the world through the lens of religion can help us make sense of developments in politics, art, business, and other fields.

"What Is Reality? A Survey of Theories (and Why They're All Wrong)" is the focus of the Peggy and John Day University Honors Endowed Lecture at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 9, given by actor, writer, director, and podcaster Curt Jaimungal. Jaimungal interrogates competing unification frameworks through his long-form interview series "Theories of Everything," which now spans over 300 episodes with guests such as Roger Penrose, Donald Hoffman, Leonard Susskind, and Geoffrey Hinton. His analytic lens shaped the feature comedy "I'm Okay" and documentary "Better Left Unsaid." Beyond broadcasting, Jaimungal contributes essays and moderates philosophy-of-science events for places like the Institute of Art and Ideas and distills ongoing debates in physics, consciousness, and AI for a 8,000-subscriber Substack readership. His current research applies category-theoretic mapping to chart the epistemic limits that Gödel incompleteness, quantum indeterminacy, and simulation-level ambiguity impose on every putative "Theory of Everything."

On Thursday, Oct. 16, at 5 p.m., Dr. Alan T. Remaley will discuss "Finding Your Path: A Physician-Scientist's Journey of Discovery and Meaning," during the Hughes Endowed Lecture in the Health Sciences. Dr. Remaley is the section chief of the Lipoprotein Metabolism Laboratory in the Translational Vascular Medicine Branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md., and a senior staff member of the Department of Laboratory Medicine at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. He is the recipient of many awards for his research and has published over 500 papers in the field of lipoprotein metabolism and cardiovascular disease. He is an inventor on multiple patents related to new therapeutic agents and diagnostic tests for cardiovascular disease and has made important contributions to the field of high-density lipoprotein metabolism. More recently, he has expanded his research into low-density lipoproteins , the main driver of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. He has developed an equation which is widely used for estimating the cholesterol content of LDL, and described the first high-resolution structure of APOB100, the main protein constituent of LDL and the ligand for the removal of LDL from the circulation by its receptor.

Wrapping up the series at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 30, is Dr. Marilie Coetsee, who will present the Albert the Great Endowed Lecture, "Religion and Political Polarization: Using Faith to Build Bridges or Deepen Partisan Divides." Dr. Coetsee is assistant professor of philosophy at Hope College. Her experiences growing up in a small Christian reformed church in the diverse San Francisco Bay area led her to research questions pertaining to how religious believers and secular citizens should engage together in a democratic society. In her broader work, she also investigates questions in moral psychology, epistemology, and Islamic ethics and politics. She is the co-author of "Does Faith Belong in Politics? Debating the Place of Religion in a Pluralistic Polity" and has published in a variety of journals, including Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.