Dr. Russell Palmer * Dr. Dale Stover
 

Dr. Russ Palmer was born in Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from Wayne State University with a B.A. in History (Phi Beta Kappa). He is also a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary. His master's thesis was "The Doctrine of Propitiation in Contemporary Theology."

His Ph.D. is from the University of Iowa, where his dissertation dealt with the thought of Karl Barth, the great 20th century Swiss theologian ("Karl Barth and the Orders of Creation: A Study in Theological Ethics"). He did post-doctoral study at Princeton and at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

Dr. Palmer taught at UNO from 1965 - Spring 2002. His primary fields of interest are Biblical studies (especially the New Testament), the history of Christian thought, and Christian ethics (especially the interrelations of religion, ethics, and public policy).

Dr. Palmer is a member of the executive board of the Karl Barth Society of North America. He founded the Karl Barth Society Newsletter in 1990 and served as its editor until his retirement in 2002.

Professor Dale Stover taught in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at UNO from1968 to 2007. He received his B.A. degree (1957) from Washington University in St. Louis. He earned Bachelor of Divinity (B.D., 1961) and Master of Sacred Theology (S.T.M., 1964) degrees from Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. He took his Ph.D. degree (1967) in Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal.

Professor Stover’s early research focused on hermeneutics as the methodological key to interpreting religious texts for contemporary understanding. In 1976 he studied modern religious meanings as affected by the European Enlightenment through a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer fellowship at Yale University under the tutelage of Professor Hans Frei. In the fall of 1979 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago where he studied with the Islamics scholar, Professor Fazlur Rahman of the Oriental Institute. In the summer of 1980 he was again a summer NEH fellow, and he studied the nexus of anthropology and psychoanalytic theory with Professor Melford Spiro at the University of California at San Diego. In the fall of 1981, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in Berkeley where he studied Shi’i Islam with Professor Hamid Algar.

In the fall of 1982 Professor Stover took a leave of absence to apprentice with healers practicing non-allopathic medicine in California. This initiated a turn toward experiential studies in religion, partly displacing and partly complementing his earlier focus on textual studies. In the fall of 1985, his concern with experiential religion led him to participation in ceremonies of indigenous peoples. His primary teachers in traditional indigenous ceremonies have been the members of the Has No Horse family of the Wakpamni Lake community on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

In the fall of 1992 Professor Stover became the Coordinator of the new Native American Studies program at UNO and he served as coordinator for three years. Besides serving on the Native American Studies faculty, he served on the faculty of the Women’s Studies program at UNO. He was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Preventive and Societal Medicine in the College of Medicine at UNMC and a fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies based at UNL.

His publications of note are:

[1] "Linguisticality and Theology: Applying the Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer," Sciences Religieuses/Studies in Religion, 5:1 (1975-76) 34-44.

[2] "Orientalism and the Otherness of Islam," Sciences Religieuses/Studies in Religion, 17:1 (1988), 27-40.

[3] "The Other Side of the Story: Indigenous Interpretation of Contact with Europeans," The Age of Exploration: Spain and New Spain; proceedings of the Fifth Annual Klutznik Symposium, ed. by Bryan F. LeBeau and Menachem Mor; Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 1996, 97-116.

[4] "Eurocentrism and Native americans," Cross Currents, 47:3 (Fall 1997), 390-397.

[5] "Religious Freedom, Native American: Legal and Philosophical Context," The Encyclopedia of Native American Legal Tradition, ed. by Bruce Johansen; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998, 265-273.

[6] "A Postcolonial Reading of Black Elk," The Black Elk Reader, ed. by Clyde Holler; Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 2000, 127-144.

[7] "Postcolonial Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 69/4 (December 2001), 817-836.

Dr. Stover's email address is dstover@mail.unomaha.edu.

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