Religion Professor Hans H. Penner

"I was going to become a medical missionary..."

IF YOU COULD take just one course at Dartmouth and you asked any student on campus for a recommendation, chances are you would be steered toward Religion 1. And that would bring you to Hans Penner, the professor of religion who co-founded the team-taught course with his former colleague Professor Robert Oden.

The consistent popularity of Religion 1 at Dartmouth seems to lie as much in the exuberance of Penner and his colleagues as in the subject matter of their lectures on cosmology, religious heroes, suffering,; religion, and community. "We have a hook on human nature if we can understand religion," Penner says. "Religion is the core department in the humanities. You can't study music, drama, art, or literature without studying religion."

Religion, in one form or another, has long been the core of Penner's worldview. "I was going to becomea medical missionaryto Africa, like Albert Schweitzer," he says. During his three wars at Judson College, an American Baptist seminary, his ambitions turned to academe. "I loved reading Freud, Marx, Kant, Durkheim, Weber. They all had tussled with religion. Ithought, here was a subject worth looking at."He transferred to theUniversity of Chicagoto study comparativereligion, eventuallyearning a doctorate for his work on Hindu myths. He joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1965.

In addition to developing Religion 1, Penner has effected other changes at the College. By the time he served as dean of the faculty in the early 1980s, he had already accomplished one of the most wideranging of these changes: he had chaired the committee that brought Dartmouth the D-Plan.