On October 16, 2019, President Jimmy Carter visited Dr. Idler’s Fall 2019 graduate seminar on Religion and Public Health. Students in the seminar are from Rollins, Candler, GDR, Emory College, the Center for Ethics, and Sociology in the PhD, MTS, MPH, MDiv, MD/MPH, MA, and BA programs.
During his visit, students presented President Carter with a copy of Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health, the text for the course.
President Carter talked about his childhood growing up in Plains, GA, the many social programs of his church there where he still teaches Sunday School, his mother Lillian (for whom the Lillian Carter Center for Global Nursing is named), the 1989 meeting he organized at The Carter Center with William Foege on the church’s role in health, and much about the Carter Center’s tropical disease eradication program. He said that normalizing relations with China was perhaps his most proud achievement, along with peace-making efforts and election monitoring around the world.
President Carter stated to the class that, “This is the most important course taught at Emory.”
