As befits an engaged campus, on any given week, there are plenty of choices for public lectures to attend. Last Monday night, I attended the Otts-Maloney lecture given by Professor Mark Noll. This talk is part one of the oldest lecture series at Davidson College.
The lecture series was founded by John Martin Philip Otts, class of 1859. He was born in Union County, South Carolina and was a member of the Eumenean Society while at Davidson. He attended Columbia Theological Seminary and received a Doctor of Divinity from William and Mary College in 1873. He served as a pastor to several churches in Alabama, Tennessee and Delaware and was editor of the Southern department for the Presbyterian Journal. His marriage to Lelia McCrary of Greensboro, Alabama in 1863 enabled him to later endow the lecture series at Davidson. He died in 1901.
The lectureship was founded in 1893 with a bequest of $2500. By 1939, the endowment had grown to $10,000. Davidson College president Walter Lingle explained the intention of the donor, “It was stipulated by Dr. Otts that the lectures on this foundation should always be on some Christian theme and, as a rule, they should constitute a defense of Christianity against some current heresy.”
Dr. Otts not only founded the series –he gave the first lecture in 1893, speaking on ” Unsettled Questions Touching the Foundations of Christianity.” In addition, Dr. Otts expected that the lectures would be published with full recognition of his endowment– if not with actual funds from the endowment. Not all of the lectures have been published. Of the 22 lectures given between 1893 and 1968, 13 were published either as pamphlets or incorporated as chapters in books.
One unusual aspect of the lecture series is that by the 1930s, the lecturer was expected to deliver 3 or 5 talks over a period of days. Speakers for series include John Bunyan Shearer, Paul Lehmann, George Butterfield, Nels Ferre, and James L. McCord. To see a full list of the speakers, go to http://davidsonarchivesandspecialcollections.org/archivesdb/awardquery.asp and search for Otts in the Title field.
As a direct descendant of John M P Otts and a lifelong student of Christian theology, I am very interested in attending one of the lectures in the future. Could you possibly add me to a contact list?
Hello! Here is a link to the list of speakers in the series https://www.davidson.edu/academic-departments/religious-studies/research-and-scholarship/otts-lecture. Due to COVID, there does not appear to have been a speaker in 2020. If you are interested in this series, I would contact the Religious Studies department at Davidson to learn the schedule. Thank you for your interest!