A Rhodes Scholar and senior minister for the historic Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore at age 26, Brad Braxton applies lessons he learned along the way as associate professor of New Testament and homiletics. He continues to guest preach as many as 25 sermons each semester.
Photo by John Russell.

In addition to his deeply intellectual sermons, Bascom had established a tradition of activism, a passion Braxton shared. But the young minister wanted to make his own mark. He began a series of Bible study classes, complete with a syllabus, reading list and exams, and he established an interfaith dialogue with the impressive Jewish community in the city. He also started a gospel choir to supplement the formal Sunday morning singing, and the energy that came from all those things made it, he says, a highly satisfying time.

But the world of academia still called. In the summer of 2000, after a whirlwind stay of five years, Braxton left his pulpit in Baltimore to join the faculty at Wake Forest University. He taught preaching and New Testament in the divinity school, before moving again in 2004 to join the divinity school at Vanderbilt. He was 35. And if there had been a certain restlessness about him, he found himself now in a comfortable place where he could apply the lessons he'd learned along the way.

Illustration by Diana Ong.

"It's an exciting community to be a part of," he says, "coming to a faculty where there is not only a strong commitment to justice, but a Ph.D. program in homiletics and linguistics. I have outstanding colleagues, and our dean, James Hudnut-Beumler, is deeply rooted in the life of the church."

In the fall he will teach the courses Preaching in the African American Tradition and Interdisciplinary Approach to Preaching and Worship. But one of his favorites is the seminar course he taught in the spring--Preaching, Healing and Justice, in which he sought to tie together with his students the two great callings of the Christian ministry: those pulpit proclamations about justice in the world, and the pastoral care of their future congregations.

He liked to begin each session with a prayer--"Holy Spirit, purify our minds and sanctify our tongues"--as well as a reminder about the need for humility in the face of the massive task set before them.

"Each of us," he declares, "has a tenuous grasp at best on the truth." Braxton often refers to his students as "colleagues" and says he learns from them every day. "These students," he concludes, "have done brilliant homiletic work."

Braxton has written three books and is working on another, and has continued to do guest preaching on his own, as many as 25 sermons each semester, including one last year at Westminster Abbey.

He says he expects someday to return to a full-time pulpit ministry. But for now at least, he has found at Vanderbilt a place where the pieces of his life come together.

A childhood fascination with animal behavior led Owen Jones on a path to becoming one of the country's foremost experts in the field of law and behavioral biology. Today he is one among a handful of academics in the country holding faculty appointments in law and biology and conducting significant research in both fields.

"Everything law does depends on some model of human behavior," says Jones, professor of law and professor of biological sciences. "And yet our models of human behavior are fairly incomplete and lack a robustness that could be increased by adding insights about behavior that flow from biology."

A consideration of biological factors does not mean "my brain made me do it" becomes a handy legal defense--any more than the height of a child's parents predicts with absolute certainty how tall that child will be in adulthood. "Biology makes understanding human behavior more complex, rather than more simple," Jones explains. "Behavior doesn't come prepackaged in either environmentally influenced or genetically determined potentiality. These things intersect, and they intersect in complex ways that are biologically and evolutionarily influenced."

The intersection of biology and behavior has been of interest to Jones as long as he can remember. A great collector of books on the subject of animal biology, he was also a keen observer of animals and their behavior.

"As a child I remember a mockingbird that used to jump up and display at larger birds, like crows. But I also noticed that it displayed to distant airplanes, of the same apparent size as the nearer birds," says Jones. "This was a conflict between a behavior that would ordinarily work very well for the bird and a behavior now bumping up against a novel environmental feature--an airplane--that results in a waste of time and energy."

Building on his early interest in biology and behavior, Jones used his undergraduate and law school years to combine a passion for science with an equally intense interest in making the legal system as efficient and effective as possible. As an undergraduate at Amherst College, Jones diversified his interests rather than limiting his focus to animal behavior. The exposure to policy analysis and academic research as well as laboratory work led to his study at the intersection of law and biology and to Yale Law School.

Determined to enter the legal academic market, he completed a judicial clerkship, several years of work with a well-known law firm in Washington, D.C., and published a number of papers in academic journals. His work paid off, and he was offered a position at Arizona State University, home to the oldest program in law, science and technology in the country. Though he was initially appointed to the law school faculty there, his interest and work in biology also earned him a tenured position in biology.

Rather than relying solely on the disciplines traditionally consulted for answers by legal policymakers in the last few decades--psychology, sociology, economics, philosophy--Jones believes the fields of evolutionary biology and neuroscience can provide new, more scientifically sound perspectives.

His research attempts to answer questions related to legal efficiency by asking--through a joint legal and neuroscience lens--how the tools of law could be used to help people behave more like they should and less like they shouldn't. What sort of environmental changes could the legal system encourage, in light of what is becoming known about the brain, that could lead to positive changes in human behaviors? How could law be used to better help people overcome their own evolutionally, neurologically influenced irrational behaviors?

"The more you can understand about how and why the brain prompts us to behave the way we do, the better equipped you are to understand the resulting behavior--and to think about ways to effectively and efficiently guide the behavior towards constructive outcomes," says Jones.

The study of that point where law and science intersect is not particularly new. Forensics testing, expert testimony from psychologists and physicians, and federal regulations regarding genetically modified foods are all examples of ways in which science and its findings are intertwined with the legal system.

Even within behavioral biology, however, neuroscience is a newer addition to the law and science mix. It is within this specific realm that Owen Jones now works and studies. What happens here does not attempt to overlay scientific knowledge onto the existing legal system, but instead calls for a careful examination of how people's biological capacities interact with our current system of laws and punishments.

During the past year this intersection of law and neuroscience has attracted more widespread attention. A New York Times Magazine cover story (March 11, 2007) exploring how neuroscience might transform the legal system prominently featured the work of Jones, his many Vanderbilt colleagues, and the world-class imaging institute led by John Gore. More recently, the field made news when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a $10 million grant to fund the national Law and Neuroscience Project. Jones was tapped to co-direct one of three areas of study within the project.

Through the Law and Neuroscience Project, more than 30 researchers at nearly two dozen universities around the country are divided into three networks dedicated to exploring topics of addiction, brain abnormalities and decision making as they relate to the law. Jones will help lead the decision-making network, which includes Vanderbilt collaborators René Marois, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience; Jeffrey Schall, E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Neuroscience, director of the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, and director of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center; and Erin O'Hara, professor of law and director of Vanderbilt Law School's Law and Human Behavior Program.

Jones and colleagues' team will examine how and why choices are made related to breaking laws. They are particularly interested in risk assessment and its role in deciding whether to engage in criminal behavior: What is the chance I'll get caught? What is the chance I'll be punished? What might my punishment be? Is the punishment I might receive worth what I might gain if I commit the crime?

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners, their work will also examine the neuroscience of decision making as it relates to determining guilt versus innocence and severity of punishment.

Jones' highly collaborative work relies on the availability and interest of colleagues from the Law School, the College of Arts and Science, the Medical School, and the Vanderbilt Institute of Imaging Science. The prospect of working on projects such as the one funded by the MacArthur Foundation brought Jones to Vanderbilt, where he credits a collegial and collaborative atmosphere for making traditional academic boundaries almost arbitrary.

"Disciplines should be linked so that a problem, rather than a subject area, is truly at the forefront," he says. "You can walk into another department at Vanderbilt and talk to colleagues and get them excited about the prospects of collaboration. That's not true everywhere. Being transinstitutional enables the university to be academically nimble in making new discoveries. We are doing exciting theoretical work as well as empirical work here that simply isn't being done elsewhere."

That emphasis on collaboration spills over to Jones' teaching. Last semester he partnered in the classroom with neuroscientist Schall, offering a course in law and neuroscience that enrolled 35 students from graduate programs in law, psychology and neuroscience. Like their teachers, the students worked together on interdisciplinary projects, with the goal of designing new neuroscience research that could be executed at the intersection of law and neuroscience.

"This was an opportunity to get graduate students in neuroscience and psychology in the same room with law students, and it was the first time here we offered a course like this," says Schall. "It was very exciting, and there was tremendous energy and enthusiasm."

The course allowed third-year law student Anna Henderson to gain exposure to the field of neuroscience within the context of her own academic work. "I call Professor Jones a true teacher because he loves engaging with students," says Henderson. "His favorite thing seems to be stimulating young minds--in conversations, in the classroom. He's attuned to detail and quality work from himself and in drawing it out of his students. He makes you do better work."

As to potential effects of his research on decision making, risk assessment and the legal system, Jones takes a long view. "Right now my colleagues and I are mainly trying to generate sufficient momentum in the legal academy so that some of the thinking will roll over into aspects of legal policymaking," he says. "This is ultimately about how we use the tools of law to shape the environments in which people behave."

He is encouraged by what he sees as the growing exploration of the field of law and neuroscience. Ten years ago he founded a scholarly association dedicated to interests in the intersection of law and biology. Today the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (SEAL) has more than 400 members from 24 countries. They include legal thinkers, economists, philosophers and biologists. The number of articles written on the subject of law and behavioral biology grows each year. Articles in other fields citing these papers also have increased in number. All of this--including popular media coverage by such publications as The New York Times and the recognition that comes from securing the MacArthur Foundation grant--contributes to a growing academic and public awareness about the field of study for which Jones is so passionate.

"The brain is not a black box but a highly developed, highly algorithmic, evolved, condition-dependent, environmentally sensitive information processor that is designed to skew the probabilities of certain behavioral outputs given certain kinds of behavioral inputs," says Jones. "Any explicit recognition that all behavior of interest to law comes from the brain, I think, will move us in the direction of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of certain areas of law." V

Ever since she graduated from Vanderbilt School of Nursing in 1975 with a master's degree in psych-mental health nursing, Carol Etherington has been providing care to people grasping at life in the midst of unfathomable tragedy. She has responded to victims of the killing fields of Cambodia, floods in Poland, civil conflict in Tajikistan, and famines and massacres in African nations. She worked on-site in the wake of the 1994 earthquakes in California, Hurricane Katrina, and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. She has counseled homeless families, orphaned children and refugees.

To honor such actions of compassion and caring, and in recognition of her work establishing mental health programs and delivering humanitarian aid in the United States and abroad, Etherington, an assistant professor of nursing, has been named the 2007 Vanderbilt University Distinguished Alumna.

"Whether I'm in a war zone or responding to a natural disaster, my goal is to help people move past the incident or incidents so they don't feel permanently stuck in an event that took away their strengths,"Etherington explains. The key, she says, is to help them see beyond a traumatic experience so they won't be "labeled" by it or allow it to define them as a person.

Etherington began her humanitarian activism shortly after receiving her nursing license. Early in her career she realized that once victims of rape, assault and child abuse were treated in a healthcare setting, they faced additional traumas as they were processed through the criminal justice mill. Appalled by the insensitivity of existing systems, she founded the Victim Intervention Program within the Metro Nashville Police Department, an innovative project that meshes crisis counseling with law enforcement.

A tall, statuesque redhead with a hearty laugh, Etherington exudes an aura of warmth and determination. "When she walks into a room, you can feel her force field," says Rusty Lawrence, executive director of Nashville's Urban Housing Solutions, an organization that provides affordable housing for lowincome individuals and families. Lawrence has worked with Etherington on addressing public health needs of the homeless and devising ways to "fix holes in the medical system" of this vulnerable population.

"Carol is a very good leader," Lawrence says. "You feel her confidence, but she is also very clear about her limits--what she is and isn't able to do."

Etherington,who joined the faculty of the Vanderbilt School of Nursing in 1995 as a community health instructor, exposes nursing and medical students to the health-care dilemmas faced by immigrants, refugees, victims of crime, the impoverished and the homeless. Aware that many of these students will one day become leaders in community and international outreach, she is determined to get it right.

"This new era of globalization ups the ante for a university like Vanderbilt," Etherington says. "Vanderbilt cannot simply be responsible for providing a learning opportunity. It must critically question not only how this experience will shape the lives of students, but also what students will leave behind.How will they affect the lives of those they come in contact with? These people, the recipients of our outreach, have much to teach us if we're willing to learn. Helping my students understand this has become integral to my humanitarian work."

Her global vision is a natural extension of her skills as a nurse. Etherington served six terms--two of them as president--on the board of directors of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international relief organization known in America as Doctors Without Borders.

"Carol was a constant reminder that we needed to focus not just on the medical issues, but on the mental health issues of those we were assisting," says Dr. Darin Portnoy, current president of the U.S. branch of MSF. "People are deeply affected by displacement, war, personal loss, and physical illness and injury. You can take care of the immediate medical needs, but unless you also address their core emotional needs, they will still be suffering."

Etherington pushed the MSF paradigm during her tenure, helping the organization see that mental health should not be addressed as an afterthought, but rather could be incorporated into an acute approach to humanitarian aid.

Nothing is more acute than a bomb launched from a rooftop or a missile attack or a drugged-out teenager wielding an Uzi submachine gun. Several times through the years, Etherington has served in some of the world's hottest war zones--Cambodia, Tajikistan, Bosnia, Kosovo,Angola, Sierra Leone.

Bosnia holds a special place in her heart. Once a part of Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina is a country of breathtaking beauty, with cloud-tipped mountains, quaint villages and cascading waterfalls. Tragically, this same scenic landscape served as a scorched-earth battleground between ethnic Serbs, Croats and Muslims, many of whom participated-- some reluctantly, others enthusiastically--in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Four times during the 1990s, Etherington chose to join others in the trenches to deliver nursing and psychological aid during the Bosnian War and its aftermath.

She first went there in 1993 to offer medical and psychological support as a humanitarian aid worker with the International Medical Corps. She returned for six months in 1994, followed by several visits in 1996 with MSF to help emotionally damaged survivors sort through the carnage they had witnessed and the atrocities they had endured.Although she was an expert in crisis counseling for rape victims, and rape was being used as a tactic of war in Bosnia, she actually spent much of her time helping to establish a mental health program for war-traumatized children.

Because many children were too shellshocked to discuss what they'd undergone, relief workers had them draw pictures instead. Elementary-aged youngsters colored images of relatives being shot at point-blank range, of houses exploding, of soldiers firing randomly into villages--horrifying acts of savagery rendered in crayon.

After 1996, Etherington revisited Bosnia once more, briefly in 2001. International relief, however,works best if undertaken as a longterm commitment. For that reason, and because a unique opportunity presented itself, Etherington returned to Bosnia in July 2007 to explore how a nation absorbs the pain of unspeakable cruelty and devastation.

Her latest journey began through the Institute of Global Health and the Emphasis Program, which allows Vanderbilt medical students to focus on an area of interest for eight weeks during the summer after their first year of training. Medical student Demetrius Tavoulareas expressed an interest in working in Bosnia, so Etherington dusted off some of her old contacts and agreed to act as his mentor for a project examining mental health programs in a post-war society. She requested that she also travel to Bosnia to oversee his work and that she bring nursing student Jessica Van Meter along as well.

In nearly every village, Etherington was greeted like a returning hero.Van Meter says that one man told her,"Carol made very beautiful things happen during the war."

In fact, the child-centered program she and her team originated,which works towards peace and social reconstruction, is still going strong and is being used in the schools to educate young children with the hope they will one day rebuild an equable mixed society.

Etherington says that while she did perceive a renewed hope for the future among her Bosnian colleagues, they are sorely aware of the precariousness of their political situation. Many have come to believe that all their politicians, regardless of ethnicity, betrayed them. Even today, she adds, some of those leaders covertly continue to excite tensions between and among the factions. Theirs is a country tied together by a fragile and uneasy peace; people are now queuing up in line at the local market behind the same neighbors who once pointed guns at their heads and threatened to pull the trigger.

Yet, in many cases, Bosnians are not just pushing forward."They are dancing forward," she insists. "They love life. They drink too much. They smoke too much. They stay up too late. And they dance."

Which makes them that much more a part of the global brotherhood. Etherington says, "If you look across borders, class, geography and religion, there are basically four things that everybody on the planet wants: They want to live and be healthy. They want someone to love them. They want to have some sense of purpose. And they want to be respected."

Anyone reading this article understands these needs. But so does the young Angolan mother, exhausted by disease, who is nursing not only her own starving infant, but another child orphaned by war. So does a little girl in a frilly blue taffeta party dress, wandering the streets alone after rebel African forces razed her village. So does the widowed mother who brings her children into the humanitarian-aid office to read poetry to the workers because she wants Westerners to know that most Bosnians not only despise killing, but appreciate literature and art.

Carol Etherington also understands. Through the years she has reached out to these very people, encouraging them to be stronger than their circumstances and to cautiously dare to dance forward.