David Toole

David Toole is director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Associate Professor of the Practice of Theology, Ethics, and Global Health. He earned his PhD at Duke in 1996 and then left for his home state of Montana, where he taught at Carroll College and the University of Montana before returning to Duke in 2005. In 2009, he started traveling back and forth from Duke to communities in the Great Lakes region of East Africa while working on grant projects and conducting research in Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan. His work in Africa led his to pursue an MPH degree from UNC, Chapel Hill, which he completed in 2014. His teaching includes courses on Global Health as an Ethical Enterprise, Ethics and the History of Humanitarianism, Challenges of Living an Ethical Life, and Ethics and Native America. He is the author of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, and has recently completed a manuscript titled The Morgue in the Garden of Eden: An Essay on Hope … in the Dark, which tells the story of a Burundian woman and the hospital she founded during Burundi’s long civil war. David has been married to his wife, Nancy, for thirty-four years and is the father of three grown boys.