David Toole
Nannerl O. Keohane Director, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Professor of the Practice: Theology, Ethics, and Global Health
Member of Faculty Advisory Council
David Toole is Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Professor of the Practice in Theology, Ethics, and Global Health. David earned his PhD in theology and ethics from Duke in 1996 and returned in 2005, after a stint in his home state of Montana, where he taught at Carroll College in Helena and at the University of Montana, Missoula, his alma mater. From 2005 to 2014, he served as an associate dean in Duke Divinity School. In 2014, after earning a master’s degree in public health from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, David joined the Duke faculty with appointments in the Duke Global Health Institute, Duke Divinity School, and the Kenan Institute for Ethics. He became director of the Institute in 2021. His teaching has included 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 Love Made Me an Inventor: The Story of Maggy Barankitse—Humanitarian, Genocide Survivor, Citizen without Borders. In his spare time, he is working to finish two books. One is a collection of essays on storytelling; the other recounts the history of North America through the eyes of horses, starting with the horses Columbus brought to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493 and ending with the government-orchestrated slaughter of tens of thousands Indian horses on the Crow Reservation in Montana in the 1920s. David and Nancy, his wife of thirty-seven years, have three grown boys.
