Todd Whitmore

Biography

Todd Whitmore draws upon ethnographic methods to raise theological questions. For his first intensive project, he spent a year and a half on the ground during and immediately after the Lord’s Resistance Army conflict in northern Uganda and South Sudan, living for most of that time in Internally Displaced Persons camps. The prime question that arose in the research was that of how persons living in such circumstances sustain hope. The response he found among the Acholi people of the region – the majority of whom are Roman Catholic in addition to practicing local traditions – is that a panoply of practices considered in the modern West to be “conservative,” such as Eucharistic Adoration and the Rosary, enables a radical witness of persons willing to lay down their lives for others because of the felt presence of God in their midst. This fieldwork led to Professor Whitmore’s book, Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology. He also co-founded a non-profit in the region, PeaceHarvest.

More recently, Professor Whitmore’s focus has been local, with an emphasis on the opioid crisis, and addiction and recovery more generally. He has been a Certified Addiction Peer Recovery Coach in Indiana since 2017. He first served as a recovery coach for incarcerated and paroled men. More recently, he has founded Sophia’s Feast, a project that supports single mothers in recovery. In addition, he has co-written a grant that provided initial funding to bring recovery coaches to the local hospital, so that when overdosed people arrive in the emergency room, they are not simply resuscitated with Narcan, but are offered ongoing recovery support. He has also been on the St. Joseph County Suicide and Overdose Fatality Review Team, for which he serves as the next-of-kin interviewer, since 2019.

Professor Whitmore’s current book project involves interpreting the opioid crisis in light of Dante’s Divine Comedy.