Bill Gallagher Gives $25,000 Endowment to Department

Bill Gallagher went to college to study business, and he currently owns a successful petroleum distribution business in Denver, Colorado, but he credits the undergraduate and graduate work he did in Religious Studies with preparing him for the world he lives in today. Inspired by professors at the University of Colorado, where he graduated cum laude in 1992 with a BA in Religious Studies, and then at the University of Chicago, where he earned an MA in the same field, he has long wanted to encourage students to learn more about religion. This desire led him to fund an annual student essay contest at his alma mater and to seek out Professor Constance Furey, a classmate from graduate school who now teaches at IU, in order to establish a similar contest at IU’s Department of Religious Studies. The Bill Gallagher Essay Contest has attracted outstanding submissions from students throughout the College of Arts and Sciences for the past four years, and Bill’s recent gift of $25,000 ensures that the contest, with its generous prize money for remarkable undergraduate essays, will be a permanent tradition in the department.

“Bill’s idea for an annual essay contest came completely out of the blue,” Furey explains, “but I shouldn’t have been surprised because it’s a classic example of his low-key activism. For example, after he studied Native American religions as an undergraduate, he spent a summer helping out kids on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Among all my friends in graduate school, he was the one who cared most about how academic theories could help us out in daily life.” When asked why he’s sponsoring the essay contest, Bill responded with a characteristic mix of idealism and pragmatism. He’s convinced that his background in the critical study of religion helped him grow his business “in an industry dominated by immigrants of various worldviews and religious backgrounds,” and that the business world needs critical thinking, liberal arts graduates. He also emphasizes that cross-cultural understanding is more important than ever right now: “Particularly in the current war environment, critical studies of religion are essential. War abolishes distinctions: a war on radical Islamic terrorists can all too easily be perceived as a war on Islam. But, as J.Z. Smith reminds your students, ‘map is not territory.’ We need careful, critical thinking to see (and, as necessary, change) the relief lines on the maps that inform our collective world views.”