Alumni establish scholarship for overseas study

When Alan Humphrey, Jr., ’81 remembers his years at Lewis & Clark, his overseas study program in Israel takes center stage.

“It was one of the highlights of my life,” says Humphrey, who majored in international affairs and now works as a quality assurance manager for Amazon.com.

So when Humphrey found himself in a position to give back to the community, it seemed only natural for him to turn his attention to the College.

This year, he led the effort to establish the Richard and Miriam Rohrbaugh Scholarship Fund. This endowed fund will benefit those

students who want to participate in overseas study programs but need some financial assistance to do so. The Student Financial Services Office will administer the scholarship based on financial need.

“Dick and Miriam Rohrbaugh conducted the overseas study program with enthusiasm and intellectual honesty,” Humphrey says. “Dick went out of his way to make sure we had a variety of academic and cultural experiences. We lived with host families, conducted research at an archeological dig in the desert, spent time in east Jerusalem and worked on a kibbutz.”

Mike Daus ’87, another contributor, agrees that overseas study programs are a valuable part of the Lewis & Clark educational experience.

Daus contributed to the Richard and Miriam Rohrbaugh Scholarship Fund to honor his parents, who were killed in an airplane crash last year.

“Through very careful planning

and foresight, my parents and my grandparents made it possible for me to attend Lewis & Clark,” he says. “I appreciate how fortunate I am to have had that opportunity. With this scholarship, I’m helping pass that opportunity along to other students.”

Rohrbaugh, Paul S. Wright Professor of Christian Studies and department chair, has led two overseas study programs in Israel and one in Scotland.

He has devoted his academic career to overcoming Western ethnocentricity in regard to the Bible by looking at it with fresh eyes from the context of the Mediterranean culture in which it was written.

He has published six books, which have been translated into five languages—French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish—and he has published close to 50 articles in scholarly journals.

Most recently, he wrote “Die Frage nach dem messianische Bewusstein Jesu: Ethnozentrismus und historich Fragen,” a chapter in the German-language book Jesus in Neuen Kontexten:Sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Jesusforschung (Kohlhammer, 2001). The book was edited by Gerd Theissen and Wolfgang Stegemann, scholars at the University of Heidelberg.