Harvard Divinity School

This lecture on Jewish midwives was given by Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaism and Women's Studies in Religion Program 2022-23 Research Associate Jordan Katz. This event took place on March 22, 2023 A full transcript can be found online: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/06/07/video-rachel-salomons-and-world-jewish-midwives-early-modern-europe Learn more: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/

In this special episode of Faculty Focus, HDS professors John P. Brown and Charles Hallisey talk about why this summer’s Making Change Professional and Lifelong Learning program is such a valuable experience for those looking to make an investment in themselves and gain a new perspective on the challenges they face. Held across five lively and concentrated days of collaboration, close reading, and...

There are two distinct concepts of translation at work in the encounter between an Amazonian Indigenous people, the Wari’, and the New Tribes Mission evangelical missionaries. While the missionaries conceive translation as a process of converting meanings between languages, conceived as linguistic codes that exist independently of culture, for the Wari’, in consonance with their perspectivist onto...

This conversation was the last of the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery | A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers were HDS professors Karen L. King, David F. Holland, Dan McKanan, Terrence L. Johnson, and Tracey Hucks. This session was a discussion among presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes...

What is dignity? Is it something conferred upon us externally by others, or an inner quality that we all possess? Drawing from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Phakchok Rinpoche provides a fresh understanding of dignity as the power that arises when we know decisively that our nature is inherently pure. With dignity, we know that we are fundamentally whole and complete. We gain an unshakeable confi...

Amahl A. Bishara, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, and author of "Back Stories: U.S. News Producation and Palestinian Politics," discusses her book "Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence and Roadblocks to Political Expression." The book looks to sites of political practice, such as journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the r...

In this lecture Visiting Assistant Professor of African Religions and Women's Studies in Religion Program 2022-23 Research Associate Elyan Hill discusses embodied visualities and domestic enslavement in Togolese sacred arts. This event took place on February 22, 2023. Learn more: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/ Full transcript: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/3/25/video-dancing-altars

Join Research Associate Dr. Giovanna Parmigiani in her conversation with Dr. Grace Nono as they discuss Dr. Nono’s work as an ethnographer and performer, about shamanism in the Philippines, and some of the possible connections between sound and healing. This event is part of the Gnoseologies Series focused on ways of knowing that are often labeled as “non-rational.” Traditionally referred to as gn...

Slavery is most readily associated with the U.S. American South with the geographies of the North often eclipsed. Tracey Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at HDS and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, led a discussion on slavery and the slave trade that focuses on New England and the DeWolf family of Rhode Island. The DeWolf...

On March 2, 2023, a cohort of Harvard Divinity School students engaged in an evening of storytelling, poetry, and photography as they shared their experiences of joy and resistance from their summer in Israel/Palestine. Learn more: https://hds.harvard.edu/ A full transcript is located here: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/4/8/video-displacement-and-belonging-israelpalestine

The Leading Toward Justice webinar series features panel discussions spotlighting alumni impact in the world and the ways alumni leverage their HDS training while working in secular or public professions. This session discussed the critical importance of ethical practices and religious literacy in community organizing and advocacy fields. Panelists: - Ryan Andersen, MDiv ’04 - Lead Organizer, Calg...

Monica Sanford, Assistant Dean for Multireligious Ministry and Lecturer in Ministry Studies at HDS, talks about the evolution and importance of multireligious ministry and setting students up for success. Faculty Focus is a special podcast series from Harvard Divinity School, where we speak with HDS professors about their courses and research interests. Full episode transcript: https://hds.harvard...

The 1619 Project spawned an unprecedented national conversation in and outside the classroom on slavery’s ongoing afterlives in American society. The enthusiastic response to the project was not universal. A few historians noted in a letter to the Times that the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding of ideology.” The challenge raised here underscores central ethical concern...

In this event, Dr. Amy Hale and Dr. Christa Shusko present their book Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses, edited by Amy Hale. They discuss some of the latest and pressing topics in the study of (Western) Esotericism and talk about some of the opportunities and challenges of inhabiting this field of study as women and scholars. This conversation is part of...

As a state-of-the-art “wearable technology” of the time, talismans provided protection, perquisites, and prescriptions for the devotees of premodern Korean Buddhism. Among a varied array of talismans discovered from tombs, stupas, and spell books, this talk focuses on a collage of the twenty-four Buddhist talismans to illustrate how they provided a vocabulary and structure to address believers’ so...

Randy Chung Gonzales was leading an ordinary life in his hometown of Lamas, Peru, when his employer, anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, asked him to accompany her to an ayahuasca ceremony led by a local shaman. There, to everyone’s great surprise, Randy was initiated by discarnate entities, who instructed him and gave him healing powers. In this unique book, Randy tells his story to Frédéri...

This lecture, given by Visiting Lecturer on Islam and Women's Studies in Religion Program 2022-23 Research Associate Rahina Muazu, discusses awra (an Arabic word that is translated as nakedness, genital organs, private parts, genitalia, blemish, defects, etc.) and the female voice in Islamic law. This event took place on October 27, 2022 Learn more: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/ Full transcript: h...

Harvard Divinity School was founded nearly forty years after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, yet many of our school’s founders and early students were intimately familiar with both enslavement and the slave trade. Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery highlights the case of our first dean, John Gorham Palfrey, who was abandoned as a child in Boston when his father moved to Louisiana to establi...

It has long been a historical truism that, in the early modern West, pseudoscientific racial hierarchies replaced religious hierarchies as the dominant framework for understanding human difference and justifying oppressive colonialist practices, including slavery. Recent research has challenged this axiom to suggest how important religious conceptions of difference remained to the racist imaginati...

As part of Harvard Divinity School's annual William James Lectures on Religious Experience, Professor John Kaag presented "William James and the Sick Soul." This lecture discussed William James's 1895 lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter-century earlier. This lecture sho...

This conversation was the first of the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speaker was Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at HDS. This event took place on January 30, 2023 Learn more: https://hds.harvard.edu/ Full transcript: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/2/2/video-enslavement-formation-earliest-christianity

This fall, Harvard Divinity School celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative (BMI). In honor of this anniversary, the community engaged in discussions of Buddhist ministry in the context of HDS. In this audio, Phillip Henderson, the CEO of the Ho Family Foundation, discusses the importance of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative at HDS. This event took place on October 27, 20...

Peripheries is a non-profit literary and arts journal established in 2017 that publishes artistic work that is, broadly understood, "peripheral"; work that explores the interstices between discourses, traditions, languages, forms, and genres. In this spirit, along with publishing poetry, visual art, and short stories, our scope is expansive, including translations, interviews, creative nonfiction,...

As the nights grow longer and the days shorter, share in a virtual celebration of Seasons of Light, Harvard Divinity School's beloved annual multireligious service honoring the interplay of holy darkness and light in the world’s religious traditions. Performances include choral and instrumental music, readings by HDS students, the ritual kindling of many flames, and communal prayers and songs. Exp...

As the nights grow longer and the days shorter, share in a virtual celebration of Seasons of Light, Harvard Divinity School's beloved annual multireligious service honoring the interplay of holy darkness and light in the world’s religious traditions. Performances include choral and instrumental music, readings by HDS students, the ritual kindling of many flames, and communal prayers and songs. Exp...