HDS Dean's Report 2020

We cannot f lourish in our humanity unless we acknowledge the full humanity of others.

DEAN’S REPORT 2020

FROM DEAN HEMPTON

Hope for Renewal I write at perhaps the most challenging moment of our lifetimes, as our society reels from global pandemic, economic collapse, and social unrest. We have all been affected. Many in the HDS community are on the front lines as activists, caregivers, and even policy makers. I want you to know that we at HDS are thinking of you. We are inspired by your efforts. We thank you for making a world of difference.

In recent months, I have often reflected on my time as an undergraduate at Queen’s University, Belfast, in the early 1970s, the first—and some of the worst—years of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. One day I struck up a conversation with a mentor of mine, a scholar of Irish history, about how terrible things were—the bombings, the assassinations, the constant outrage, grief, and fear. He looked at me a bit quizzically and ticked off a list of some of the great disasters of the twentieth century: the Battle of the Somme (in which Northern Irish forces suffered great losses); the flu pandemic of 1918; more or less the entirety of World War II. My mentor’s point was not to minimize the violence in Northern Ireland or even to say, “Things could be worse.” (Anyone who studies Irish history understands that things could always be worse.)

Rather, he meant to point out that we had become somewhat inured to catastrophe. We think we are the masters of our fates, that we are in control. But history shows that much of the time we are not in control at all. We are buffeted about by events and forces much larger than we are.

Far from encouraging a kind of fatalism, this perspective underscores the importance of doing all we can, wherever we can, to make a world of difference—to act out of hope, to build for renewal, and to do so with great humility and compassion as we walk through these difficult and uncertain times.

In that context, I am proud of the way that the HDS campus community responded to the formidable challenges of the past year.

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“Despite the hardships, we learned a great deal during the spring of 2020....These innovations in teaching and the creation and distribution of knowledge will be with us long after COVID-19 has receded.”

Teaching and Learning in a Global Pandemic With the coronavirus spreading rapidly throughout the country, HDS, like our sister Schools at Harvard, made the decision to shift to remote learning last March in order to safeguard the health of everyone in its community. The rationality of the decision did not make it any easier, however, for students who had to leave campus in the middle of a semester. Worst of all, they could not be together to mark one of the most important passages of their lives: graduation.

Faculty too were faced with great challenges. In the space of a week or two, most had to learn an entirely new way of teaching—one suitable to an online environment and that involved technologies that many had never used before. They had to alter, midstream, their curriculum and their criteria for evaluating student performance. And they and their students missed the joy of being together in person.

The School’s staff worked with faculty and students to make the rapid transition possible. They provided training for teachers grappling with new tools. They provided support for students to help them stay focused as the world went into pandemic lockdown and help them stay connected while living and working thousands of miles from campus. They recreated, online, vital aspects of the HDS experience, such as Noon Service and even graduation ceremonies. Many juggled these demands while minding children for whom there was no day care or while caring for—and, sadly, sometimes grieving—a loved one lost to COVID-19.

Despite the hardships, we learned a great deal during the spring of 2020. We used technology to enrich our classes as never before, bringing scholars and practitioners into the virtual classroom in ways that would have been impossible to do on campus. We hosted events—such as my conversation with Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria—that reached new and far-flung audiences. These innovations in teaching and the creation and distribution of knowledge will be with us long after COVID-19 has receded.

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Construction at Swartz Hall on the new multiuse space and proposed café in early 2020.

We Will Return And we will return to campus. While the move to remote teaching and learning has, overall, been a positive experience, it has also underscored the importance of our physical environment to all that we do.

That is why I am so delighted that, after a hiatus of several months during the lockdown, the renewal of Swartz Hall has resumed and continues apace. One of the ways that HDS makes a world of difference is by being a model of a multireligious community that brings together people from many different traditions in an atmosphere of authenticity and mutual respect. Swartz Hall will allow us to augment those efforts by integrating into our teaching and learning spaces the kinds of technologies that have become the fabric of our pedagogy during the lockdown. At the same time, it will provide new spaces where students can acquire the irreplaceable experience of living and working side by side.

As HDS scholars like Mayra Rivera and Mark Jordan emphasize, our existence is embodied. That reality lies at the center not only of the educational experience at HDS but of the experience of being human.

Confronting the Evil of Racism And yet, as last summer’s social unrest demonstrates, our society still does not acknowledge the full humanity of all its members. As I write this, the country is grappling once more with the 400-year-old problem of racism—both overt and systemic. Although the current conversation may have been inspired by the killing of George Floyd, an African American man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis last spring, the pervasiveness of systemic racism is evident in the way that Black and Brown communities are disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also evident in longstanding disparities in access to health care, housing, education, and a dozen other critical concerns. As I wrote to the HDS community last spring: At moments like this, when the scar tissues of our past sins and present ugliness burst open into full view, what we need most are not more ritual words of condemnation, but a steely, unquenchable resolve to work together for deep structural change that is long, long overdue.

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“We must continue to build connections with our partners at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, Business School, Kennedy School, and other faculties as part of the University’s ‘One Harvard’ efforts.”

Progress in Uncertain Times As part of engaging with the significance of the global pandemic and a nation-wide reckoning on racial justice, Harvard Divinity School must continue to advance its mission of educating scholars and leaders who make a world of difference. We must continue to build connections with our partners at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, Business School, Kennedy School, and other faculties as part of the University’s ‘One Harvard’ efforts. We must continue to extend our connections to sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, South America, and the other regions expected to become the centers of religious life in the decades to come. Above all, HDS must ensure that the Faculty of Divinity still is preeminent in the study of global religion.

Despite the challenges of the year just past, I am pleased to say that the School made progress in each of these areas.

HDS added some extraordinary scholars and practitioners to its faculty, including visiting professor Judith Lieu, one of the world’s great experts on the New Testament and early Christianity; visiting faculty member Rev. Cornell William Brooks, the former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and an authority on the role of religion in the U.S. civil rights movement; and practitioner in residence John Brown, a longtime business executive, the former deputy director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and a thought leader on business ethics and religion. Rev. Brooks, who also sits on the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School, 4 | 2020 DEAN’S REPORT

and many other faculty are continuing and deepening HDS collaboration with partners across the University.

The School also announced the appointment of Teren Sevea (effective July 1, 2020) and Mohsen Goudarzi (effective July 1, 2021), two dynamic scholars of Islam. Professor Sevea, profiled in this report, will advance HDS’s knowledge of South Asian Islam. Professor Goudarzi, an outstanding teacher, will greatly increase the depth and breadth of its expertise in Qur’anic studies.

A New Center of Excellence Perhaps the most exciting area of progress, however, is the launch of Religion and Public Life (RPL), a new School-wide initiative that addresses the need among leaders and citizens for deep understanding of the role that religion plays both in escalating intolerance, inequality, and extremism and in contributing to human flourishing.

In recent years, HDS has seen a significant rise in the number of programs, seminars, conferences, and activities initiated by faculty that can be broadly characterized under the umbrella of promoting the public understanding of religion.

These include the Religious Literacy Project; the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, in cooperation with the Kennedy School; Religion and the Practice of Peace; Science, Religion, and Culture; and the School’s Executive Education program, Making Change, to name just a handful. Additionally, HDS regularly hosts seminars and conferences that focus on a wide range of issues such as Christianity, race, and mass

incarceration that are matters of urgent concern to the wider public. My own efforts to assemble the HDS Global Task Force similarly reflect our growing need to engage our mission even more broadly in the wider world.

Religion and Public Life integrates many of these current programs and builds new bridges from the academy to a wide range of stakeholders, drawing on the vast resources of Harvard University— including the curricula of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the rest of Harvard’s graduate schools—to promote understanding of all the world’s major religious traditions. Through critical scholarship, the program explores the beliefs, stories, ethics, and practices associated with the world’s religious traditions; provides the conceptual tools that enable leaders to place them in social, political, and historical context; and illuminates religion’s immense potential to promote—and, too often, to thwart—the thriving of humanity and of creation.

Religion and Public Life creates a new center of excellence at HDS, leveraging the School’s traditional leadership in both ministry education and the academic study of religion, to prepare religiously literate, ethical leaders in all fields who work for a just world at peace. With this aspiration in mind, HDS will this year invite an initial cohort of prospective students to apply to its first new degree program in 50 years: the master of religion and public life (MRPL). Along with the School’s expanding programs in executive and continuing education, the MRPL will enable HDS to engage leaders in a wide range of professions— law, journalism, business, entertainment, and humanitarian aid work, to name only a few—providing them with religious knowledge that makes more effective their efforts to address the world’s most urgent challenges. Moreover, the new certificate in religion and public life will enable MDiv and MTS students to make the same kind of real-world connections with their own course of study at HDS.

Scholarship and Service Even as we look to the creation of new centers of excellence at HDS, we also acknowledge the ongoing excellence of longstanding programs. The Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), under the leadership of Charles Stang, Professor of Early Christian Thought, continues to be a model of interreligious residential community and dialogue. Last year, the CSWR welcomed its first-ever cohort of Hindu monastics, which included Swami Sarvapriyananda, a monk of over 25 years in the Ramakrishna Order and the current minister and spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of New York. The program, 2020 DEAN’S REPORT | 5

which featured several public events with the monks, immeasurably strengthened the Hindu presence on campus. HDS looks forward to the arrival of the next cohort in academic year 2021–22.

Last year, the Women’s Studies in Religion Program brought another group of outstanding scholars to teach and conduct research at HDS. These included new scholars like Kerry Sonia, who explored the role of domestic life in the evolution of Judaism, and established experts like Jyoti Puri, who examined the way that death rituals helped early South Asian immigrants to North America find community with one another.

Finally, the School’s ministry studies program—including the pioneering Buddhist Ministry Initiative—continues to produce graduates whose commitment to service has never been more inspiring. I have often been moved, over the past year, to hear the stories of HDS alumni whose work as health-care chaplains put them on the front lines of the effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Formed in the School’s multireligious environment, these leaders provide care and comfort to the sick and suffering—and their families—regardless of religious tradition or belief. Driven by a deep experience of something greater than themselves, they often put their own health and wellness at risk to be a companion to others, particularly in the final hours of life. As Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Interfaith Chaplain Jo Murphy, MDiv ’15, told The New York Times last summer, “I try to fight the aloneness with everything I’ve got.”

Together, We Create Something New That the School has been able to make progress on its priorities in a time of such tumult is a tribute to the support HDS receives from its alumni, donors, and friends. Last year, donors provided over $900,000 in current-use funds for student financial aid. They provided funding for new initiatives like the Hindu monastics in residence. And they provided lifeblood support for the visionary program Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.

This support will be even more important in the years ahead. Swartz Hall, the importance of which has been underscored by our renewed appreciation of the value of physical spaces and face-toface connections, requires added resources for its transformation into a campus center worthy of a twenty-first-century multireligious academic community. As the pandemic lingers and the prospect of a rapid economic recovery decreases, the need for student support will only increase. And, as the most endowment-dependent School at Harvard, HDS badly needs new unrestricted funds both to launch new initiatives like RPL and to cope with the profound economic uncertainties that will likely linger for some time after the COVID-19 outbreak recedes.

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With you as our partners, we will successfully meet these challenges. We will continue to reshape the HDS curriculum and the student body, making it ever more diverse and inclusive. We will transform our campus with twenty-first-century teaching, research, and meeting spaces worthy of these students. We will advance religious knowledge and bring it to whole new audiences, both on and off campus, through the use of new technologies. And with your support, we will bring to HDS even more talented and devoted students from countries other than the United States, regardless of their financial circumstances, with an increasingly robust aid program.

These are fearsome times. But as I learned, coming of age in Northern Ireland, times of great change always are. As the poet Seamus Heaney wrote in The Cure at Troy: If there’s fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry Of new life at its term.

Let us walk together through the fire and the storm, to create something new.

Thank you for all you do for Harvard Divinity School.

David N. Hempton Dean of the Faculty of Divinity Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity

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Year in Review

HIGHLIGHTS 2019–20 AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

PAULSELL NAMED MEMORIAL CHURCH INTERIM MINISTER THE UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCES THAT STEPHANIE PAULSELL, THE SUSAN SHALLCROSS SWARTZ PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIAN STUDIES, WILL SERVE AS PUSEY MINISTER AT HARVARD’S MEMORIAL CHURCH DURING THE SEARCH FOR A PERMANENT REPLACEMENT FOR THE REV. JONATHAN WALTON.

HINDU MONASTICS COME TO HDS THREE HINDU MONASTICS BEGIN THEIR YEAR-LONG RESIDENCE AT HDS, THE FIRST TO PARTICIPATE IN A NEW PROGRAM MADE POSSIBLE BY A GIFT FROM VIBHU AND AJIT NAGRAL DESIGNED TO STRENGTHEN THE HINDU PRESENCE ON THE SCHOOL’S CAMPUS.

HDS REMEMBERS PROFESSOR ANNE E. MONIUS IN A MEMORIAL SERVICE ATTENDED BY FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND FRIENDS, HDS REMEMBERS PROFESSOR ANNE E. MONIUS, A BELOVED SCHOLAR AND TEACHER OF SOUTH ASIAN RELIGIONS WHO PASSED AWAY ON AUGUST 3, 2019.

SEPTEMBER

GROUNDBREAKING FOR SWARTZ HALL IN AN INTIMATE CEREMONY, DONORS JIM AND SUSAN SHALLCROSS SWARTZ AND HARVARD PRESIDENT LARRY BACOW BREAK GROUND ON SWARTZ HALL, THE LARGEST CAMPUS RENEWAL PROJECT AT HDS IN NEARLY A CENTURY.

DIANE MOORE LEADS EFFORT ON NEW COLLEGE RELIGIOUS LITERACY GUIDELINES THE PRODUCT OF A MULTIYEAR EFFORT CO-LED BY DIANE L. MOORE (DIRECTOR OF RELIGION AND PUBLIC LIFE AT HDS), THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION’S NEW GUIDELINES PROPOSE WHAT GRADUATES OF TWO- AND FOUR-YEAR UNDERGRADUATE INSTITUTIONS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD’S RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS. NOVEMBER

TONI MORRISON REMEMBERED AT THE SCHOOL’S 2019 CONVOCATION, DAVÍD CARRASCO, NEIL L. RUDENSTINE PROFESSOR FOR THE STUDY OF LATIN AMERICA, DELIVERS THE CONVOCATION ADDRESS “TONI MORRISON STORIES: GOODNESS AND MERCY AND MEXICO” AS HDS PAYS HOMAGE TO THE LATE WRITER AND THE BEAUTY, WISDOM, AND PROPHETIC VOICE OF HER WRITING.

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AFRICA, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE MUSLIM WORLDS IN A CONFERENCE ORGANIZED BY THE ALWALEED PROFESSORSHIP OF CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC RELIGION AND SOCIETY AT HDS AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT IN AFRICA (ISITA) AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, SCHOLARS CONVENE ON CAMPUS TO EXPLORE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AFRICAN AND MUSLIM AT THE INTERSECTION OF LOCAL, REGIONAL, AND GLOBAL ENCOUNTER.

HDS AT AAR MORE THAN A DOZEN HDS FACULTY MEMBERS PRESENT THEIR RESEARCH DURING THE 2019 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION AND SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE ANNUAL MEETINGS IN SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA.

Year in Review

FEBRUARY

MARCH

BLACK WOMXN AT THE CENTER IS THEME OF BLACK RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND CULTURE CONFERENCE THE FOURTH ANNUAL BLACK RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND CULTURE CONFERENCE AT HDS HIGHLIGHTS BLACK WOMXN DOING PRAXIS-DRIVEN WORK IN ACADEMIA, MINISTRY, AND THE ARTS, AND ACKNOWLEDGES SELF-IDENTIFIED WOMANISTS OR BLACK FEMINISTS WHOSE WORK FOCUSES ON TRADITIONALLY MARGINALIZED GROUPS.

HDS ASSEMBLES SPIRITUAL RESOURCES FOR THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ENCOURAGING ALL IN THE HDS COMMUNITY TO USE A “TIME OF EXTRAORDINARY DISRUPTION AND ANXIETY” AS “AN OPPORTUNITY TO DEEPEN OUR SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL PRACTICES,” THE OFFICE OF THE CHAPLAIN AND RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL LIFE ASSEMBLES A WIDE RANGE OF SPIRITUAL RESOURCES FOR THOSE COPING WITH THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

MARCH APRIL

HDS LAUNCHES NEW PROGRAM FOR THE EVOLUTION OF SPIRITUALITY HDS ANNOUNCES THE PROGRAM FOR THE EVOLUTION OF SPIRITUALITY, WHICH WILL SUPPORT THE SCHOLARLY STUDY OF EMERGING SPIRITUAL MOVEMENTS, MARGINALIZED SPIRITUALITIES, AND THE INNOVATIVE EDGES OF ESTABLISHED RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS.

WSRP ANNOUNCES NEW RESEARCH ASSOCIATES HDS’S WOMEN’S STUDIES IN RELIGION PROGRAM ANNOUNCES THEIR 2020–21 RESEARCH ASSOCIATES, WHOSE INTERESTS RANGE FROM ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CONCEPTIONS OF THE AFTERLIFE TO WOMAN WARRIORS OF THE MAI-MAI REBEL MOVEMENT IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO.

MAY

SCHOOL APPOINTS NEW ISLAMIC STUDIES FACULTY HDS NAMES MOHSEN GOUDARZI AND TEREN SEVEA EACH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN ISLAMIC STUDIES. SEVEA, A SCHOLAR OF ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA, WILL BEGIN HIS APPOINTMENT ON JULY 1, 2020. THE APPOINTMENT OF GOUDARZI, WHO STUDIES THE INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF ISLAM’S EMERGENCE, IS EFFECTIVE JULY 1, 2021.

VIRTUAL PROGRAMS HONOR THE CLASS OF 2020 WITH REMARKS FROM DEAN DAVID N. HEMPTON, A READING OF GRADUATES’ NAMES, AND A ROUSING ADDRESS FROM STUDENT SPEAKER ASHLEY LIPSCOMB, THE HDS CLASS OF 2020 MARKS THE COMPLETION OF THEIR STUDIES AT HDS WITH A VIRTUAL DIPLOMA AWARDING CEREMONY.

MAY

UNIVERSITY TRANSITIONS TO ONLINE COURSES HARVARD PRESIDENT LARRY BACOW ANNOUNCES THAT TO PROMOTE THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY AMID THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, ALL COURSES WILL TRANSITION ONLINE AND STUDENTS WILL NOT RETURN TO CAMPUS AFTER SPRING BREAK. UNIVERSITY FACULTY AND STAFF BEGIN TEACHING AND WORKING REMOTELY.

DEAN DAVID HEMPTON ELECTED TO ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY DEAN DAVID HEMPTON IS NAMED AN HONORARY MEMBER OF THE ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY. THE HIGHEST ACADEMIC DISTINCTION IN IRELAND, THE HONOR RECOGNIZES ACADEMICS WHO HAVE MADE A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL CONTRIBUTION TO THEIR DISCIPLINES, BUT WHO ARE NOT NORMALLY RESIDENT IN IRELAND.

JUNE BARTHOLOMEW NAMED ASSOCIATE DEAN OF DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND BELONGING HDS ANNOUNCES THAT MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW, MDIV ’15, WILL JOIN THE SCHOOL ON JULY 2, 2020, AS NEW ASSOCIATE DEAN OF DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND BELONGING. A CHRIST-CENTERED MINISTER, ATTORNEY, MEDIATOR, AND RACIAL JUSTICE AND HEALING PRACTITIONER, BARTHOLOMEW USES A MULTIDISCIPLINARY AND MULTIFAITH APPROACH TO EQUIP PEOPLE FOR THE WORK OF ERADICATING RACISM.

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Year in Review

PETER J. GOMES, STB ’68 DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI HONOREES Chosen each year by the HDS Alumni/Alumnae Council (AAC), the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honorees represent the wide range of human activity in which HDS graduates are engaged.

This year, the council recognized alumni scholars, religious leaders, and activists who cross religious, professional, and cultural divides to advance knowledge and serve communities.

(Note: Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the council plans to recognize the 2020 Gomes cohort in-person when we are able to gather again.)

Ephraim Isaac, BD ’63, PhD ’69 A scholar and peacemaker whose career spans nearly three generations, Isaac is the director of the Center for Semitic Studies in Princeton, NJ, and the chairman of the board of the Peace and Development Center of Addis Ababa.

Milia Islam, MTS ’04 A 2011 NAACP Woman of the Year and a former advisor to the Council on World Religions and Spiritualities, Milia Islam is a lifelong interfaith activist who now heads the South Coast Interfaith Council in Long Beach, CA.

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Karen Meeker, MDiv ’94 A decorated colonel and chaplain in the United States Army, Karen Meeker recently directed Recruiting and Endorser Relations at the Army's Office of the Chief of Chaplains in Washington, D.C. As of this summer, she was reassigned as the Eighth Army command chaplain in the Republic of Korea.

Abel Rodriguez, MTS ’04 Both a practicing immigration lawyer and an academic, Abel Rodriguez is director of the Center on Immigration and assistant professor of religion, law, and social justice at Cabrini University in Philadelphia, PA.

NON-ALUMNA/US HONOREE Nitin Nohria Dean of Harvard Business School and George F. Baker Professor of Administration Nitin Nohria leads an organization dedicated to educating leaders who make a difference in the world. His passion for religious literacy, his understanding of its importance for leaders in all fields, and his commitment to ethical leadership has made him one of Harvard Divinity School’s great friends.

Year in Review

FACULTY APPOINTMENTS

FACULTY AWARDS

Cornell William Brooks, Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership Rev. Cornell William Brooks is the former president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A civil rights attorney, ordained minister, and Harvard Kennedy School professor, Brooks was a visiting scholar at HDS during the 2018–19 academic year.

Catherine Brekus, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America and Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, was named HDS Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2019.

Brooks holds a JD from Yale Law School, and a master of divinity degree from Boston University’s School of Theology, where he was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar. He is a fourth-generation ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Prior to leading the NAACP, Brooks was president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.

At Harvard Kennedy School, Brooks is Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice, and is also director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at HKS’s Center for Public Leadership. His courses include “Creating Justice in Real Time: Vision, Strategies, and Campaigns,” and “Morals, Money, and Movements: Criminal Justice Reform as a Case Study.”

Judith Lieu, Frothingham Visiting Professor in New Testament and Early Christianity Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity Emerita at the University of Cambridge, Judith Lieu is a biblical scholar, theologian, and historian of religion whose current research centers on letters in early Christianity, exploring their changing function through their reception and embedding in new contexts, as well as the production of letter-like writings.

Lieu holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of Birmingham.

She previously taught at The Queen’s College, Birmingham, King’s College London, and Macquarie University, Sydney. She is also a fellow of Robinson College at the University of Cambridge. Lieu continues to work on aspects of the formation of a Christian identity and has a particular interest in heresiology. She is on the editorial board of a number of journals and series and was previously editor of New Testament Studies. Some of her most recent books are: Marcion and the Making of a Heretic (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and I, II, & III John: A Commentary (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008).

In 2014, Lieu was elected a fellow of the British Academy. She was also named an international honorary member of the 2019 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Emily Click, Assistant Dean for Ministry Studies and Field Education and Lecturer on Ministry, was awarded an Orein Arts residency in June 2019.

Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology, was elected vice president of the Catholic Theological Society of America on June 7, 2019, and will serve as president in 2021. He also received an honorary degree from Regis College, University of Toronto, in 2019.

Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Charles Chauncey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity, were awarded honorary doctorates by the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University.

Cheryl Giles, Francis Greenwood Peabody Senior Lecturer on Pastoral Care and Counseling, was awarded a research fellowship by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.

Mark Jordan, Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on October 12, 2019.

Ousmane Kane, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society, was awarded the Golden Peanut (Cauris d’or) by the Senegalese Chamber of Commerce, Agriculture and Industry for academic excellence on August 3, 2019.

Kevin Madigan, Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History, was named among “Favorite Professors, Class of 2020, Harvard College.”

Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, received the Distinguished Scholar Award at the annual meeting of the Communal Studies Association in October 2019. In March 2020, he received the Elizabeth Boggs Leadership Award from the Camphill Foundation.

Diane Moore, Director, Religion and Public Life, Lecturer in Religion, Conflict, and Peace, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, received an award from the Harvard Extension School for Distinguished Teaching Performance, Fall 2019.

Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, was elected vice president of the American Academy of Religion.

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Year in Review

FACULTY BOOKS 2019–20

HAVING THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST: SPIRIT POSSESSION AND EXORCISM IN THE EARLY CHRIST GROUPS Giovanni Bazzana, Professor of New Testament The earliest Christian writings are filled with stories of possession and exorcism, which were crucial for the activity of the historical Jesus and for the practice of the earliest groups of his followers. This innovative book approaches the study of possession from a different methodological angle by using a comparative lens that includes contemporary ethnographies of possession cross-culturally.

GOODNESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION Davíd Carrasco (co-editor), Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, Stephanie Paulsell (co-editor), Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies and Interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, and Mara Willard, MDiv ’04, PhD ’11, (co-editor) What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination?

Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form.

WITH THIS ROOT ABOUT MY PERSON: CHARLES H. LONG AND NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION Davíd Carrasco (co-editor), Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America The volume features 26 essays by a diverse group of students and scholars of Long. Revitalizing an interpretive framework rooted in the Chicago tradition, the essays in this volume vigorously debate the nature of religions in the Americas.

WESTERN JESUIT SCHOLARS IN INDIA: TRACING THEIR PATHS, REASSESSING THEIR GOALS Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology This book collects 15 essays and book sections written over 30 years about the Jesuits in India. The volume looks back into this long missionary history, but asks as well, how ought interreligious learning take place in the twenty-first century?

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READING THE HINDU AND CHRISTIAN CLASSICS: WHY AND HOW DEEP LEARNING STILL MATTERS Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology We live in an era of unprecedented growth in knowledge. Never before has there been so great an availability of and access to information in both print and online. Yet as opportunities to educate ourselves have greatly increased, our time for reading has significantly diminished.

And when we do read, we rarely have the patience to read in the slow, sustained fashion that great books require if we are to be truly transformed by them.

BLACK AND BUDDHIST: WHAT BUDDHISM CAN TEACH US ABOUT RACE, RESILIENCE, TRANSFORMATION, AND FREEDOM Cheryl A. Giles, MDiv ’79 (co-editor), Francis Greenwood Peabody Senior Lecturer on Pastoral Care and Counseling What does it mean to be Black and Buddhist? In this powerful collection of writings, African American teachers from all the major Buddhist traditions tell their stories of how race and Buddhist practice have intersected in their lives.

CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY THINKING Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions Drawing on such critical thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Jaspers, whose work was profoundly influenced by the catastrophes that overwhelmed the world in the middle of the last century, Jackson explores the transformative and redemptive power of marginalized voices in the contemporary conversation of humankind.

THE PAPER NAUTILUS Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions The Paper Nautilus is about loss—the forms it takes, how we go on living in the face of it, and the mysterious ways that new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness. This book provides a vivid image of this interplay of death and rebirth since, for new life to begin, the angelically beautiful but fragile shell that sustained a former life must be shattered.

Year in Review

LAW AND SOCIETY IN ISLAM Baber Johansen (co-author), Research Professor of Islamic Studies This book covers significant themes explaining the practice of Islamic law. The first essay treats taqiyyah (literally, “caution”), the concealment of one’s religion when to reveal it would incur danger, which is based on a Qur’anic passage. The second essay inquires into norms for physical and sexual contacts between individuals, even husbands and wives, defining rights to look, to touch, and even to mutilate. The third essay evaluates the Ottoman records of local fines.

JAMES AND ROYCE RECONSIDERED: REFLECTIONS ON THE CENTENARY OF PRAGMATISM David C. Lamberth (editor), Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Cornel West (co-contributor), Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy Noteworthy both for the presence of most leading scholars in the field and for its attention to the European influence of these thinkers and the revival of interest in America and Europe, this volume offers a unique view of the state of the discussion on James and Royce across several disciplines.

RELIGION AND GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE, IMMIGRATION, AND HUMAN RIGHTS Jacob Olupona (co-editor), Professor of African Religious Traditions This book builds on work that examines the interactions between immigration and gender-based violence, to explore how both the justification and condemnation of violence in the name of religion further complicates our societal relationships.

RELIGION AROUND VIRGINIA WOOLF Stephanie Paulsell, Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies and Interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church Virginia Woolf was not a religious person in any traditional sense, yet she lived and worked in an environment rich with religious thought, imagination, and debate. In this book, Paulsell considers how the religious milieu that Woolf inhabited shaped her writing in unexpected and innovative ways.

A MAGIC STILL DWELLS: COMPARATIVE RELIGION IN THE POSTMODERN AGE Kimberley C. Patton (co-editor), Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion The first thorough assessment of the field of comparative religion in 40 years, this groundbreaking volume surmounts the seemingly intractable division between postmodern scholars who reject the comparative endeavor and those who affirm it.

LAW AND LAWLESSNESS IN EARLY JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY: WISSENSCHAFTLICHE UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZUM NEUEN TESTAMENT Charles Stang (co-editor), Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions According to a persistent popular stereotype, early Judaism is seen as a “legalistic” religious tradition, in contrast to early Christianity, which seeks to obviate and so to supersede, annul, or abrogate Jewish law. The essays in this volume aim to bring to the fore the legalistic and antinomian dimensions in both traditions, with a variety of contributions that examine the formative centuries of these two great religions and their legal traditions.

OTHER NOTES: CREATION AND THE PERSISTENCE OF EVIL Jon Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies A new Korean translation of Levenson’s 1994 book brings to an even wider audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Levenson defines God’s authorship of the world as a consequence of his victory in his struggle with evil.

Janet Gyatso wrote the foreword to the book DHARMA MATTERS: WOMEN, RACE, AND TANTRA Charles Hallisey wrote the afterword to the book WISDOM AS A WAY OF LIFE: THERAVADA BUDDHISM REIMAGINED Dan McKanan has a new book CAMPHILL AND THE FUTURE: SPIRITUALITY AND DISABILITY IN AN EVOLVING COMMUNAL MOVEMENT 2020 DEAN’S REPORT | 13

Year in Review

THE FACULTY OF DIVINITY LAWRENCE S. BACOW, President DAVID N. HEMPTON, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, and John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity GIOVANNI BAZZANA , Professor of New

Testament

ANN D. BRAUDE, Senior Lecturer on

American Religious History and Director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program CATHERINE BREKUS , Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America DAVÍD CARRASCO, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America (HDS and FAS) EMILY CLICK , Assistant Dean for Ministry Studies and Field Education and Lecturer on Ministry FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology

MARK D. JORDAN, Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity OUSMANE OUMAR KANE, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (FAS), and Counselor to Muslim Students KAREN L. KING , Hollis Professor of Divinity DAVID C. LAMBERTH, Professor of Philosophy

and Theology

JON D. LEVENSON, Albert A. List Professor

CHARLES MARSHALL STANG , Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions D. ANDREW TEETER , Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament TODNE THOMAS , Assistant Professor of African American Religions and Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study) CORNEL R. WEST, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy (HDS and FAS)

of Jewish Studies

KEVIN J. MADIGAN, Winn Professor of

Ecclesiastical History

DAN MCKANAN, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity DIANE L. MOORE, Director, Religion and Public Life, Lecturer in Religion, Conflict, and Peace, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions

MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY EMERITI LEILA AHMED, Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity JOHN BRAISTED CARMAN, Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Religion, Emeritus HARVEY GALLAGHER COX , Hollis Professor

of Divinity, Emeritus

JACOB K. OLUPONA , Professor of African

ARTHUR JAMES DYCK , Professor of Ethics, Emeritus, and Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics, Emeritus (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

FRANCIS SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA , Charles

KIMBERLEY C. PATTON, Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion

WILLIAM A. GRAHAM, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, and Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Emeritus (FAS)

CHERYL A. GILES , Francis Greenwood

STEPHANIE PAULSELL , Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies

DAVID D. HALL , Bartlett Professor of New England Church History, Emeritus

MATTHEW L. POTTS , Associate Professor

PAUL D. HANSON, Florence Corliss Lamont Professor of Divinity, Emeritus

MAYRA RIVERA , Andrew W. Mellon Professor

Islamic Studies

DUDLEY C. ROSE, Associate Dean for Ministry

PETER MACHINIST, Hancock Research Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages (FAS)

DIANA L. ECK , Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society (FAS)

Chauncey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies

Peabody Senior Lecturer on Pastoral Care and Counseling JANET GYATSO, Hershey Professor of

Buddhist Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs CHARLES HALLISEY, Yehan Numata Senior

Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures

DAVID F. HOLLAND, John A. Bartlett Professor

of New England Church History

AMY HOLLYWOOD, Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies MICHAEL D. JACKSON, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions

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Religious Traditions, with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies (FAS)

of Religion and Literature and of Ministry Studies of Religion and Latinx Studies

Studies and Lecturer on Ministry

MICHELLE C. SANCHEZ , Associate Professor

BABER JOHANSEN, Research Professor of

RALPH BENAJAH POTTER, JR., Professor

of Theology

of Social Ethics, Emeritus

ELISABETH SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA , Krister

PRESTON NOAH WILLIAMS , Houghton Professor of Theology and Contemporary Change, Emeritus

Stendahl Professor of Divinity

TEREN SEVEA , Assistant Professor of Islamic

Studies

ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION

“Global peace and human flourishing depend on the education of a new generation of religiously literate, ethical leaders.”

DEAN DAVID N. HEMPTON

2020 DEAN’S REPORT | 15

ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION

APOCALYPSE

NOW

Bazzana uncovers the truth about the book of Revelation in early Christianity—and today

BY PAUL MASSARI

Coronavirus. Unemployment. Social unrest. People often describe the times we’re living in as “apocalyptic,” but Giovanni Bazzana wouldn’t necessarily agree.

“Today ‘apocalypse’ is associated exclusively with catastrophe,” he says.

“That comes from its association with the end of the world and the book of Revelation in the Bible, which has a lot of destructive imagery and motifs.

But as the use of these motifs has become more common, the word has lost a lot of its original meaning.”

Bazzana would know. As Harvard Divinity School’s Professor of New Testament, he teaches about early Christian apocalyptic literature and connects its themes to contemporary culture. In so doing, he sheds light on the narratives that frame everything from global climate change, to the politics of white evangelical Christians, to Afro-futurism.

A RADICAL IDEA As Bazzana teaches undergraduate students in his course “Stories from the End of the World” for the Harvard College Program in General Education, the word “apocalypse” comes from the ancient Greek “apokálupsis,” which means, literally, “revelation” or “uncovering.” He says that the emphasis on catastrophe so closely associated with the term obscures more interesting— and more subversive—meanings.

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ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION

“The word is associated with the end of the world but, just as important, the end of a particular world system,” he says.

“It’s not just a kind of accident that happens and creates pain or destruction. It brings to an end a world order. It’s a very radical idea.”

Written under the pressure of persecution, the Apocalypse of John—better known as the book of Revelation—envisioned an end to a very specific world order: the Roman Empire. For this reason, it was inconsistently included among the canonical books of the New Testament in late antiquity.

“It was a dangerous book for the Constantinian project,” Bazzana says, referring to the fourth-century Roman emperor.

“Constantine says, ‘I’m the emperor. I’ve become a Christian.

Now the empire itself will become Christian.’ But Revelation sees the empire as inherently evil. There’s no way it can be saved. The book describes its complete destruction.”

Moreover, there was more than one ‘apocalypse’ for Rome to worry about. Bazzana says that John’s apocalypse is best known because it was eventually admitted to the New Testament canon, but there was an entire genre of apocalyptic literature during Christianity’s early years.

“There was basically an ‘apocalypse’ for every major figure in early Christianity,” Bazzana explains. “So, one for Peter.

There’s one for Paul. One for the Virgin Mary, which is very important, very popular in antiquity and in the Middle Ages everywhere, mostly because it contains a very detailed description of the otherworld, which went on to influence famously Dante and others.”

THE ENEMY IS US The history of apocalyptic literature, the circumstances under which the books were written—which were included in the canon, which were rejected, and why—is important to understand, Bazzana says, because it still shapes the way the stories are deployed in politics and society. In the United States, for instance, apocalypticism is associated with conservative Christianity and its support for traditional norms and centers of power. In most of the rest of the world, though, the book of Revelation’s repudiation of the Roman Empire is associated with the struggle of marginalized people against oppression.

“Apocalypticism is very much something that progressives do [outside of the U.S.],” Bazzana says. “For instance, in Catholicism it’s tied into the influence of liberation theology in South America and Latin America. It also shapes the way that people in Europe see contemporary theological issues. As a student in Italy, my own interest in apocalyptic themes and literature was fueled by this commitment to liberation and progressive political ideals.”

Moreover, apocalyptic themes still permeate contemporary art and culture. Today, though, the antichrist precipitating the end of the world order isn’t “a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns”; it’s someone who looks very much like us.

“You get movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I always watch with the students in my class,” Bazzana says.

“The enemy looks like the same people we know and trust and respect, which is why it’s so hard to defeat. It’s unrecognizable.”

In recent years, the enemy has gotten even harder to identify.

The popular Left Behind series of novels present an updated version of the book of Revelation in which the antichrist is often someone from the United Nations or the European Union. In this context, the enemy is someone who exhibits behaviors associated with Christ, but for nefarious purposes.

“So, there’s war or famine and you’ve got to give aid to countries in distress,” Bazzana says. “These are all good things, but this is exactly where the antichrist works—through ostensibly Christian ideals and projects, but for evil ends: idolatry, total control, etc.”

In this context, apocalypticism reflects conservative Christians’ preoccupation with individual freedom and their deep suspicion of the state. It may also help explain their unwavering support for Donald Trump, whose character flaws seem familiar—the devil you know. But Bazzana says that apocalyptic themes and narratives crop up on the left as well, particularly around the coronavirus pandemic and global warming. And if the enemy for the right is someone who looks like us—or even like Christ—the enemy on the left actually is us.

“You find a lot of writing where the pandemic is a kind of natural response of nature against the human attack on Earth,” Bazzana explains. “People think about humankind as an infection that brings about the destruction of earth as an ecosystem. Nature takes the place of God as a superhuman force that intervenes—that destroys the infection before the infection destroys creation. People even talk about ‘the climate change apocalypse.’”

Yet even amid the associations with catastrophe and doom, apocalypticism can also offer hope for the future. Bazzana points to the theology of postmillennial Christians who believe that Christ’s “thousand-year reign” is now. The task of human beings is to come together and work to create heaven on earth by redressing social inequities and repairing the damage to nature.

“Postmillennials believe that, even though things look bleak, Christ works through humans to establish the kingdom,” Bazzana says. “It’s up to the faithful to work toward that goal. We can’t wait for external divine intervention. Peace, justice, and creation care are committed into the action and responsibility of humans.”

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ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION

A Student of Miracles Sevea studies the role of spirit mediums in the South and Southeast Asian Islamic world

BY PAUL MASSARI

Teren Sevea grew up in a “universe of miracle workers.” They were in shrines, in cemeteries, in homes, and coffee shops, and, of course, on the streets of Southeast Asian cities in which he spent most of his life.

He can’t remember the first time he saw a miracle worker, but he does recall vividly the powerful mix of emotions these figures conjured up in him.

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ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION “I am convinced that being a part of HDS will help me to grow both as a scholar of Islam and Southeast Asia and as a teacher and enable me to realize my full potential.”

“I remember being fascinated and terrified of miracle workers,” he says. “They were either praised for their supernatural powers, lineages and esoteric knowledge or dismissed as sorcerers, black magicians, and ‘conmen.’ I bracketed them off as a childhood curiosity for decades and didn’t recognize the need to take them seriously or to treat them as a subject of historical study.”

As Harvard Divinity School’s new Assistant Professor in Islamic Studies, however, Teren Sevea brings a scholarly eye to the connections between miracles, miracle workers, and material life. Coming to HDS from the University of Pennsylvania, Sevea specializes in the study of Islam and Islamic societies in Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean world. His first book, Miracles and Material Life, was about the ways that the production and extraction of natural resources— including the use of technology—were intertwined with the charismatic religious authority of the miracle workers of the Malay world.

“The book looks at the economic, environmental, and religious significance of Islamic miracle workers in the nineteenth and twentieth century,” Sevea says. “Many spent their professional lives clearing forests, producing rice, trapping elephants, mining for tin and gold, or manufacturing guns and bullets. I explore the ways that these aspects of material life were inextricably linked to the imagined nonmaterial realms of the Unseen.”

By the late nineteenth century, for instance, Malaya was the world’s most prolific producer of tin. Sevea points out that miracle workers and spirit mediums played a central role not only in the religious lives of those in the mining industry, but also in the work itself.

“Scholars might be tempted to [approach mining] simply as an economic activity,” he says. “Instead, what we often find is that the primary actors in the mines— the key agents—were Islamic spirit mediums. They were working with prospectors, going through layers of land, fossicking for tin. They were mediating the spirits of the soil and mobilizing them to mine with human miners. In addition to that, they were introducing a form of Shari’a or Islamic law into mines, facilitating a working of religion and capitalism.”

Sevea’s already at work on his next book, “Singapore Islam: The Prophet’s Port and Sufism across the Oceans.” He says

that Singapore has a distinctive religious history—one that’s often been ignored. But, although a relatively small port city, Singapore has played an outsized role in the development of Islam.

“The Sufis of Singapore were in the forefront of shaping late nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates and discussions about the nature of ‘genuine’ Islam, Sufism, and Islamism” Sevea says. “They came from the Malay peninsula as well as India, Yemen, Java, China, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. Many managed Sufi networks and movements that linked the devotional communities of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. Their influence was vast.”

Even as he continues his research, Sevea looks forward to teaching this year and will offer courses both to HDS students and to undergraduates at Harvard College. During the fall semester, for instance, Sevea will teach the introductory class “Islam, Bodies, Sexuality: Islam and Islamic Bodies in Southeast Asia.”

“The course focuses on the literature of Islamic bodies and sexuality,” he says. “We pay attention to how Islamic ‘adepts’ associated the health, growth, and regeneration of religion with the cultivation of bodies and sexual practices.

We’ll not only look at academic texts, but also manuals, mantras, travelogues, autobiographies, novels, pamphlets, and films produced in Southeast Asia between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries.”

If Sevea is excited about teaching, however, he’s just as excited about what he can learn from his students and his faculty colleagues.

“I am convinced that being a part of HDS will help me to grow both as a scholar of Islam and Southeast Asia and as a teacher and enable me to realize my full potential,” he says.

Sevea calls his appointment at HDS “an honor.” He’s excited to join one of the world’s premier institutions for the study of global religion and looks forward to the years ahead.

“It is a privilege to be part of HDS and contribute to the vibrant and interdisciplinary research being carried out by the members of the School—and their colleagues in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” he says. “I look forward to discussing my work with scholars who have informed my approaches to the study of religion throughout my career.”

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ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION

PUBLIC POLICY, PROPHETIC VISION Brooks teaches students to bring sacred and secular together in service of social justice

BY PAUL MASSARI

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ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION “My class is about being tough, strong, and clear in terms of policy and strategy, but also compassionate, persuasive, and inspiring. It joins hard public policy skills with a prophetic vision.”

When Cornell William Brooks saw the video of George Floyd, the African American man killed last May by a Minneapolis police officer, it immediately brought to mind another terrifying image: the photo of the disfigured corpse of Emmett Till, the 14-year old African American lynched in Mississippi in 1955.

Till’s mother had an open casket at her son’s funeral and allowed photographers in to show the world the violent reality of white supremacy in the American south. The two images are sixty-five years apart but both were shockingly violent, created moral intimacy with the viewer, and inspired change.

“That picture of Emmett Till on the eve of the Montgomery Bus Boycott animated and inspired a civil rights revolution—the second Reconstruction in American history,” Brooks says. “This video [of George Floyd’s killing], not unlike that photograph, appears to be animating and inspiring a civil rights movement. Out of this tragedy, I believe, can come some hope.”

Hope is something that Visiting Professor Cornell William Brooks tries to pass on to the students in the classes he teaches at Harvard Divinity School. A former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights attorney, and a fourth-generation minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Brooks teaches future activists not only to lead great organizations, but also to build and sustain great movements for social justice.

SECULAR SCHOLARSHIP, SACRED TEXTS In his course, “Morals, Money and Movements,” Brooks walks students through case studies focusing on voting rights, immigration reform, gun control, LGBTQ rights, and systemic racism, to teach students how to make the case for change—and how to build a movement that can achieve it.

“We look at the role that violence played, for instance, both in dispiriting and inspiring people to push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” he says. “We examine not only the middle-aged ‘mother of the civil rights movement’ Rosa Parks and the rebellious teenager Claudette Colvin refusing to give up their bus seats on the eve of the Montgomery Boycott, but also the role of a younger 31-year-old Rosa Parks investigating the gang rape of 24-year-old Recy Taylor by white racists and the Black woman who created the organizational foundation for the 1955 boycott against racial segregation by protesting against sexual violence—15 years before, in 1940.”

One of the great challenges of sustaining the push for social justice is how to maintain momentum in the face of setbacks. Brooks says that the value of the case studies is not just to provide students with examples of successful strategies, but also to teach them to interpret history in a way that inspires moral agency. He teaches students about creating a “hermeneutic of history that inspires willingness to resist an injustice,” one of the critical advocacy principles covered in the course.

“You can look at your history as a series of defeats, or you can look at it the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Theodore Parker, HDS ’36, did: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”

Here, Brooks underscores the importance of using sacred texts in partnership with secular scholarship as tools for organizing and for accurately portraying the moral and ethical dimensions of struggle. He tells of his own experience passing “Ban the Box” laws in New Jersey that prohibit employers from asking about job applicants’ criminal record until late in the hiring process. Brooks’s organization, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ), drew on the academic work of Alfred 2020 DEAN’S REPORT | 21

ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE OF GLOBAL RELIGION “There are casualties in this work. You do a 1,000–mile march and you expose yourself to tear gas or rubber bullets. People lose their jobs. People get death threats. That’s why you must inspire people, often by your eloquent example.”

Blumstein, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, which showed that, after a time, those with a criminal record who did not reoffend were no more likely to break the law than anyone else in the labor market. Then the NJISJ shared Blumstein’s work with a range of religious communities and asked them to connect it to their notions of redemption. The result was one of the most expansive Ban the Box laws in the country.

“We use that case study to show that you can take scholarship, join it with sacred texts, and use it to articulate, flesh out, and illuminate values that move the public,” Brooks says. “We also use it to demonstrate that in most communities, the trusted intermediaries are not Democratic and Republican policy makers. They are the clergy and others who are recognized as moral voices.”

AN INCREDIBLY POWERFUL TRAINING Brooks’s course is typically filled with students both from HDS and Harvard Kennedy School, where he is also a member of the faculty, Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and elsewhere around the University. All want practical knowledge that can help them lead change, so Brooks challenges them to articulate a specific goal and then come up with the campaign, tools, and argument and legal and financial structures that they will use to achieve it.

“It’s immoral not to focus on results,” he says. “My class is about being tough, strong, and clear in terms of policy and strategy, but also compassionate, persuasive, and inspiring. It joins hard public policy skills with a prophetic vision.”

A spiritual and theological grounding is critical for social justice work, Brooks says, because the road is long and the risks are real.

“There are casualties in this work,” he says. “You do a 1,000-mile march and you expose yourself to tear gas or rubber bullets. People lose their jobs. People get death threats. That’s why you must inspire people, often by your eloquent example.”

Brooks says that ministry education helped him develop the moral imagination that has expanded his notions of justice and how it might be possible to change the law. The ability to listen deeply, to speak, and to preach were also invaluable skills that Brooks acquired in divinity school—and ones that continue to serve him well.

“When I sit down with a distrustful client,” he says, “because I took pastoral counseling and understand the concept of a ministry of presence, I can listen to their story without trying to put it into legal categories right away. It’s been an incredibly powerful training for me.”

While Brooks believes the notion that only religious leaders can be moral voices is antiquated, he says that the need for those voices is not. In fact, it’s more important than ever. That’s why an institution like HDS—nonsectarian, multireligious, with students on a wide range of career paths—is uniquely positioned to meet the need for ethical leaders in all fields.

“You have a generation of activists who long to hear moral voices in the places they are,” he says.

“HDS graduates can bring the tools of ministry into places that most ministers can’t or wouldn’t go.

And to the extent that they can bring a clear theological and ethical voice where people don’t expect it to be, they literally build congregations and temples just as powerful and important as those with a physical edifice.”

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MODELING MULTIRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

“HDS is a model of a multireligious community— bringing together people from many different traditions in an atmosphere of authenticity and mutual respect.”

DEAN DAVID N. HEMPTON

2020 DEAN’S REPORT | 23

MODELING MULTIRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY LESEDI GRAVELINE, MTS ’21 Lesedi Graveline is an activist on the path to a career in social justice and human rights work.

A graduate of the University of Connecticut, she is passionate about expanding her leadership through mentoring and empowering young people. In order to keep herself grounded in her work, while she is at HDS, Graveline tutors incarcerated young men at Boston’s Judge John J. Connelly Youth Center and is an academic advisor to first-year students at Harvard College. Graveline has also interned at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre in New York City and has worked for MASS Design Group, a nonprofit, social justice architecture firm best known for designing the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, AL.

At HDS, I’m studying African and African American religions, but I feel as though I am also being trained in ethics.

I’ve taken classes such as “Leadership and Womanist Moral Traditions” with Professor (Monique) Moultrie, “Forgiveness” with Professor (Matthew) Potts, and “The Ethical and Religious thought of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” with Professor (Preston) Williams.

In those classrooms, we read about history, literature, theory, and narratives, which are all important to my scholarship; however, the learning went beyond that. I was also challenged to critique the world through the lens of morals and ethics and to understand how those concepts are inherently tethered to one another—lessons that I know would be difficult to find elsewhere.

When I think about the critical application of these lessons, I think about how in businesses—and even at nonprofits—I have found that morals and ethics are often neglected as organizations develop best practices, systems, and structures needed to accomplish their missions. Rather than being built into the process of the work, morals serve as a retrospective checklist. What should serve as guiding principles trail behind, losing their ability to effectively shape and counsel the operations of these organizations.

With this in mind, I hope to move through the world and speak with people, to hold conversations with a particular type of tenderness that I don’t believe you can find, or even be explicitly taught, at the Kennedy School, the Law School, or the Business School. I could have gone down a path where I would only be focused on maintaining a lucrative career, but that’s not my ethos; that’s not the way I want to live my life. What’s important to me is finding the connection between personal transformation and social change and embodying ethical leadership.

I care about people. I care about the way I leave this earth and my legacy. It’s like Maya Angelou said: “People will forget what you did and people forget what you said, but people never forget how you made them feel.” And this is how I want to be remembered. At HDS, I have been able to nurture these parts of identity and spirit. It is truly a special place.

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MODELING MULTIRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY I was so afraid of the criminal legal system. I was like, “This is an awful place. They do horrible things. They murder people.” And then my mom, with little options of employment to support our family, actually became a prison officer. Seeing her in her uniform made me internalize the system in a completely different way. I was scared. She had a gun. She had handcuffs. I was scared for her in the system, knowing that the system is what killed my dad.

As I got older, I kept getting drawn back into conversations with people who experienced incarceration: conversations with children who had incarcerated parents; conversations with kids who had deported parents; conversations with kids who were not represented well; conversations with parents who feel guilty about being incarcerated during their kid’s childhood. They revealed a whole new spectrum of people I felt the world was hiding from me.

When I was an undergraduate and also on my own religious journey, I had an Aha! moment. I realized that the people I love, the people I care for, are people who have experienced [incarceration]. I’ve been told that they were bad, but they were jailed for things like survival crimes, for taking care of their family, or for their unfortunate circumstances. I’ve been told that my dad was bad, all while I know him, and I know that he wasn’t bad. In retrospect, the very place that I’m scared of was the place that pretty much saved me and paved the way for my future career.

I came to HDS with an open mind, hoping that I was going to get some experience with other cultures and ethnicities and practices, and that’s exactly what I got. My language has also gotten a lot better, particularly for the work I want to do. I used to say “prison guard,” for example, and then I realized how damaging that language is. Now I say “prison officer.” I’m being very intentional with what I say. Just one year of HDS has made me more mature, more professional.

EBONI NASH, MTS ’21 Eboni Nash was only in third grade when her father was murdered in prison. She grew up a young woman of color—both African American and Native American— in a small, predominantly white town where her excellence in athletics and academics earned her a full scholarship from Hastings College, even as she dealt daily with micro aggressions and overt racism. Irrepressibly hopeful and optimistic, Nash came to HDS in order to prepare for a career of activism around the issues of racial justice and mass incarceration.

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MODELING MULTIRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

For me as a monastic, coming to America was a huge transition. There’s a big difference in the way that people understand and practice Buddhism in Vietnam and in the United States.

One thing that I found interesting was that here in the U.S., you can still be a Buddhist teacher even if you are not a monk. At first, I thought “How can a lay person become a spiritual teacher?” That was very weird to me. But I asked many of my friends and they said they would prefer a lay teacher rather than a monastic because lay people have more experience. They live in the “house” their whole life. So, I’ve had to ask myself as a monk, “How can you understand the difficulties of a household life if you don’t live it? How do you teach people about that life to help them overcome the challenges and difficulties?”

Another big difference that I’ve struggled to understand is the teaching of self-compassion. In my monastic training in Vietnam, compassion is always for others, so the first time I heard the term self-compassion I immediately thought, “Maybe this is just, you know, a selfish idea of compassion,” but that’s not true at all. I heard someone in class saying, “If you cannot love yourself, how can you love others?” So, there are so many incidents at HDS that really shocked me and also awakened me to be more open to learning something different from what I was taught in Vietnam.

VEN. TIEN NGUYEN, MDIV ’21 Born into a traditional Buddhist family in Vietnam, Ven. Tien Nguyen was 15 years old when his parents agreed to allow him to pursue ordination as a Mahayana Buddhist monk. At temple, he studied dharma practice and teaching under his master for some years but felt as though the training was not enough for him to be an effective Buddhist leader in the modern world. His pursuit of greater knowledge and understanding led him to Thailand, to Naropa University in Colorado, and finally to HDS.

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LÓRE STEVENS, MDIV ’22 The Mexican American daughter of “Christmas and Easter Christians” from East Tennessee, Lóre Stevens decided early on that “religion wasn’t for me” and pursued a master’s degree in gender studies at Eastern Michigan University. During a postgraduation trip that ran south through the Texas wilderness, however, Stevens had a deep experience of transcendence that eventually brought her to HDS. A finalist in the School’s annual Billings Preaching Prize Competition, Stevens is now on the path to ordination in the Unitarian Universalist Association.

I had this spiritual experience and didn’t know what to do with it, so I started going to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Nashville. They helped me find some language for what I experienced, and I started to realize that it was called mysticism and lots of people in lots of different religions experience it, and those folks are often the foundation for the nonviolent movements in different religions. It’s been from that little weird proof of realization, all the way to a really mind-blowing career possibility and to HDS. It’s been a really lovely first year. In “Theories and Methods” we read a book about a Muslim women’s movement in Egypt. Western, secular, liberal feminism sees these women as being oppressed, as being victims, as being without agency, but this book showed us that there is agency in being devout and being pious and being harmonious with your culture even if it doesn’t look like the rebellious kind of agency that we have. It allowed me to see that the folks who at HDS who are more traditional...we’re all working toward similar processes of selfformulation and connecting to however we understand the universe. We’re just doing it in ways that are shaped by our past experiences.

The week before the coronavirus lockdown, I went to the morning Catholic Mass that Professor Clooney holds once a week. I just happened to be in the building. So, I went in and [the Eucharist] was such an embodied experience.

I had this perception of Catholicism being so oppressive, but it was just so sweet. Everyone drank from the same cup. Everyone hugged at the end. It was quiet and calm. Everyone was on the same page in a way that was similar to that book about the Muslim women. Everyone in there knew the lines and knew the stories. And having a shared experience and language with a community was really new to me. It was so beautiful, even to just be in the room.

I was like, “Oh, I see why this is a thing!”

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MODELING MULTIRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

Being. On Campus.

Hindu monastics bring Vedanta to HDS and gain new perspectives on their tradition—and others

BY EMILY FARNSWORTH, HDS CORRESPONDENT

Just like any student at Harvard, Swami Sarvapriyananda had dreams about what he would do when he grew up.

As he sat in a classroom in Rockefeller Hall on Harvard Divinity School’s campus, wearing his distinctive saffron robes, he recalled what he wrote down as his top two choices while at school in his hometown of Bhubaneswar, located in the eastern part of India.

“Number one, be a pilot, and number two, find God,” he said. “As I grew up, being a pilot became number two and find God became number one, until only number one remained.”

A monk of over 25 years in the Ramakrishna Order, Sarvapriyananda is the current minister and spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of New York and one of three Hindu monastics in residence at HDS during the 2019–20 academic year. The three monks were the first to participate in a new program made possible by a generous gift from Vibhu and Ajit Nagral to strengthen the Hindu presence on campus.

With similar intent to the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, which brings Buddhist monks from Asia to HDS for a year of study, the new program at HDS has two main objectives: to enrich the HDS community, and to enable the participating monastics to return to their communities with expanded horizons.

The three monastics were easy to spot on campus. As Brahmacharini Shweta Chaitanya of Houston’s Chinmaya Mission quipped, “We dress quite loudly.” Her bright yellow robes indicated that she was, in her words, “a monastic in training.” Her Nike trainers and cardigan sweaters, however, signaled that she and the other monastics don’t shy away from the modern world. Before coming to Harvard, Sadhak Akshar, an aspiring BAPS Swaminarayan sadhu from Gujarat, India, who wears an all-white uniform, wondered how people in the U.S. would receive him.

“But from the very first day,” he said, “this hasn’t been a question for me. People accept you as you are and respect you.”

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Sadhak Akshar, Brahmacharini Shweta Chaitanya and Swami Sarvapriyananda

“At Harvard, everyone can have dialogue across the table. And this is a nice thing.

And now when I go back, I will be more confident in continuing this dialogue, because it is coming from experience.” SADHAK AKSHAR

Akshar and the others, who have devoted years to studying their own traditions, enrolled in courses at Harvard to learn about new theories and traditions. Akshar and Shweta took classes on Buddhism and Christianity. Sarvapriyananda enrolled in a number of philosophy courses—both Eastern and Western. All three took Professor Francis X. Clooney’s “Introduction to the Upanishads,” which are “some of the oldest and most famous primary texts of Vedic and Hindu India, ranging from before 700 BCE to 200 BCE and later.”

Daniel Sanders, a first-year MTS candidate also in the class, said he was “excited by the opportunity to study these texts with those who have made it their life’s focus to absorb, contemplate, and practice the wisdom found there.” He added that their in-class Sanskrit recitations of the text and insights into interpretation added “a joyful new dimension to my classroom experience.”

In addition to enriching group discussions, the three monastics gave class presentations about the way that the Upanishads are studied in their own traditions. Shweta Chaitanya’s two-year residential Vedanta course in Mumbai, India, for example, was entirely different from the kind of objective, academic approaches she was exposed to in pursuing her degrees in Sanskrit at the University of Texas, Austin, and at Columbia University.

(Edited and abridged from a piece that appeared on the HDS website.)

“There was a lot of lifestyle change that was considered necessary to imbibing the teaching of the Upanishads,” she said—including the time she woke up and what kind of food she ate. “It was almost like being able to take what we studied and to relate it to your every moment. I thoroughly appreciated that style of learning and teaching. It was very inspiring.”

Despite years of studying the Upanishads, the monastics learned much from their HDS professor and classmates. All enjoyed encountering new perspectives. Shweta said she hopes to bring some of this perspective back to her community.

Sarvapriyananda was also eager to share his HDS experience with the acharyas in India who run the monastic training center.

“They want to know what it’s like, what are the teaching methods, how do the students respond to the material,” he explained. “I’m sure when I go back to India, I’ll probably be asked to give talks on my Harvard experience.”

For Akshar, who has never had the chance to engage in much interreligious dialogue, the lesson he hopes to take home with him is the community experience itself.

“At Harvard, everyone can have dialogue across the table,” he said. “And this is a nice thing. And now when I go back, I will be more confident in continuing this dialogue, because it is coming from experience.”

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LEADERS WHO SERVE

“Many in the HDS community are on the front lines as activists, caregivers, and policy makers.”

DEAN DAVID N. HEMPTON

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LEADERS WHO SERVE “We’re taking a critical look at the health inequity issues highlighted and exaggerated by COVID-19....How can we do something beyond crafting statements—something that really looks at our systems and the extent to which they are operating equitably?”

Ministry of Healing White-Hammond provides care to the sick—and addresses the injustice that makes them ill

BY SUZANNAH LUTZ

Gloria White-Hammond, MDiv ’97, is committed to healing and ministry—often in the most difficult situations.

In the 2000s, she entered war zones in the African nation of Sudan to help recently liberated women and girls recover from the experience of slavery as part of her work with My Sister’s Keeper, the international nonprofit she cofounded with fellow HDS alumnae Liz Walker, MDiv ’05, Cynthia Bell, MDiv ’10, and Melinda Weekes, MDiv ’05.

For over 25 years, she served as a pediatrician at the South End Community Health Center, healing Black and Brown children from some of Boston’s most underserved neighborhoods.

A co-pastor of Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain, MA, and Swartz Resident Practitioner in Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School, White-Hammond has even teamed up with Dr. John R. Peteet of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry to co-teach the course “Spirituality and Healing.”

Now, Rev. Dr. White-Hammond is once again answering the call to the ministry of healing. As a member of the City of Boston’s COVID-19 Health Inequities Task Force (HITF), she will help address the ways in which people of color— particularly African Americans—have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

“We’re taking a critical look at the health inequity issues highlighted and exaggerated by COVID-19,” she says. “What are the implications of that, both in the short term and long term? How can we do something beyond crafting statements— something that really looks at our systems and the extent to

which they are operating equitably? How can we think deeply about changes that get more at the root of the inequity that we are seeing in this moment?”

A Crisis of Public Health—and Inequality Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh declared a public health emergency on March 15 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In June, he declared racism an emergency and a public health crisis. As part of the city’s response, HITF will explore the ways that inequities, not only in health care, data analysis, and testing, affect Boston’s most vulnerable populations.

“We certainly knew that older people were more vulnerable, so the nursing homes were anticipated,” she says. “But there were other conditions or preexisting illnesses—like diabetes, asthma, heart disease, obesity—that we knew were most prevalent in largely African American communities in the City of Boston.”

Preexisting illnesses and other conditions are not the only factors that make Black and Brown communities more vulnerable to the virus. As workers in Massachusetts and the rest of the country received stay-at-home orders in March, it became clear that the mandates would affect Black and Brown communities differently.

“The concept of being able to stay at home—to isolate in your house—is a luxury,” she says. “For the people who have to go out, there are lots of issues that were starting to become clear. We certainly knew that clinicians weren’t going to be able to work from home, but there wasn’t the similar kind of calculation with other people who would end up being essential workers.”

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Chaplains Rev. Erica Rose Long, MDiv ’16 (L), and Sarah Byrne-Martelli, MDiv ’02, providing care and comfort at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

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“The thing that makes life sacred is the breath of the Holy Spirit, so the breath is really what gives life and renders the whole sense of the sacred. It’s a broader conversation about the extent to which inequity is jeopardizing people’s capacity to live and to live well and to live fully.”

Grocery workers, who became essential to shoppers planning for uncertain months ahead, were especially at risk. And, as White-Hammond observes, “Where there’s a food industry operating, there are workers that are predominantly people of color.” Low wages, poor benefits, and little savings to fall back on also put these employees at risk for the virus, White-Hammond says.

“In areas where there is greater poverty, people are more constrained in terms of their access to medical care,” she explains. “People don’t have primary care physicians, and certainly not insurance.

In retrospect, this absolutely should have been predicted once we recognized that in other countries there was a concern about the adequacy of treatment resources.”

The Breath of Life The killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25 took place against the background of long-standing inequities thrown into high relief by the coronavirus outbreak. Moreover, White-Hammond says that the lockdown gave people time to focus on it all.

“How poorly the pandemic had been handled from the start, the inadequacy of access to testing, the fact that there has been so much dysfunction and so much malice coming from the White House—we were watching it happen in real time. People could focus and look at the videos in the context of all that was going on. It just clicked in a way that all the other videos that we’ve seen did not click.”

The killing of George Floyd also coincided with those of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade and symbolized the ongoing injustice and violence experienced by African Americans in the United States every day. With the whole world watching, Black Lives Matter protests spread to nearly every continent. Here, too, White-Hammond answered the call to ministry and healing. In June, Bethel AME hosted Clergy United for Peace, Prayer and Protest as they led a funeral procession in memory of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, followed by a memorial service broadcast live on WCVB, the local ABC affiliate. White-Hammond’s daughter Mariama gave the sermon that day, observing that a body can have all its organs, but if it does not have breath, it is not truly alive.

“The thing that makes life sacred is the breath of the Holy Spirit,” Gloria White-Hammond says, “so the breath is really what gives life and renders the whole sense of the sacred. It’s a broader conversation about the extent to which inequity is jeopardizing people’s capacity to live and to live well and to live fully. We constrain people’s capacity to breathe in and to live fully into that sacredness by not providing so many of the resources that people would consider pretty basic.”

Breath also calls us to one another, she says.

“It marks us as people endowed with the sacred, and part of what emanates from us as spiritual beings is the calling to create a space for other people to live and breathe freely.”

As more people join Black Lives Matter protests and the movement for racial justice—as more officials are called to turn toward the inequities in the system highlighted by COVID-19, the calling to restore that breath grows stronger and stronger.

“Mariama’s point was that even as we look at this situation—as we look around this country and see so much of the dry bones in terms of what this country has become—there’s hope in a restoration of people returning to God’s spirit, and when that happens, these bones can live again. The lesson that the Lord might have had for us as a people—as a nation—it can be restored. It requires us to be open to the Holy Spirit, and I think there’s been a lot of evidence of that hope more recently.”

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There Is No ‘Other’ Here Kevin Cranston and the truth of pandemics

BY PAUL MASSARI

Kevin Cranston, MDiv ’86, learned early on that viruses tell the truth. As a gay man coming of age during the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, he saw the ways that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) crossed national and geographic boundaries to reveal the underlying disparities in U.S. society.

The populations that suffered most during the health crisis were also the most vulnerable—the poor, people of color, addicts, and gay and bisexual men like him. In a word, the marginalized “other.”

“The blatant and overt—as well as systemic and institutionalized—disregard for their lives was manifest in the early days of the epidemic,” he says. “And it’s still with us today.”

More than a generation later, Cranston fights a different pandemic that tells the same truths. As assistant commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, he puts the skills and habits of mind he acquired at HDS to use in the effort to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, which devastates marginalized communities just as HIV did.

Something to Offer When Cranston enrolled at HDS in 1983, he didn’t know he was taking his first step on the path to a 32-year career in public health. He was trying to respond to a moment of crisis in the gay community.

Activists had built a vibrant movement in the years since the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. Now he saw it fragmenting, as partners and friends rejected HIV-positive men, treating them “like pariahs.”

“It hit me very hard that this community we had grown and built in reaction to the oppression of outsiders was now oppressing itself,” he says. “I came to HDS because I recognized that the epidemic was going to be a long-term reality, and I needed to have something to offer.”

At HDS, Cranston learned to reflect, to scrutinize his own assumptions, and to identify the ways that society demonizes the “other”—skills that have been invaluable to him during his career. He says that history shows pandemics typically come in twos: the virus and the outbreak of fear and prejudice that accompany it.

“The 1918 flu pandemic was called the Spanish Flu, not because it originated in Spain, but because Spain was the first to openly acknowledge it,” he says. “Today, there’s this identification of COVID-19 as the ‘Chinese Virus.’ And so, I have Asian American colleagues who are fearful of traveling, of moving about the world in public, because they’re seen as a threat. The other illnesses in our society— particularly around race, class, and ethnicity—are playing out underneath this epidemic.”

Because viruses tell the truth, though, Cranston says they often reveal as lies the very prejudices to which they give rise.

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“I’m particularly concerned about the disproportionate impact of the closures on the most economically vulnerable. It’s day workers. It’s hourly workers. It’s people in the food and restaurant business. It’s people who cut hair. Their money ended the day they were sent home.”

“One of the truths the coronavirus has told is that we are amazingly like one another. Human beings are human beings despite all the differences of biology and culture that we focus on. We are fundamentally very much the same organism.

That’s why it spreads. There really is not an ‘other’ here.”

Ministry of Public Health Ask Cranston about the future and he draws on another lesson from his time at HDS: Have humility about what you can and cannot know. He points out that the coronavirus is a new organism—one with which humans have little experience and no immunity. The world could be in for multiple waves of infection. Moreover, putting aside the challenges of mass production and distribution, a vaccine is probably still months away. For these reasons, Cranston is slow to criticize colleges and universities that have decided to stay online this fall. “[The Department of Public Health does] a certain amount of consultation with the higher education system,” he says. “On top of that, individual institutions have also tapped their own experts to read and analyze the data. They’re balancing the risk of human illness with the loss of connection and educational opportunity. You make the best choices you can to maximize the goods and minimize the harms. I’m not going to secondguess those decisions.”

When confronted by the argument between those who

caution against prematurely relaxing public health measures that mitigate the spread of the pandemic and those who cry that the “cure is worse than the disease,” Cranston draws on a final lesson from his time at HDS: Reject dichotomies. Make space for multiple perspectives.

“I’m particularly concerned about the disproportionate impact of the closures on the most economically vulnerable,” he says. “It’s day workers. It’s hourly workers. It’s people in the food and restaurant business. It’s people who cut hair. Their money ended the day they were sent home. And when they lose their health insurance, when they put off doctor’s appointments, when they turn to substances to deal with the stress—those are public health issues too. We have to put as much attention into rebuilding their lives as we put into the response to the pandemic.”

It is this attention to the “least of these” that inspires Kevin Cranston’s passion for his work. By bringing moral teaching and ethical analysis to all he does, Cranston transforms the practice of public health into a ministry of social justice.

“Injustice continues to play out in our society,” he says.

“It’s one of the reasons I wanted to go into public health. We’re responsible for the whole population. We don’t get to pick and choose who our patients are. We get to use our tools to unpack what’s really going on in our society. We can’t always address the root causes, but we can name them. We can point to them.”

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ON THE PATH OF LOVE AND JUSTICE Bartholomew fosters diversity, inclusion, and belonging at HDS

BY PAUL MASSARI

Melissa Wood Bartholomew, MDiv ’15, has been here before—the horrifying event, the protests, the renewed pledges, soon forgotten, to combat racism. While she has concerns about whether the current movement for racial justice will be sustained, she says this time feels different.

“Five or ten years ago,” she remembers, “we were confronted with the same issues that are at the core of the racial justice movement today: the killing of Black people (e.g., Eric Garner) at the hands of police, the movement for Black Lives, and the fight against systemic racism. Still, in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—and given the coronavirus’s impact on communities of color—there seems now to be a deeper commitment to systemic change. Moreover, it’s global.”

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“...my priority is to support the School’s ongoing efforts to strengthen our foundation and address the pressing needs of this challenging period in a way that gets us on solid footing.”

Bartholomew has “been here before” at HDS as well. As a master of divinity student, she and her classmate Rachel Foran co-founded the HDS Racial Justice and Healing Initiative to “advance racial justice and healing by means of cross-disciplinary dialogue, scholarship, and training designed to address personal and systemic racism through strategies rooted in love.” Following graduation, while pursuing her PhD in social work at Boston College, she returned to campus as a racial justice fellow where she facilitated conversations designed to help make HDS a more authentic, inclusive community.

Now Bartholomew is back again, with a mandate from the School’s leaders to take this work to a new level as HDS’s associate dean for diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIB).

“I believe the goal of DIB is to create an atmosphere where people can bring their whole selves to the community,” she says. “It’s work that’s rooted in compassion.”

A successful litigator and mediator who teaches restorative justice at Boston College Law School and diversity at Boston College School of Social Work, Bartholomew hopes to bring not only the deep listening skills of a minister and healing practitioner to the role of associate dean, but also the habits of mind of an attorney and mediator.

“As lawyers, we’re trained to see all sides and build an argument that is counter to our own,” she says. “When you can understand and make a case for someone else, it enhances your ability to love your neighbor as yourself. It enables you to have compassion and empathy in the most difficult circumstances. As a mediator, you are able to bring all parties to the table and facilitate a process that will hopefully move them closer to resolution than they were when they stepped into the room.”

Bartholomew is also a licensed Baptist minister whose commitment to the work of diversity, inclusion, and belonging is deeply rooted in her spiritual life. She describes herself as a Christ-centered minister—a nod to her daily commitment to cultivate the Christ consciousness that enables her with love when she encounters racism and oppression.

“I have the Holy Spirit that animates me and orients me and reminds me of my own frailties and shortcomings,” she says.

“That Spirit is a power greater than me, yet in me. So this is not an intellectual endeavor. It is work that requires the head and

the heart, and I believe it also requires the Spirit. The path of love and justice is the foundation of all I do.”

Bartholomew says that HDS is uniquely positioned to address racial justice and healing—and to bring that work into the world. Her vision for DIB is to build a connected, cohesive community that is engaged in antiracist and antioppression work “from the inside out.” Along those lines, she hopes to leverage the School’s curriculum and programming to help prepare leaders of all major traditions—and those with no tradition at all—to serve diverse communities and work to eradicate racism wherever they find it. She says this work begins at home with the HDS community and each of its members.

“Before systemic racism can be addressed, we must begin by addressing the way racism manifests within ourselves,” she says. “As an instructor at HDS, I’m part of a classroom environment that acknowledges that reality as part of an effort to cultivate interpersonal change. That work expands beyond this space—out in the world but also at home where we engage with people who don’t share our views. The approach is individual and interpersonal.”

Such high-touch efforts will be a challenge as the School continues to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. During the 2020–21 academic year, Bartholomew will devote much of her time to helping students feel like they’re a genuine part of the HDS community, even though they may be thousands of miles away from campus.

“While we’re online, my priority is to support the School’s ongoing efforts to strengthen our foundation and address the pressing needs of this challenging period in a way that gets us on solid footing,” she says. “We’re responding to all that students bring—the trauma, grief, and uncertainty, as well as the hope and excitement.”

Long-term changes in the culture of a 200-year-old school won’t come quickly. Bartholomew urges patience, compassion, and understanding during a time when emotions are running high.

“In a moment of anger and outrage, it’s so important to maintain the long view and understand that what’s required is a cultural shift,” she explains. “That shift takes time and commitment. There’s no ‘off’ switch. It’s long-term, internal work. We have to strategize and incorporate methods to take us through.”

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FROM LORI STEVENS, ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR DEVELOPMENT AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS

The Harvard Divinity School community that all of you support and help to build—with your involvement, your leadership, and your financial investment—is a remarkable one.

Together with the faculty, staff, and students of HDS, you are creating the space and preparing the ground for meaningful dialogue, genuine care, and hopeful action, while strengthening the School’s outstanding academic foundations. Since I began in my role here in February, I have been grateful for the sense of community that surrounds all of this and shines through uncertain times.

Staying connected has been an essential part of that, and we have found new ways to be and learn together. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, spring events, including the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honors and our annual Dean’s Leadership Forum, were quickly adapted to virtual formats. We will celebrate the 2020 Gomes Honorees in person when we are able, and in the meantime, we were inspired by virtual conversations with them, hosted by the Alumni/Alumnae Council. Every year, the Dean’s Leadership Forum creates a special opportunity for members of our giving societies and volunteer leaders to connect with thought leaders to explore issues in religion, ethics, and contemporary life. This year, with the changes in format, we were heartened by connecting with alumni and friends we rarely get to see all in one place—from across the U.S. and around the globe, including Italy, India, and China.

We look forward to when we can gather in person again. In the meantime, we have been encouraged by seeing the progress on the Swartz Hall renovation. New gathering spaces and technological capacity will allow us to further adapt our programming for those near and far. We are grateful to the Swartz and James families and to all the building donors for their transformative support.

In so many ways, this moment in time has highlighted how religion plays a critical role in our lives— as we navigate complex feelings and beliefs around grief and loss; draw strength from communities and faith traditions; and seek to bridge religious and cultural divides. It has also focused attention more keenly on great challenges: economic inequality, racial injustice, and climate change. Facing these challenges will require new forms of understanding and ethical leadership in all fields of public engagement. As reflected in Dean Hempton’s letter and the collection of stories here, this community continues to rise to these challenges in inspiring ways. Thank you for being part of it.

Gratefully,

Lori Stevens Associate Dean for Development and External Relations

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NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

“Religion and Public Life creates a new center of excellence at HDS, leveraging the School’s traditional leadership in both ministry education and the academic study of religion.”

DEAN DAVID N. HEMPTON

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NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Participants in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace 2020 J-term course, including Yaseen Hashmi, MTS ’21 (second from right), pose in front of the skyline of the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Canopy Under the auspices of RPL, programs come together to promote a just world at peace

BY PAUL MASSARI

Yaseen Hashmi, MTS ’21, didn’t expect an epiphany when he joined students from HDS and six of Harvard’s other graduate schools for a January-term course in Israel and Palestine, but that’s what he got.

Hashmi came to HDS thinking that he might pursue a legal career afterwards. The attorneys he met in the Middle East, however, seemed to face a steep uphill battle working against the violations of human rights and international law in the region. On the other hand, the artists he spoke with, from a range of religions and cultures, “had these awesome stories about the ways they’ve opened people’s minds.”

Seeing the artists successfully challenge the very narratives and assumptions that thwart legal work toward justice left him feeling enlightened and excited.

Hashmi had had a passion for screenwriting and filmmaking since he was a teenager, but he never really thought of his creative work as more than a hobby. It certainly wasn’t a way to work for justice.

The J-term course changed his mind.

“Something clicked for me on that trip,” he says. “One movie can teach you so much about the history of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict. And not only that, it can give you insight into why people are entrenched in their views. Why does the conflict persist? Why is the occupation where it is today? You can see it so much better through filmmaking.”

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NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION “[Religion and Public Life] will enable the School to become greater than the sum of its parts and to focus its collective efforts more deliberately in the years ahead.”

DEAN DAVID N. HEMPTON

In the years to come, many more HDS students will expand their notion of how they can make a difference in the world—and learn how religion shapes nearly every area of human activity— thanks to Religion and Public Life (RPL), a major new initiative launched by HDS in the fall of 2020. Dean David N. Hempton says that RPL is an effort to bring the School’s vast expertise in the study of religion to bear on contemporary challenges.

“Religion and Public Life leverages Harvard Divinity School’s historic strengths in scholarship and ministry studies to address some of the most complex issues facing the world today,” he says. “It seeks to do so by integrating many of our current programs and building new bridges from the academy to a wide range of stakeholders in business, law, humanitarian work, journalism, the arts, and many other fields. It will enable the School to become greater than the sum of its parts and to focus its collective efforts more deliberately in the years ahead.”

Two Pillars, One Canopy The new program is led by Diane L. Moore, Senior Fellow at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions and Lecturer on Religion, Conflict, and Peace. Moore, who has over 40 years of experience working with students and educators, says RPL will act as a “canopy,” bringing under its auspices two foundational “pillars” of programming: one to advance knowledge of religion in a wide range of professions, including education, journalism, government, humanitarian action, and entertainment media; and a second to support peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Beyond this, the wider “canopy” of the RPL will advance programming and academic offerings on a wide range of topics of contemporary significance. Moore points out that RPL flows organically from trends in the work of the School’s faculty, the interests of its students, and the career paths of its alumni.

“The intention is to lean into what we know about our strengths and to marry this with what we are seeing in terms of the expectations of our students and faculty and our mission to the wider world,” she says. “More than anything else, RPL provides coherence to the many projects and programs at HDS that already focus on the public understanding of religion.”

Moore has a history of developing innovative curriculum.

As director of the Religious Literacy Project, she assembled in

2016 an all-star team of scholars for the HarvardX massive open online course, “World Religions Through Their Scriptures.”

Last year, the class enrolled more than 730,000 participants from around the world. In 2018, Moore created another HX MOOC, titled “Religion, Conflict, and Peace,” that has attracted nearly 72,000 participants. Together, these courses have drawn students from 192 countries. Religion and Public Life expands HDS’s efforts to promote religious literacy by educating a new kind of leader—one who understands the religious traditions and values that shape people’s lives, is capable of rigorous selfreflection and self-criticism, and harnesses religion’s capacity to bridge cultural divides while mitigating its capacity to destroy.

“The widespread failure to understand the power of religion in human experience has significant consequences,” Moore says.

“It fuels bigotry and prejudice, leads to misinterpretations of conflicts and crises, and hinders cooperative endeavors in local, national, and international arenas. There is an urgent need to promote a more sophisticated understanding of religion in public life to mitigate these consequences—and to leverage religious resources that promote human and planetary flourishing.”

To address this need for religious knowledge, one of RPL’s two programmatic pillars is the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative (RLPI). The RLPI offers a fellowship program that brings professionals into the classroom to coteach courses on religion and the professions and to mentor students. The program’s internships put students in the field at institutions like the United Nations, the European Union, and the humanitarian nonprofit Oxfam, where they gather real world experience.

Shaun Casey, MDiv ’83, ThD ’98, was U.S. special representative for religion and global affairs during the Obama Administration and a 2019–20 RLPI Fellow who co-taught the initiative’s “Religious Literacy and the Professions I: Government and Humanitarian Action” course. He says that RPL is “aiding students in their vocational call to change the world in a multitude of ways.”

“In the foreign service, which is the professional corps of workers in the United States Department of State, there’s a woeful lack of religious literacy,” Casey says. “In the office that I ran (Religion and Global Affairs), it was a real struggle to find people who had the kind of expertise I needed to help 2020 DEAN’S REPORT | 41

NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION “HDS graduates have long demonstrated what can be achieved with deep knowledge of religion in journalism, public health, business, government, and many other professions.”

DIANE L. MOORE

diplomats get a deeper understanding of religion in context around the world. RPL is one of the few programs in the country that trains students how to grasp religious literacy in a more sophisticated way.”

As with its predecessor, the Religious Literacy Project (RLP), RPL will promote religious literacy in order to address the deterioration of civic life and the rise in social hostility.

Along those lines, another area of of focus within the Religious Literacy and Professions Initiative is with educators, particularly those working at the high school and community college levels. Through the annual Summer Institute for Educators, a fellowship program, collaborations with school districts, workshops, conferences, and the comprehensive Religious Literacy Resource Kit, RLPI provides educators with tools to help students think critically, creatively, and constructively about religion.

Monika Johnston is the head of the history department at Packer Collegiate Institute, a private pre-K–12 school in Brooklyn, New York, and a 2018–19 Religious Literacy and Education Fellow. She says her students are initially suspicious of religion but, thanks to tools provided by the RLPI, they’re able to engage in conversation with one another and the texts they study in ways that she calls “transformative.”

“Kids have very set ideas about their own religious tradition or other traditions,” she says. “What’s been so great about using (RLPI’s resources) is kids really are hungry to talk about religion and religious experience and related issues. And we’re not shying away from controversy. We’ve built the tools that develop the foundational trust for them to talk to one another genuinely and respectfully.”

RPL’s second pillar addresses one of the most powerful— and visible—ways that religion influences human affairs: its capacity to help ignite and resolve conflicts. The Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) brings together scholars from HDS, Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and Atalia Omer from Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies to examine the role that religious communities play in violent conflict—and in promoting sustainable peace. Last winter’s January-term course in Israel and Palestine took place under the auspices of the RCPI, as did Moore’s fall-term course, “Religion, 42 | 2020 DEAN’S REPORT

Conflict, and Peace in the Contemporary Middle East,” and the eight-week “Religion, Conflict, and Peace Internship Seminar” for students of the J-term course who wished to return to the region. (Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the RCPI internships, which were planned for Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and other locations in the Middle East, took place remotely.)

“Learning literacy with regard to religion is one of the most urgent issues that anyone who is serious about social justice, peace-making, and political change can undertake,” says Gregory Khalil, a Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative NonResident Fellow and president of the Telos Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “It’s not a question of whether religion, faith, and theology will shape our world. It’s a question of how.

And if we sit back on the sidelines and if we don’t learn to be literate and how to engage honestly as peers, unfortunately, fundamentalist, supremacist, extremist religious narratives will continue to gain prominence and shape our world.”

A New Degree Perhaps the most exciting aspect of RPL is that it will engender a new degree—the first since HDS introduced the master of theological studies over 50 years ago. Set to welcome its first cohort of students in the fall of 2021, the master of religion and public life (MRPL) is an opportunity for practitioners from fields such as business, law, the arts, nonprofit work, and many others to gain advanced knowledge about religion. Through coursework, a shared seminar with other professionals, and a final project, MRPL students will prepare to serve as leaders within their professions regarding the public understanding of religion.

“Right now, professionals who want to enhance their understanding of religion at HDS have to enroll as Special Students or through our two-year MTS degree, probably concentrating in religion, ethics, and politics,” Moore explains.

“Neither of those programs is really equipped to respond to their particular needs and interests—which is to understand the role that religion plays relevant to their work. The master of religion and public life degree is a focused program aimed at experienced professionals from a diverse range of fields.”

MRPL candidates will be required to master a common theoretical framework for analyzing the ways that religion

Petitioners are sworn in as new citizens in front of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights during a naturalization ceremony at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., June 18, 2014.

NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

shapes the breadth of human experience. At the same time, they will construct a course of study unique to their own profession and aspirations. When they graduate, MRPL alumni will be equipped to serve as leaders in the public understanding of religion and its specific relevance to their field.

“Just as analysis about dynamics related to gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class emerged decades ago with profound impacts on how professions function,” Moore explains, “analysis regarding the complex roles that religions play in human experience is equally critical yet rarely acknowledged. The MRPL meets the urgent need for a more sophisticated understanding of religion in a wide range of professions.”

Students in HDS’s existing degree programs will also have a chance to get this sort of applied knowledge. The new certificate in religion and public life (CRPL) will allow MTS and MDiv candidates to engage in coursework, mentoring, internships, and projects that bring a nuanced understanding of religion to areas like education, government, humanitarian work, and entertainment media.

“HDS graduates have long demonstrated what can be achieved with deep knowledge of religion in journalism, public health, business, government, and many other professions,” Moore says. “The new certificate program acknowledges this tradition and provides it new support with opportunities to bring this knowledge to bear on all sectors of public life.”

Yaseen Hashmi took advantage of those opportunities

last summer as an RCPI intern for 1for3, a Cambridge-based organization that supports refugee communities in the West Bank. Hashmi took what he learned in Moore’s courses and used it to create digital content for the nonprofit’s social media presence.

“Most of my work supports Aida refugee camp, where we (the RCPI J-term students) got to visit in January,” he says.

“1for3 supports access to water, food, health, and education by helping organize and fund community-led projects like rooftop gardens that support food security and a team of local community health workers. I’m mostly putting together short promotional videos about each project using footage sent to me from the Aida camp’s media unit.”

Hashmi has big plans for the year ahead. He’s anxious to check out RPL’s new certificate program. He also wants to make a film about the ways that different religious organizations relate to beauty in the city of Istanbul, Turkey—a documentary and a work of art that would inspire conversations about cultural violence and activism. Even at a time of great uncertainty, Hashmi says that RPL enables him to look to the future with hope and excitement.

“It feels like I got fairy-tale picked up and dropped into a community and I’m having a blast there,” he says. “Working with RPL programs has given me a sense of security in pursuing justice through art. I’m excited to get working on film, and I feel empowered to take on whatever comes next.”

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NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

An Investment in Understanding As U.S. deputy secretary of state from 1985 to 1989, the investor, diplomat, and philanthropist John Whitehead saw that religion was the thread that connected many of the diplomatic challenges he faced around the world. He believed deeply in the importance of the study of global religion and in Harvard Divinity School’s capacity to advance that work. To that end, Whitehead was one of the School’s most loyal supporters for more than a generation, serving on the HDS Dean’s Council and as honorary chair of its capital campaign.

Since John Whitehead’s passing in 2015, his son Gregory has continued this work as head of the Whitehead Foundation, an organization that “honors and extends the philanthropic legacy of John C. Whitehead through support for mission-based organizations.” In line with its namesake’s belief in the mission of HDS, the Whitehead Foundation in 2020 pledged $1M to the School’s new program, Religion and Public Life (RPL), providing the initiative with critical funding. In a recent conversation, Gregory Whitehead talks about the way that RPL fits into the Whitehead Foundation’s philanthropic strategy and why he believes that global peace and human flourishing depend on the education of a new generation of religiously literate, ethical leaders.

HDS: How did you (through the foundation) decide to make a gift to Religion and Public Life in memory of your father, John Whitehead?

Gregory Whitehead: In his last years, my father was inspired and revitalized by the strong spirit of community within HDS, and within the Center for the Study of World Religions in particular.

He deeply admired and respected Dean David Hempton’s tireless work in search of a lasting peace in Northern Ireland, as well as 44 | 2020 DEAN’S REPORT

his emphasis on the practice of peace within both HDS and the University as a whole. Dean Hempton has referred to John as a valued mentor, yet John would undoubtedly say that the reverse was closer to the truth. This gift honors their special friendship, as well as the exceptional creativity, skill, and knowledge of RPL Director Diane Moore and her colleagues in articulating such a beautifully interdisciplinary and interfaith program.

HDS: Why support RPL in particular? How does the gift reflect your father’s life and work?

Gregory Whitehead: My father, like his father, Eugene, before him, always came to the table in the spirit of fairness, consensus, and service to others. He abhorred violence and conflict at all levels, and he despaired over the relentless rise of fanaticism, what Thomas Merton identified as a “universal infection” that flows from a crippled human nature that recoils from love, mercy, and compassion. He rejected the senseless War on Terror, and we often spoke about how our lamentably long list of documented war crimes and abuses would haunt the American conscience for generations.

In one of our last conversations before he became seriously ill, my father and I talked about reparations for torture victims, and accountability for those who enabled and perpetrated such cruel atrocities. We need a new generation of ethically grounded leaders for whom such decisions would be unthinkable, being in profound violation of what Bryan Stevenson calls “just mercy,” an ethos present in many variations throughout world religions, one that provides a sacred key toward a viable future.

I believe that Religion and Public Life holds that key. I’m sure that my father would have as well.

NEW RESOURCES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

HDS: The Whitehead Foundation supports many worthy causes in key areas like environmental protection, human rights, and restorative justice. How does RPL fit in? How can knowledge of religion help address the urgency and depth of the challenges humanity faces in the years ahead?

Gregory Whitehead: We are always looking for partners and projects that aim to heal what is most broken and splintered in our fundamental relationships to each other and to the whole of life on Mother Earth. Spiritual practices and religious knowledge offer a powerful and transformative path back to the wholeness we will surely need if we are to resolve the severe challenges ahead. RPL supports those with the courage, compassion, and faith to engage sacred texts as the foundation of ethical leadership, a path that compels us to recall and honor the sanctity of all life-forms in a spirit of restorative justice, equity, and humble reckoning with uncomfortable truths. Rather than RPL fitting into the work of the Foundation, I would like to think that the Foundation resonates and unites with ideas and practices already vibrantly present within RPL!

HDS: The Whitehead Foundation gift will in part help expand HDS’s public engagement on the topic of religion. Why do you think it’s important for the School to play a greater role in the public conversation?

Gregory Whitehead: Given the intensity and acuteness of the global health crisis, the equally as virulent pandemic of racism, through to the ticking time bomb of the climate emergency, now is not the time to stay safely within the privileged confines of Harvard. The path of compassion requires walking in the

shoes of others, and that means confronting the world and its many wounds at the site of their infliction. Here again, broader engagement across the entire global reach of the HDS community through RPL seems a natural outgrowth from the countless fertile conversations that have incubated in HDS conferences and colloquia over the course of the past several years, with brilliant guest speakers such as Lily Yeh, Zumbi, Leah Penniman, Aysha Upchurch, and Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, and luminous moderators such as Terry Tempest Williams and Melissa Bartholomew.

HDS: Finally, what are your hopes for the gift? When the money is spent, what would make you say it was a worthwhile investment?

Gregory Whitehead: I know my father would be strongly encouraging students from Harvard Business School, the Kennedy School, and the Law School to participate within the RPL, together with those pursuing the new master’s degree in religion and public life. Professional boundaries can be as confining as campus walls, and the core values of RPL apply equally to all human endeavors.

My father was particularly concerned about the collapse of ethical standards within the financial world to which he had devoted much of his career. Yet in the end, the power and value of RPL will be measured in countless acts of love, courage, mediation, reconciliation, and transcendence, and it would be wrong to apply any sort of conventional investment metric to such deeply liberating and divinely inspired work. Of course, I would celebrate the day when the Foundation could support projects led by RPL graduates!

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PHOTOS: THATCHER BEAN, ANNE H. BETTERIDGE, JEFFREY BLACKWELL, COURTESY OF KEVIN CRANSTON, JOHN DEPUTY, EVGENIA ELISEEVA, TOM FITZSIMMONS, STEVE GILBERT, BETH GWINN, ELIZABETH HO, LAWRENCE JACKSON, JUSTIN KNIGHT, ROSE LINCOLN, STEPHANIE MITCHELL, MIKE NAUGHTON, TONY RINALDO, KRIS SNIBBE, BRIAN TORTORA, KRISTIE WELSH, COURTESY OF GREGORY WHITEHEAD, SUSAN YOUNG, SHIRA YUDKOFF, JULIA ZHOGINA

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