2018 HDS Dean's Report

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 THE C AMPAIGN FOR HARVARD DIVINIT Y SCHOOL

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CONTENTS 1

FROM DEAN HEMPTON

YEAR IN REVIEW 2 HIGHLIGHTS 2017–18 4 GOMES HONOREES: HDS’S PUBLIC VOICE

ILLUMINATE 16 NOT AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF:

PROFESSOR STEPHANIE PAULSELL

18 EXCAVATING THE SPIRITUAL GENIUS OF BLACK PEOPLE:

PROFESSOR TODNE THOMAS

5 FACULTY APPOINTMENTS AND PROMOTIONS 6 THE FACULTY OF DIVINITY 7 FACULTY BOOKS 2017–18

ENGAGE 20 ANDOVER MAKEOVER 23 THE RELIGIOUS LITERACY PROJECT

8 DEAN’S DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD: RALPH M. JAMES THE CAMPAIGN FOR HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL 10 BRINGING RELIGIOUS STUDIES INTO THE 21ST CENTURY 12 FROM ASSOCIATE DEAN HANNAH PETERS 13 CAMPAIGN LEADERSHIP 14 ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATING ETHICAL,

RELIGIOUSLY LITERATE LEADERS

SERVE 31 HDS STUDENTS: SCHOLARS AND LEADERS WHO SERVE 34 CHIEF COUNSEL: TOM STANTON, HDS ’68 37 MINISTRY OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION:

DEREK VAN BEVER, MDIV ’11

40 DONOR REPORT 52 HDS FINANCIALS 2018

From Dean Hempton I’m delighted to report that the Campaign for Harvard Divinity School came to a resounding close last June. Its success exceeded our wildest hopes.

We started with a goal of $50M —more than the School had ever raised in its 200-year history.

With your help, we finished with over $77M. On behalf of everyone in the HDS community, thank you for your support.

The true goal of the campaign, of course, was to advance a mission: to increase knowledge of the world’s religious traditions; to meet the twenty-first century’s need for spiritual leadership; and to serve humanity through the education of religiously literate, ethical professionals in all fields.

Those goals in mind, the Campaign for Harvard Divinity School has already inspired tremendous change, including creative collaborations with other schools that have helped Harvard earn the world’s top ranking for the study of religion; the addition of dynamic scholars, including Cornel West, Ousmane Kane, and Todne Thomas, who bring new vitality and perspective to our research; and the launch of initiatives that extend the impact of our work far beyond campus, such as the Religious Literacy Project, Religions and the Practice of Peace, and June’s pilot executive education program.

The campaign will enable us to reach even higher in the years to come. With the renewal of our teaching, learning, and convening spaces, HDS will bring people together for the conversations between different traditions that are crucial for human flourishing. HDS will spread knowledge of the way that religion shapes the everyday lives of real people around the world through new massive open online courses on the EdX platform. Perhaps most of all, HDS will, through new curriculum that engages with big ethical questions, educate leaders who work to ensure that humans live responsibly on the planet so that they and all species may thrive.

To realize these heady aspirations, the School will need to reach out in ways it never has before. We must continue to strengthen our networks and ties outside of the United States if the work we do is to reflect the diversity of the traditions we study. And—as we have started to do with Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and others—we will need to partner with colleagues around Harvard University to make more effective our joint efforts to address the most pressing challenges of our time.

We have these opportunities thanks to your support. With you as our partners, we can transform them into realities that make a world of difference.

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

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 1

Year in Review

HIGHLIGHTS 2017–18 In a groundbreaking year, HDS drew renowned scholars and leaders to campus for conversations on the ways that religion shapes the world.

AUGUST 29, 2017 CORNEL WEST’S ‘PROPHETIC FIGHTBACK’ JUST WEEKS AFTER STANDING ARM IN ARM WITH CLERGY MEMBERS DEMONSTRATING AGAINST WHITE NATIONALISM IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, HDS PROFESSOR CORNEL WEST SPEAKS ON CONFRONTING HATE AT THE SCHOOL’S ANNUAL CONVOCATION.

OCTOBER 3, 2017 STRENGTHENING TIES WITH MEXICO DEAN DAVID N. HEMPTON, PROFESSOR DAVÍD CARRASCO, AND OTHER LEADING HARVARD SCHOLARS TRAVEL TO MEXICO TO INAUGURATE THE EDUARDO MATOS MOCTEZUMA LECTURE SERIES, A FIVE-YEAR COLLABORATION BETWEEN MEXICAN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND HARVARD. MOCTEZUMA HIMSELF TRAVELS TO CAMBRIDGE IN APRIL 2018 TO DELIVER THE FIRST ON-CAMPUS TALK IN THE SERIES AND TO ATTEND THE UNVEILING AT HDS OF A PAINTING THAT HONORS HIS WORK. FEBRUARY 7, 2018 CLAIMING GOD’S PEACE WHEN WHITENESS STANDS ITS GROUND THE REV. KELLY BROWN DOUGLAS, DEAN OF EPISCOPAL DIVINITY SCHOOL AT UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, DELIVERS THE ANNUAL GREELEY LECTURE FOR PEACE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EXAMINES THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF WHITENESS AS AN IMPEDIMENT TO LIVING GOD’S JUSTICE.

OCTOBER 31, 2017 500 YEARS OF MARTIN LUTHER HDS RECOGNIZES THE 500TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION WITH A SERIES OF EVENTS THROUGHOUT THE SEMESTER, INCLUDING A SPECIAL EXHIBIT ORGANIZED BY ANDOVERHARVARD THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY.

NOVEMBER 9, 2017 RLP CONNECTS REFUGEES, HARVARD STUDENTS THE RELIGIOUS LITERACY PROJECT PARTNERS WITH SHARED STUDIOS TO BRING IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGY TO THE HDS CAMPUS THAT ALLOWS MEMBERS OF THE HARVARD COMMUNITY TO CONNECT IN REAL TIME WITH RESIDENTS AND REFUGEES LIVING IN BERLIN, GAZA CITY, JORDAN, AND IRAQ.

FEBRUARY 15, 2018 HDS ANNOUNCES LARGEST GIFT IN SCHOOL HISTORY ARTIST AND PHILANTHROPIST SUSAN SHALLCROSS SWARTZ AND HER HUSBAND, INVESTOR JAMES R. SWARTZ ’64, MAKE A RECORD $25M GIFT TO TRANSFORM THE HDS CAMPUS THROUGH THE RENEWAL OF THE SCHOOL’S MAIN CLASSROOM BUILDING, ANDOVER HALL. DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 2

NOVEMBER 9, 2017 E.J. DIONNE ADDRESSES POLITICAL STRAINS IN THE U.S. DRAWING ON LESSONS FROM THEOLOGIAN REINHOLD NIEBUHR, REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND OTHERS, VISITING PROFESSOR AND JOURNALIST E.J. DIONNE URGES LISTENERS TO FIGHT FOR JUSTICE WHILE THEY ALSO CULTIVATE GENUINE UNDERSTANDING AND SYMPATHY FOR THOSE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM.

DECEMBER 7, 2017 RELIGIOUS LITERACY IN GOVERNMENT WITH A KEYNOTE ADDRESS FROM SHAUN CASEY, MDIV ’83, THD ’98, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE’S OFFICE OF RELIGION AND GLOBAL AFFAIRS, THE RELIGIOUS LITERACY PROJECT HOLDS A SYMPOSIUM THAT EXPLORES THE COMPLICATED ROLES RELIGIONS PLAY IN THE NATION’S DEBATE OVER IMMIGRATION.

Year in Review

FEBRUARY 21, 2018 DEMOGRAPHER DISCUSSES ‘THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA’ IN CONVERSATION WITH JOURNALIST AND VISITING PROFESSOR E.J. DIONNE, ROBERT P. JONES, CEO OF THE PUBLIC RELIGION RESEARCH INSTITUTE, EXPLAINS THE DRAMATIC SHIFT IN DEMOGRAPHICS THAT HERALD THE END OF THE UNITED STATES AS A MAJORITY WHITE CHRISTIAN NATION.

MARCH 3, 2018 HARVARD/HDS EARN NO. 1 RANKING FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW, HARVARD CLAIMS THE WORLD’S TOP SPOT FOR THE STUDY OF DIVINITY, THEOLOGY, AND RELIGION IN THE PRESTIGIOUS QS UNIVERSITY RANKINGS.

MAY 24, 2018 HDS CELEBRATES COMMENCEMENT HDS AWARDS 140 DEGREES DURING THE ANNUAL MULTIRELIGIOUS COMMENCEMENT SERVICE AND DIPLOMA AWARDING CEREMONY, INCLUDING 134 MASTER’S DEGREES AND SIX DOCTORATES.

MARCH 28, 2018 JUDITH BUTLER DELIVERS JAMES LECTURE RENOWNED GENDER THEORIST AND PHILOSOPHER JUDITH BUTLER DELIVERS THE WILLIAM JAMES LECTURE WITH A TALK TITLED “DEATH DRIVE, ORGANIC PACIFISM: RECONSIDERING FREUD AND EINSTEIN FOR THE PRESENT.”

APRIL 12, 2018 THE LITURGY OF HOME DELIVERING THE ANNUAL INGERSOLL LECTURE ON IMMORTALITY, ENVIRONMENTALIST, ACTIVIST, AUTHOR, AND HDS WRITER-INRESIDENCE TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS SPEAKS ON THE ESSENTIAL GESTURES AND SACRED ACTIONS THAT LEAD TO A CHANGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONSEQUENCE.

APRIL 13, 2018 THE FUTURE OF ‘SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS’ SCHOLARS CONVENE AT HDS TO EXPLORE THE HISTORY AND ROLE OF THE SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT WITH WHICH NEARLY 20 PERCENT OF U.S. CITIZENS SELF-IDENTIFY.

MAY 3, 2018 NUREMBERG PROSECUTOR SPEAKS ON SUSTAINING PEACE AT A COLLOQUIUM HOSTED BY THE RELIGIONS AND THE PRACTICE OF PEACE INITIATIVE, BENJAMIN B. FERENCZ, JD ’43 HLS, FORMER UNITED STATES PROSECUTOR AT THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL AT NUREMBERG, SPEAKS ON THE ROLE OF LAW, POLICY, AND ETHICS IN SUSTAINING PEACE AND HOW THE UNITED NATIONS CAN FORGE A MORE COHERENT VISION OF THIS NEW PARADIGM.

JUNE 18, 2018 HDS LAUNCHES EXECUTIVE EDUCATION PROGRAM 20 PARTICIPANTS FROM DIVERSE PROFESSIONS AND FIELDS ATTEND MAKING CHANGE, AN INTENSIVE FOUR-DAY PROGRAM DESIGNED TO ENABLE THEM TO REFLECT ON THEIR OWN LIVES AND TO IDENTIFY AND GATHER THE TOOLS THEY NEED TO HAVE A POSITIVE IMPACT ON THE WORLD. DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 3

Year in Review

2018 GOMES HONOREES: EXEMPLIFYING HDS’S PUBLIC VOICE The tradition of HDS graduates speaking and acting publicly—and often prophetically—extends back to the School’s earliest years. Few exemplified the School’s public voice more powerfully than the late Rev. Peter J. Gomes STB ’68, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in Harvard’s Memorial Church, who risked his career in 1991 when he joined campus protests against homophobia and publicly acknowledged that he was gay. And few carry this tradition on more proudly than this year’s Peter J. Gomes STB ’68 Memorial Honorees.

Chosen each year by the HDS Alumni/Alumnae Council (AAC), the Gomes honorees represent the diverse personal and professional paths on which HDS graduates have an impact. In 2018, the council recognized: ROBERT MICHAEL FRANKLIN, MDIV ’78 The former president of Morehouse College and former director of the religion program at the Chautauqua Institute, Robert Franklin is a prolific author on social justice issues as a scholar of public theology, and a voice for moral leadership and formation within the academy.

JALANE D. SCHMIDT, MDIV ’96, AM ’05, PHD ’05 A scholar-activist in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Jalane Schmidt was a central and instrumental player in the resistance to white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville during the summer of 2017.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 4

SIMRAN JEET SINGH, MTS ’08 A religious studies scholar and an advocate for pluralism, inclusion, and social justice issues, Simran Jeet Singh is a Sikh activist who works to dispel myths about his religious tradition.

KAREN I. TSE, MDIV ’00 An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, lawyer, and international rights activist, Karen Tse is the founder and CEO of International Bridges to Justice—an organization that seeks to end the use of torture as an investigative tool around the world.

FACULTY HONOREE ANN D. BRAUDE Senior Lecturer on American Religious History and director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Ann Braude’s efforts to curate the School’s bicentennial exhibit “Faces of Divinity” shed light on HDS’s path from Unitarian origins to a multireligious twenty-first-century divinity school.

Year in Review

FACULTY APPOINTMENTS AND PROMOTIONS CHERYL GILES Francis Greenwood Peabody Senior Lecturer on Pastoral Care and Counseling (Reappointment) A licensed clinical psychologist, Cheryl Giles has extensive experience in the treatment of children, adolescents, and their families with significant mental illness, high-risk behaviors, and traumatic stress. Prior to coming to HDS, she was director of the Lighthouse Program, a residential facility in Brighton, Massachusetts, that treated adolescents who were newly discharged from psychiatric hospitals and needed time for stabilization before returning home. Her primary research interests are identifying the role of risk and resilience in developing healthy adolescents, exploring the impact of contemplative care for the dying, and increasing awareness about health care disparities for African Americans.

A core faculty member of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, Giles received training and certification in end-of-life care from the Being With Dying program and G.R.A.C.E.: Training in Compassion-Based Interactions in the Clinical/Patient Encounter at Upaya Zen Center.

She teaches courses on spiritual counseling, contemplative care of the dying, and antiracism practices for ministry, and mentors students who are preparing for health care chaplaincy, social justice, and research on the psychology of contemplative care.

Giles is the co-editor of The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work (Wisdom Press, 2012).

She has authored articles on contemplative care of the dying and preparing clinicians to become compassionate caregivers.

MICHELLE SANCHEZ Associate Professor of Theology (Promotion) Sanchez received her doctorate in the study of religion in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. She completed her dissertation, “Providence: From Pronoia to Immanent Affirmation in John Calvin’s Institutes of 1559,” under the direction of HDS professor Amy Hollywood.

Her research interests include the Christian movements of reform and complicated legacies of Protestantism, and the complex

interrelationships between theology, politics, and rapid social change that marked sixteenth-century Europe. She also studies ways of reading theology that are attentive not only to the traditions themselves, but also to how theological writing responds to concrete historical conditions and general human concerns.

In 2012, Sanchez was recognized by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning for excellence in undergraduate teaching. She also received a Denie S. Weil Teaching Fellowship in Religious Ethics at Harvard. She has been active with regional and national scholarly groups, including the American Academy of Religion, focusing on theology in historical and contemporary contexts.

TODNE THOMAS Assistant Professor of African American Religions (Appointment) An anthropologist who specializes in religion, race, and kinship, Todne Thomas’s work among evangelical churches in the southern United States expands narratives that too often focus on the political activity of white conservative Protestants, on the one hand, and homogeneous accounts of black churches, on the other.

Thomas’s ethnographic accounts reveal the gendered, racialized, and neoliberal logics that inform evangelical encounters on the world stage. Her current book project, based on extensive ethnographic work in Atlanta, Georgia, attempts to show how both traditionally African American and more recent Afro-Caribbean immigrant churches appeal to (or obscure) the interwoven nature of race and kinship to navigate racial discrimination.

As a Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, Thomas will spend a year, during her first three years at the University, as a fellow at the Institute, with 50 scholars, scientists, and artists pursuing innovative work across disciplinary boundaries. The Radcliffe Professorship Program helps recruit pioneering scholars to the Harvard faculty by providing time and resources to pursue new work.

Thomas has a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and Africana studies from Cornell University. She has authored several articles that have appeared in peer-reviewed publications, including The Journal of African American Studies, Journal of Africana Religions, and Anthropology and Humanism.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 5

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 LEILA AHMED, Victor S. Thomas 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 DIANA L. ECK , Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society (FAS) FRANCIS SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA , Charles Chauncey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies CHERYL A. GILES , Francis Greenwood

BABER JOHANSEN, Professor of Islamic

MICHELLE C. SANCHEZ , Associate Professor

Religious Studies

of Theology

MARK D. JORDAN, Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity

Stendahl 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

of Jewish Studies

KEVIN J. MADIGAN, Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History

ELISABETH SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA , Krister

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) JONATHAN L. WALTON, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church (FAS), and Professor of Religion and Society (HDS)

DAN MCKANAN, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity

CORNEL R. WEST, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy (HDS and FAS)

ANNE E. MONIUS , Professor of South Asian

MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY EMERITI

DIANE L. MOORE, Director, Religious Literacy

JOHN BRAISTED CARMAN, Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Religion, Emeritus

Religions

Project, Lecturer in Religion, Conflict, and Peace, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions LAURA S. NASRALLAH, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity JACOB K. OLUPONA , Professor of African Religious Traditions, with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies (FAS)

HARVEY GALLAGHER COX , Hollis Professor

of Divinity, Emeritus

ARTHUR JAMES DYCK , Professor of Ethics, Emeritus, and Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics, Emeritus (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) WILLIAM A. GRAHAM, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, and Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Emeritus (FAS)

Peabody Senior Lecturer on Pastoral Care and Counseling

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

JANET GYATSO, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs

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

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

CHARLES HALLISEY, Yehan Numata Senior

MATTHEW L. POTTS , Associate Professor

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

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

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 6

of Religion and Literature and of Ministry Studies AHMED RAGAB , Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion MAYRA RIVERA RIVERA , Professor of Theology

and Latinx Studies and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (FAS)

DUDLEY C. ROSE, Associate Dean for Ministry Studies and Lecturer on Ministry

PETER MACHINIST, Hancock Research Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages (FAS) RALPH BENAJAH POTTER, JR., Professor

of Social Ethics, Emeritus

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

Year in Review

FACULTY BOOKS 2017–18

HOW TO DO COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY: EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES IN DIALOGUE Francis X. Clooney, S.J. (co-editor), Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology This volume contributes to the maturation of method in the field of comparative theological studies, learning across religious borders, by bringing together essays drawing on different Christian traditions of learning, Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the wisdom of senior scholars, and also insights from a younger generation of scholars who have studied theology and religion in new ways and are more attuned to the language of the “spiritual but not religious.”

THE FUTURE OF HINDU-CHRISTIAN STUDIES: A THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology Based on the Westcott-Teape Lectures given in India and at the University of Cambridge, this book explores the possibilities and problems attendant upon the field of Hindu-Christian studies, the reasons for occasional flourishing and decline in such studies, and the fragile conditions under which the field can flourish in the 21st century.

The chapters examine key instances of Christian-Hindu learning, highlighting the Jesuit engagement with Hinduism, the modern Hindu reception of Western thought, and certain advances in the study of religion that enhance intellectual cooperation.

LEARNING INTERRELIGIOUSLY: IN THE TEXT, IN THE WORLD Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology Learning Interreligiously offers a series of about 100 short pieces, written online between 2008 and 2016. They are meant for a wide range of readers interested in interreligious dialogue, interreligious learning, and the realities of Hindu-Christian encounter today and are rich in insights drawn from teaching, travels in America and India, and the author’s research on sacred texts.

THE VARIETIES OF TEMPORAL EXPERIENCE: TRAVELS IN PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC TIME Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions What does it mean to live in time, between the unforeseeable and the irreversible? In The Varieties of Temporal Experience, Michael Jackson demonstrates the significance of a phenomenology of time

for ethnography, philosophy, and history through a multifaceted consideration of the gap between our cultural representations of temporality and the bewildering multiplicity of our experience of being-in-time.

ECO-ALCHEMY: ANTHROPOSOPHY AND THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity A historical and ethnographic study of the environmental movement, Eco-Alchemy uncovers for the first time the profound influences of anthroposophy and its founder, Rudolf Steiner, whose holistic worldview, rooted in esoteric spirituality, inspired the movement.

Dan McKanan shows that environmentalism is itself a complex ecosystem and that it would not be as diverse or as transformative without the contributions of anthroposophy.

EPHESIANS (WISDOM COMMENTARY SERIES) Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza examines the political understandings of ekklesia and household in Ephesians as well as the roles that such understandings have played in the formation of early Christian communities and that still shape such communities today. By paying close attention to the function of androcentric biblical language within Ephesians, Schüssler Fiorenza engages in a critical feminist emancipatory approach to biblical interpretation that calls for conscientization and change, that is, for the sake of wo/men’s salvation or well-being.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN SPIRITUAL KINSHIP: SACRED TIES ACROSS THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS Todne Thomas (co-editor), Assistant Professor of African American Religions (HDS) and Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor (Radcliffe Institute) This volume examines the significance of spiritual kinship—or kinship reckoned in relation to the divine—in creating myriad forms of affiliations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Rather than confining the study of spiritual kinship to Christian godparenthood or presuming its disappearance in light of secularism, the authors investigate how religious practitioners create and contest sacred solidarities through ritual, discursive, and ethical practices across social domains, networks, and transnational collectives.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 7

Year in Review

DEAN’S DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD RALPH M. JAMES The Dean’s Distinguished Service Award recognizes exemplary service to—and support of—Harvard Divinity School. Recipients have a deep understanding of HDS and its mission, and they serve as visible advocates for the School, helping us to strategically advance HDS and the Dean’s priorities.

Harvard Divinity School not only prepares scholars, ministers, and leaders to work for a better world, but also brings together knowledge from many different disciplines to advance understanding of the way that religion shapes human experience. It’s how HDS seeks to make a world of difference.

This hybrid mission can be difficult to understand for those outside the School, but Ralph James, MBA ’82, gets it instinctively. A longtime champion of “One Harvard,” James embraces the value of the study of religion at HDS because it is inherently interdisciplinary. He sees in the School’s capacity to bring people and knowledge together across boundaries an important model for others at the University—one he promotes through the support and guidance he gives to initiatives throughout Harvard.

As co-chair of the Harvard Campaign for the Graduate School of Education (HGSE), James looked for ways to build stronger connections between HGSE and Harvard Business School (HBS) students, graduates, and faculty who are intensely interested in education reform. As a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council at the Radcliffe Institute, he supports a long tradition of convening scholars from many disciplines who collaborate on pathbreaking ideas. Through his work on the Dean’s Council at HDS, he is in close touch with initiatives in ethics, leadership, and values that complement research and teaching at HBS. James, whose career included 10 years in the private sector as president and COO of the First Marblehead Corporation, spent most of his working life at HBS. In his role as executive director of university affairs, from which he retired in August 2017, James took the work of developing connections to a whole new level. There he saw his job as a chance to connect people, programs, and ideas across Harvard in ways that would maximize their positive impact on the world.

Following his strong belief in the power of “One Harvard,” James observes that “Harvard is bigger than the sum of its parts. Its impact on the world is greatest when all the parts work together.”

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 8

HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL

Dean’s Distinguished Service Award 2018 RALPH JAMES Having lost your way to class many years ago, you have nonetheless found Harvard Divinity School in all the ways that matter.

Your life and career in higher education demonstrate that you have always carried with you the passion for ethical leadership and service that brings students here. In your approach to problems, you exemplify the most important things we try to teach. You listen more than you speak. You reflect on what you hear. You seek to understand. And then you ask, “What can I do to help?” Your commitment to HDS demonstrates a love for the School that many of its alumni take with them when they graduate.

In helping to raise the profile of the Divinity School throughout Harvard and beyond, you have become one of our most valued advocates. With your encouragement and expertise, the School is positioned to reach new audiences and to bring religious knowledge to leaders and organizations who need it most.

Through your philanthropy—as well as that of the Robert & Ardis James Foundation—you have enabled HDS to advance its mission in creative ways and to take advantage of new opportunities to drive the public conversation on religion in the twenty-first century.

At an often-siloed University, you are a connector, championing the Divinity School’s ethos of scholarship, collaboration, and conversation that crosses boundaries. In so doing, you embody the spirit of “One Harvard” and remind us all that—whatever our achievements—they can be greater still when we work together.

A school that sits on the outskirts of Harvard’s sprawling campus could have no better friend than someone at the center of it all. We are deeply grateful for your guidance, your support, your loyalty, and your warmth. And so, on behalf of Harvard Divinity School, it is my great pleasure to present the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award to you, Ralph James, on this 13th day of April 2018.

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

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 9

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TO BRING RELIGIOUS STUDIES INTO THE 21ST CENTURY With over $77 million raised, this unprecedented effort will renew the School for a third century of leadership, enabling it to advance the study of global religion, drive the public conversation on the world’s religious traditions and their influence on nearly every area of human activity, and

THE C AMPAI GN FOR HD S

prepare scholars and religiously literate, ethical leaders who work for a better world.

ILLUMINATE: A VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Dean David N. Hempton laid out a vision for the Campaign for HDS at the launch of its public phase on April 4, 2014. Describing the campaign as a five-year effort to bring into the future the School’s focus on religion, values, meaning, and the most important questions of life, Hempton said that HDS aspired to “advance the study of religion not through work in one faith or two...but through critical scholarship in all of the world’s major traditions,” to “transform public understanding of religion by inspiring dialogue, learning, and reflection among people of all faiths,” and to “build a better world by enabling extraordinary men and women to obtain the knowledge and skills to serve humanity, and then to go where they are most needed.”

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ENGAGE: NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO CONNECT The Campaign for HDS aimed to advance the School’s mission not only through fundraising, but also by extending and strengthening the HDS community. To this end, the Divinity School offered alumni and friends new and enhanced opportunities for engagement across the globe. Events and gatherings such as the Gomes Honors, Divinity Dialogues, regional Harvard Club talks, the WSRP National Leadership Conference, and the HDS Bicentennial and Alumni Reunion all helped build new connections between the School and community members in North America, Asia, and Europe.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 11

THE C AMPAIGN FOR HARVARD DIVINIT Y SCHO OL

FROM ASSOCIATE DEAN HANNAH PETERS When we began planning for the Campaign for Harvard Divinity School in 2012, we knew the stakes were high.

On the cusp of the School’s bicentennial, Dean Hempton had a vision for HDS—one that would renew and propel it into a third century of leadership in the study of religion. It would take substantial new resources to make this vision a reality and to cement the School’s distinctive mission of academic excellence, professional education, and multireligious community.

Thanks to you, we successfully met this daunting challenge. In the years to come, we will transform the HDS campus with twenty-first-century teaching, research, and convening spaces worthy of the diverse students, scholars, and leaders we attract. Thanks to you, we will advance religious knowledge and bring it to literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world through programs like the groundbreaking Religious Literacy Project and the initiative on Religions and the Practice of Peace, and through massive open online courses on the HarvardX platform. And thanks to you, we will bring to HDS the most talented and devoted students, regardless of their financial circumstances, with an aid program that provides scholarships to 9 out of 10 degree candidates.

There is so much more to do. An understanding of religion is essential to virtually all cultures and disciplines, so we must extend HDS’s international reach. We must increase the diversity and excellence of our faculty and students. Only in this way can we achieve our highest goal: to model the respectful, authentic conversations on complex and sensitive topics that are vital to our flourishing as a human society.

Your overwhelming generosity throughout the campaign indicates that our work here matters.

In these challenging times, your devotion to and enthusiasm for HDS inspire us all and ensure that our future is bright. Let’s stride boldly into it together!

Gratefully,

Hannah Peters Associate Dean, Development and External Relations

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 12

THE C AMPAIGN FOR HARVARD DIVINIT Y SCHO OL

ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATING ETHICAL, RELIGIOUSLY LITERATE LEADERS

Approximately 90% of HDS students depend on scholarships, making financial aid an ongoing priority for the School.

HDS STUDENTS HDS students come from diverse religious traditions, backgrounds, and professions, but they are united in their commitment to service and to religious and cultural understanding. They are scholars of Christianity, Buddhist

During the Campaign for HDS, alumni and friends provided $5 million in direct support for students.

monastics, humanist chaplains in training, to name only a few of their callings.

FACULTY OF DIVINITY

Students come to HDS to learn from faculty who include some of the world’s top scholars in Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and many smaller traditions.

The Faculty of Divinity teach about half the courses on religion at Harvard College.

Campaign gifts to the HDS Fund for One Harvard support the School’s contributions to undergraduate education.

Campaign gifts established new faculty positions in fields such as Christian studies; religion, ethics and business; and religion, conflict and peace, both bolstering the School’s core strengths and putting HDS at the center of the “One Harvard” emphasis on interdisciplinary work.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 14

THE C AMPAIGN FOR HARVARD DIVINIT Y SCHO OL

NEW INITIATIVES With support from campaign gifts, HDS developed programs that look at religion, culture, and ethics in new ways; bring religious knowledge to efforts to address critical challenges; and foster collaboration with colleagues throughout the University.

During the Campaign for HDS, donors provided $8.5 million in flexible, current use funds that enable the School to pursue new initiatives such as the Religious Literacy Project, Religions and the Practice of Peace, the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, and Executive Education which inform policy, educate new religious leaders, and enable students to be agents of positive social change.

CAMPUS RENEWAL

THANK YOU HDS alumni and friends are a worldwide, 6,500-person community network of partners in the School’s mission to advance knowledge, lead religious communities, and work for a better world.

2,300 supporters contributed to HDS during the campaign. 55 percent of these were HDS alumni, 22 percent were other Harvard alumni, and 23 percent were friends from beyond Harvard.

Together, the HDS community contributed $77.6M toward the School’s mission to illuminate, engage, and serve. The campaign’s success is their achievement.

The HDS campus fosters the intellectual and spiritual development of students with diverse backgrounds and interests and provides common spaces for study, worship, and social connection.

Thanks to some of the largest gifts in its 200-year history, HDS will reimagine iconic Andover Hall, the center of teaching and learning at the School. The renewal of the heart of the HDS campus will transform research and education at the School, making possible a third century of leadership in the study of religion.

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WH O ADVAN CE UND E R S TAND ING OF R E LI GI ON

Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf With support from the Campaign for HDS, Paulsell explores religious elements in the work of one of literature’s most noted atheists

“Woolf was raised by people who had lost their faith and were trying to construct life practices and ethics that could sustain them and help them interpret the world.”

Stephanie Paulsell

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 16

STEPHANIE PAULSELL IS A SCHOLAR OF RELIGION AND A PERSON OF DEEP faith, but when deciding on a subject for her latest research, she chose one of literary history’s most enthusiastic atheists.

“Virginia Woolf was raised by Victorian agnostics to think that people who believed in God were not facing reality,” says Paulsell, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). “She once wrote to her sister that ‘there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.’ But her novels are full of religious language: consecration, revelation, soul, spirit. For me, she is a generative religious thinker.”

Religious work is something Paulsell knows well. As the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies—a chair established through Swartz’s landmark 2012 gift to the Campaign for Harvard Divinity School—she is a core member of HDS’s multireligious ministry education program. In both her teaching and research, Paulsell often explores transcendence in experiences that are not formally religious, not unlike the one she had reading Woolf as a freshman at Greensboro College.

“Woolf was raised by people who had lost their faith and were trying to construct life practices and ethics that could sustain them and help them interpret the world,” she explains.

“She was trying to create a new form for modernity, when we know much more about the world, and evolution, and even where the Bible came from. She’s part of a project to recreate sacred community.”

At a time when mainline Christianity has been upended in the United States, Paulsell says there is also an opportunity to chart a new course for spiritual life in the modern world.

The work and life of Virginia Woolf is a rich resource for that project.

“We have a chance to look at the resources of all our traditions and see the ways in which they do speak to the deepest, fiercest hopes and aspirations and fears that we have,” she says. “Woolf thought that the religion around her did not often offer responses to those hopes and fears that were equal to them and explored in her writing other spiritual alternatives.

We have the same challenge today. The question is, ‘How do we marshal the resources of religion toward these very human longings?’”

—Paul Massari

THE C AMPAI GN FOR HD S

“The first novel of hers that I read was To The Lighthouse,” she remembers. “I didn’t fully understand it, but there was something there that felt religious to me. She has a way of opening up the hidden moments of our lives, returning our own experience to us, illuminated. It felt like a spiritual experience to read her.”

In her forthcoming book, Religion around Virginia Woolf, Paulsell explores the ways that the novelist’s engagement with religion went far beyond the question of belief to include “studying the history of religions; reading the Bible...studying religious art and thinking about her own art in relation to it; drawing in complex ways upon religious language and religious themes both in her novels and in her reflections on the practices of reading and writing; and creating a literature that did, and continues to do, a kind of religious work.” Moreover, Woolf was an insightful, often scathing critic of clergy who failed to deliver in ritual the kind of transcendent, meaningful experience she strived for in art—and in life.

“After the funeral for her friend, Ottoline Morrell,” Paulsell writes, “[Woolf] bemoaned ‘the lack of intensity’ in the service and the ways in which symbols of British power, in the form of medals on the clergyman’s robe and the presence of the Union Jack in the sanctuary, undermined the solemnity of the occasion and the sacredness of the space. What did any of this have to do ‘with Ottoline, or our feelings?’ she asked when she reflected on the day in her diary. And when she read a bishop’s empty musings on heaven in the newspaper, she despaired at how unequal the representatives of religion were to the task of articulating religious hopes and desires. ‘The duty of heavenmaking,’ she wrote, needs more than a bishop can bring to it: ‘it needs time and concentration. It needs the imagination of a poet.’”

Paulsell’s last book, co-authored with the HDS theologian Harvey Cox, was a commentary on the Bible’s Song of Songs.

She says that she finds a connection between the Song and Woolf’s work. Both are concerned with intimacy—and the ways in which it frequently falls short of human longing.

“The lovers in the Song of Songs are always asking ‘Where are you? Who are you?’” Paulsell says. “I think Woolf gets at that experience in books like The Waves and Three Guineas.

We miss each other. We try to communicate. We fail. We can’t understand what’s going on with the other. But then sometimes we can. Sometimes we look together at something or, through very ordinary gestures, we know each other for a moment. Like the Song of Songs, Woolf reveres those moments.”

Woolf’s work is particularly relevant in the age of “the nones,” Paulsell says, a time when formal affiliation with religious organizations is on the wane and young people in particular look for new ways to identify and mark the sacred in their lives.

SERVE: VOLUNTEERS GIVE MORE THAN MONEY By contributing time and advice as well as philanthropic support, members of the Dean’s Council and Alumni/ Alumnae Council were invaluable partners in the Campaign for HDS. Over 80 people served on at least one of these councils, which included a campaign advisory subcommittee.

The Divinity School is especially indebted to campaign cochairs Susan Shallcross Swartz, Ram Sudireddy, and Thomas M. Chappell, MTS ’91, and the late John. C. Whitehead (honorary), without whose wisdom, energy, and commitment the campaign would not have been a success.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 17

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WH O ADVAN CE UND E R S TAND ING OF R E LI GI ON

Excavating the Spiritual Genius of Black People Todne Thomas sheds light on Afro-diasporic religious life

“There’s this idea of the ’Trumpvangelical. We can talk about a white evangelical majority, but whites don’t own evangelicalism. There are many strands, substrates, and narratives about evangelical Christianity in the United States today. Those are the stories I want to tell.”

Todne Thomas DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 18

“MOUTHS DON’T EMPTY THEMSELVES unless ears are sympathetic and knowing,” wrote the twentieth-century anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men, her collection of African American oral histories, sermons, songs, and folk tales. Hurston’s words could have been a mantra for sociocultural anthropologist Todne Thomas, who embedded herself in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American religious communities in the American South as research for her forthcoming book.

“I attended as many church services as possible,” she says. “I attended the breaking of bread service in the early morning. I was there at Sunday school, Bible study, worship service, and in the parking lot until every car was gone. I was a vacation Bible school teacher. I tried to be as integrated into religious and congregational life as I could in order to listen for the deep stories of the people there.”

Thomas, Assistant Professor of African American Religions, is one of the newest members of the Faculty of Divinity, which has expanded and diversified over the last five years, thanks in large part to support from the Campaign for Harvard Divinity School. Like Hurston, whose work was the subject of her undergraduate thesis at Cornell University, Thomas focuses on Afro-diasporic religious communities in the southern U.S. and the Caribbean.

“Zora Neale Hurston showed me the kind of conceptual vigor it takes to do vigorous ethnographic research,” she says. “Seeing the way that she thought very carefully about methods really appealed to me. I look at the intersections between the Caribbean and the U.S. south in a different way than Hurston did, but I’m very inspired by her work.”

For her new book on black evangelicalism, Thomas collaborated with two Christian congregations in the Atlanta, Georgia, area. One had a predominantly Afro-Caribbean membership; the other was predominantly Afro-American. Thomas explored the relationships, values, and practices through which each community understood themselves as authentically Christian.

“The community that I did research with practiced a type of evangelicalism that was brought to the United States by Afro-Caribbean missionaries who believed that African Americans needed exposure to Bible-believing Christianity—a very complicated concept,” she says. “There were moments of ethnic tension, particularly around the idea that African American Christianity was somehow less Biblically grounded than the Christianity that the Afro-Caribbeans were trying to translate.”

Thomas says that one of the ways that ethnic tension was navigated was through a language of spiritual kinship that enabled people not only to understand each other

“There’s a sense of possibility and seriousness about the work we do here. It requires us to maintain a certain sense of engagement with the world beyond campus. It’s a challenge, but what we do here in the classroom will have an afterlife.

It doesn’t just go on a transcript.

It has a future.”

Todne Thomas

as “brothers and sisters in Christ,” but also to create a community that assisted them with living through the realities of discrimination and racism in the wider society.

“These ideas help people to enliven themselves as spiritual mothers, parents, and prayer partners,” she says. “It’s a set of relationships—a technology of belonging and intimacy—that provides a way for people to live ethically with each other and also to mitigate the experience of being racialized as black.”

In general, Thomas studies Afrodiasporic religious movements where European influence isn’t necessarily primary. While she acknowledges “the weight of coloniality” on the people of the south Atlantic, Thomas says that a narrow focus on colonization misses the imprint that people of African descent

made on religion in the “New World.”

“When the term Afro-Caribbean religion comes up, people are likely to think of things like Santeria or voodoo,” she explains. “I’m a scholar of Christianity. I think it’s also an important project to look at how black Christians from different ethno-national backgrounds navigate, translate, practice, and understand Christianity. I cannot drop the colonial aspect, because it’s important, but there are other things happening as well.”

Those “other things” include an understanding of evangelicalism in the United States that goes beyond what Thomas calls the “white evangelical norm.”

“There’s this idea of the ‘Trumpvangelical,’” she says. “We can talk about a white evangelical majority, but whites

don’t own evangelicalism. There are many strands, substrates, and narratives about evangelical Christianity in the United States today. Those are the stories I want to tell.”

They are also the stories that students want to hear, if Thomas’s first year at HDS is any indication. Although she’d never taught at a divinity school before, Thomas became one of HDS’s bestloved faculty soon after she arrived. Last spring, she received the Outstanding Teacher Award—an honor that caught her off guard.

“I didn’t even know the award existed,” she says. “It made me feel good about the decision to come to HDS. My colleagues said their favorite thing about being here was the students. Now I know why. It was a really beautiful thing.”

Looking ahead, Thomas says that one of the things she finds most gratifying about HDS is the knowledge that her ideas will have a real world impact in the work that the School’s graduates do. It’s a daunting challenge, but also a great opportunity.

“There’s a sense of possibility and seriousness about the work we do here,” she says. It requires us to maintain a certain sense of engagement with the world beyond campus. It’s a challenge, but what we do here in the classroom will have an afterlife. It doesn’t just go on a transcript. It has a future.”

—Paul Massari

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 19

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C AMP U S INSPIR ING D IALO GUE , LE ARNING , AND R E FLE C TI ON

“The renewal of Andover Hall will allow us to prepare twenty-firstcentury students for lives of scholarship, ministry, service, and religiously literate leadership in all fields. It will create new spaces that enable them to learn from each other in an atmosphere of safety, authenticity, and mutual respect.”

Dean David N. Hempton

Andover Makeover Record gifts will be used to remake the heart of the HDS campus

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 20

AS A STUDENT, NATALIE CAMPBELL, MTS ’18, NEEDED MORE THAN A CAMPUS; she needed a second home.

During the 2017–18 academic year, she commuted to class each day from Belmont and couldn’t easily go back and forth to the School, so she often stayed in Cambridge late into the evening. As a result, she needed a place not only to study, but also to eat, relax, and connect with classmates. Unfortunately, those kinds of spaces are few and far between at HDS—particularly at the School’s main campus building, Andover Hall.

“Andover Hall is the center of campus, but it really isn’t equipped to be a center of the community,” says Campbell, who graduated last May. “I can walk around and see no one or maybe a sprinkling of people here or there, but there’s no central place I can go and hang out with my classmates. Most students I know like to go to the Law

A TRUE CAMPUS CENTER The vision for the new Andover Hall is of a true campus center that brings HDS’s core academic resources together with student services. Modernized classrooms with flexible spaces will facilitate new ways of teaching and learning. A 200-seat auditorium will enable the School to host global leaders for conferences and public conversations on religion. A multifaith chapel will welcome all members of the HDS community for worship, performances, and other gatherings. And the new Andover will provide full access throughout the building for people of all physical abilities.

“Like all of Harvard, we have to adapt our spaces to meet the needs of future generations of scholars and students who will walk our halls and inhabit their roles at Harvard and indeed the world,” says Dean Hempton. “The exchange of ideas and knowledge—the interactions that students, faculty, guest scholars and speakers, and alumni have face-to-face—will be enhanced by a renewed physical campus.”

The new Andover will also include an updated multimedia infrastructure that reflects the interconnected, technologyenhanced, multireligious reality students inhabit—and that

facilitates the research and collaboration that make HDS faculty among the best in the world. Academic Dean Janet Gyatso knows how much new digital tools can complement and augment the work that happens on campus. Nonetheless, she says that HDS must continue to strike a balance between the “rich information and resources found online and the both wonderful and critical experience of teaching and learning together in person.”

“Technology can provide amazing tools and access to knowledge,” she says. “But we should never lose sight of the deep connections and inspirations that come from working in community and proximity and that foster value and commitment in our work.”

To facilitate those connections, the School aims to create new communal spaces in the revitalized Andover. Particularly important in light of the fact that HDS is not a residential campus, social space gives students opportunities for informal learning outside of classrooms, a central aspect of the educational experience. According to Tim Whelsky, associate dean for enrollment and student services, these spaces are also critical for the School’s global recruitment efforts.

THE C AMPAI GN FOR HD S

School, Lamont, Widener, or other places removed from HDS that are comfortable and have food. I wish Andover was the type of space that made people want to stay on campus.”

Harvard University’s only instance of Collegiate Gothic architecture, Andover Hall is the Divinity School’s signature building. Its stone walls, soaring bell tower, impressive woodwork, and grand chapel all summon the School’s long history as a training ground for religious leaders and scholars.

But, while HDS has evolved beyond its origins as a residential seminary for liberal Protestant ministers, the often austere teaching, learning, and meeting spaces that the School offers to students like Natalie Campbell have not kept pace. Now, thanks to a major gift from Susan and Jim Swartz, AB ’64—the largest in HDS history—and from other generous donors, Andover Hall will undergo a renewal, its first since construction over 100 years ago.

Dean David N. Hempton says that the project has the potential to transform not only the School’s campus, but also every aspect of teaching and learning at HDS. “The renewal of Andover Hall will allow us to prepare twenty-first-century students for lives of scholarship, ministry, service, and religiously literate leadership in all fields,” he says. “It will create new spaces that enable them to learn from each other in an atmosphere of safety, authenticity, and mutual respect. It will centralize and modernize all we do to support the academic endeavor. And it will leverage technology in new ways to bring knowledge of religion to the world far beyond our little corner of Cambridge.”

FOR CORE NEEDS—AND EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES During the Campaign for HDS, unrestricted gifts to the HDS Fund provided support for every area of work at the School. At the same time, unrestricted support enabled the School to pursue critical new initiatives such as the Religions and the Practice of Peace (RPP) initiative, which leverages the University’s cross-disciplinary expertise, religiously and culturally diverse community, and global reach in order to foster sustainable peace throughout the world. Along with RPP, unrestricted gifts also expanded the Religious Literacy Project, made possible a new executive education program, and funded massive open online courses that reached over 220,000 participants in more than 160 countries around the world.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 21

“Jim and I have seen the impact our previous gifts have had on the lives of HDS graduates and the communities they serve. We are thrilled to partner with the School in its effort to make this unique and historic building an innovation lab for the future of religious education and ethical leadership.”

Susan Swartz “Students come to HDS in large part to engage with talented classmates who are doing exciting things,” he says. “They ask often for spaces where they can connect with one another.

Filling this need is one of the most exciting parts of the vision for Andover.”

Finally, the project will put the School out front on environmental sustainability. A campus leader in the effort to confront climate change, HDS has already reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 36 percent over 2006 levels.

Renewal will earn Andover at least Gold certification in Leadership in Environmental Engineering and Design from the U.S. Green Building Council, increasing the building’s efficiency and comfort, while further reducing campus emissions.

“We always work to improve the sustainability of our campus, but Andover renewal will take it to another level,” says HDS director of operations Ralph DeFlorio. “The project will provide efficient heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in the often extreme New England weather. The lessons learned will provide a model for other historic buildings on Harvard’s campus—and for organizations and communities confronting climate change in the years ahead.”

A DEBT OF GRATITUDE HDS can embark on the long-awaited campus project thanks to a $25 million gift from artist and philanthropist Susan Shallcross Swartz and her husband, investor James R. Swartz, AB ’64, and to support from some of the School's most generous friends.

Two of the School’s most devoted supporters, the Swartzes have given generously for student financial aid, established the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professorship of the Practice of Christian Studies (currently occupied by Rev. Stephanie Paulsell), and funded programming, events, and much more at HDS. Another gift from an anonymous donor will support the creation of a modern conference space, enabling HDS to expand its capacity to bring scholars and leaders together for conversations about religion and its impact on the wider world.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 22

Hannah Peters, associate dean for development and external relations, says that gifts for Andover renewal will have a farreaching effect on the School and its ongoing capital campaign.

“By helping to renew our main teaching, learning, and convening space, these donors increase the impact of every other gift and the effectiveness of all we do at HDS,” she says. “They are our partners in this campaign and we are deeply indebted to them for their generosity and devotion to the School’s mission.”

Moreover, these donations are gifts that will keep on giving.

That’s because, as Harvard’s most endowment-dependent school, HDS has little in the way of funds not restricted by the donor for a specific purpose, such as faculty support or research. Each year, the School must draw on scarce current-use funds for Andover maintenance—a list of projects that grows as the building ages. Every dollar used to patch antiquated electrical systems and plumbing is one that can’t be spent on the student experience or financial aid.

“Andover Hall is the only HDS building that has not had a major renovation,” says DeFlorio. “As a result, there are currently approximately 20 large capital projects that need to be done. These include windows, roof, ventilation systems, fire and safety, accessibility, and many others. If we tackle them piecemeal, it will be expensive, very disruptive, and it could take a decade to complete. Renewal not only compresses all of that, but also allows us to step back and think about how to redesign the building to improve the student experience.”

Susan Swartz says that she and her husband wanted to extend their support to every aspect of the School’s mission with a gift that would truly transform HDS as it begins its third century.

“Jim and I have seen the impact our previous gifts have had on the lives of HDS graduates and the communities they serve,” Swartz says. “We are thrilled to partner with the School in its effort to make this unique and historic building an innovation lab for the future of religious education and ethical leadership.”

—Paul Massari

THE RELIGIOUS LITERACY PROJECT

TOOLS FOR HUMAN FLOURISHING Our civic dialogue has broken down at a time when a robust public conversation on issues like global security, climate change, health care, and human rights is critical for securing a future of peace and prosperity.

A critical factor in this dissolution is a lack of understanding of the religious influences that shape people’s identities, lives, relationships, and communities. This often leads to bigotry and prejudice that prevent collaboration and effective action.

With support from the Campaign for Harvard Divinity School, the Religious Literacy Project (RLP) addresses this crisis by enhancing public understanding of religion in order to mitigate its negative consequences and encourage its positive expression. Through critical scholarship—rather than devotional expression—the project’s work goes well beyond education about the beliefs and rituals associated with the world’s religious traditions.

The RLP gives leaders the conceptual tools to place religion in social, political, and historical context so that they can understand how religion promotes—and, too often, thwarts—human flourishing.

RLP DIRECTOR DIANE L. MOORE Diane L. Moore leverages both her 40-year history working with educators and HDS’s longstanding expertise in the world’s religious traditions to advance understanding of the complex roles religions play in all dimensions of human experience. A Senior Fellow at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions and Lecturer on Religion, Conflict, and Peace, Moore also directs the Certificate in Religious Studies and Education (in partnership with Harvard Extension School) and is a Faculty Affiliate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.

THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF RELIGIOUS LITERACY RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION IS DISTINCT FROM THE CRITICAL STUDY OF RELIGION. RELIGIONS ARE INTERNALLY DIVERSE. RELIGIONS CHANGE AND EVOLVE OVER TIME. RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES ARE EMBEDDED IN ALL AREAS OF HUMAN ACTIVITY.

HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL’S RELIGIOUS LITERACY PROJECT BUILDS UNDERSTANDING OF GLOBAL RELIGION TO HELP CITIZENS AND LEADERS WORK FOR A JUST WORLD AT PEACE

“A better understanding of the complex roles that religions play in human experience can minimize antagonisms and promote peaceful coexistence in local, national, and global arenas. The RLP is at the center of Harvard Divinity School’s commitment to foster religious literacy in the service of a just world at peace across religious and cultural divides.”

David N. Hempton, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity

“As I traveled the world for three and a half years in the role I had in the State Department, I marveled at the deep, deep global desire to have these conversations, and yet at the same time the paucity of literal space and intellectual space where those conversations could go on.”

Religious Literacy and the Professions Fellow Shaun Casey

PROMOTING SUSTAINABLE PEACE Religion is a powerful influence on human affairs, nowhere more visibly than in its capacity to help ignite and resolve conflicts. In recent years, religiously motivated violence has plagued Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan, France, and the United States, to name only a handful of countries.

The Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) brings together scholars from the RLP and Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative to study the role that religious communities play

in violent conflict—and in promoting sustainable peace. Funded with a campaign gift from Ramez Sousou, AB ’85, MBA ’92, and his wife, Tiziana, and part of the One Harvard Sustainable Peace Initiative, the RCPI’s approach produces new insights for leaders in the field of conflict resolution.

Last fall, as part of Diane Moore’s course on religion, conflict, and peace, the RLP partnered with Shared Studios on an immersive technology “portal” that allowed for real-time, face-to-face conversations between people at

Harvard and refugees living in Berlin, Gaza City, Jordan, and Iraq. The participants’ personal encounters enabled them to reframe their understanding of this global refugee crisis, which impacts nearly 23 million people around the world. In the years to come, the RCPI will offer coursework (including January term programming and summer internships in the region), a practitioner fellows program, annual symposia, public events, and new resources for the “Religion, Conflict, and Peace” massive open online course on the HarvardX platform.

“RELIGIOUS LITERACY AND JOURNALISM” brought together professional journalists and professors of journalism and of religious studies to explore the way that religion is covered and shapes the stories that appear in the news media.

“RELIGIOUS LITERACY AND HUMANITARIAN ACTION” convened humanitarian practitioners and leading scholars to discuss how religious knowledge—and its lack—impact the way that aid agencies operate and promote

“The RCP initiative is groundbreaking for both HKS and HDS. It will enable us to leverage the expertise and enthusiasm of faculty and staff from both schools to prepare future leaders, advance scholarship on the region, and build bridges between academia and practice around these critical yet insufficiently studied issues. At a crucial and precarious time in contemporary global affairs, this initiative could not be more timely or urgent.”

Hilary Rantisi, Director of the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School

local leadership. The symposium built on a research report co-authored by the RLP and the international aid organization Oxfam.

“RELIGIOUS LITERACY AND GOVERNMENT” gathered local, state, and national officials—along with scholars, journalists, and community activists—to explore how religion shapes the way that governments respond to ongoing refugee crises.

“RELIGIOUS LITERACY, MEDIA, AND ENTERTAINMENT” convened professionals and scholars of the media, religion, and the entertainment business to assess their roles in shaping public understanding of religion. The conference fostered critical reflection and new collaborative relationships to enhance religious literacy in film, television, and other forms of media.

ENABLING RELIGIOUSLY LITERATE LEADERS IN ALL FIELDS Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has said that the greatest modern challenge is to “build bridges of understanding and tolerance.” “There are some who might want to engage in such a bridge-building effort without bringing religion into the conversation,” she went on. “To them I say, ‘Good luck.’”

The RLP established the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative (RLPI) to address this need for religious knowledge among leaders in critical fields. Established with a campaign gift from H. Bruce McEver, MBA ’69, MTS ’11, and support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the RLPI hosts symposia that connect scholars of religion with practitioners in a range of important fields.

THE SUMMER INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATORS brings secondary and

MINISTRY OF IDEAS

community college teachers to Harvard Divinity School from across the U.S. and Canada. Here they learn to understand

As religious affiliation retreats in the U.S., so does the religious literacy that informs how citizens interpret their culture. The RLP’s “Ministry of Ideas” podcast seeks to address this challenge by improving public understanding of religion’s place in the twenty-first century, one episode at a time.

fundamental intersections of religion and society, politics, and culture with the goal of educating students for critical and informed democratic citizenship.

RLP TOOLS FOR TEACHERS include case studies that bring a religiously literate “lens” to real-world situations and relevant topics, including the residential school system of Canada, environmental fatwas in Indonesia, Jewish views on nuclear weapons, the hijras of India, and much

EMPOWERING EDUCATORS

more. School districts in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Illinois have already begun to use RLP resources in their classrooms.

THE RELIGION AND UNITED STATES HISTORY (RUSH) project provides high school history teachers with practical tools for incorporating the study of religion into 7–12 public education. Hosted on the RLP website, RUSH materials are organized to correspond with common U.S. history textbooks to facilitate easy integration with course content.

The demonization of the religious and ethnic “other” is a profound and growing global crisis. More than 25 percent of the world’s nations struggle with “high” or “very high” levels of social hostility, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2017, hate crimes in the United States increased for the second year in a row, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. Major U.S. cities saw hate crimes rise for a fourth consecutive year.

One of the most effective ways to address the rise in social hostility is to foster religious literacy. And the most effective way to foster religious literacy is to provide K–12 and community college educators with the tools to help students think critically, creatively, and constructively about religion. With support from the Once Here Foundation, the RLP’s Religious Literacy and Education Initiative provides teachers throughout the country with the knowledge and resources they need to transform the way students understand how religions function in human experience in both historical and contemporary contexts.

THE RELIGION IN EDUCATION

“I have taken a lot of professional development over the years and this workshop hit me at my core, in my heart almost. I was challenged academically, pedagogically, and intellectually and I felt the importance of this work from a moral stance, something that initially drew me to teaching but perhaps has waned over the last 13 years.... I felt a renewed spark for my craft and profession.”

Participant in Summer Institute for Educators

MAPPING (REM) project looks at the way that religion is taught in over 16,000 public high schools in the U.S. REM examines the nature and scope of course offerings and includes an interactive web presence as well as guidance for future efforts.

Drawing on the RLP’s cultural studies approach, “Ministry of Ideas” helps listeners get a better grasp of where ideas come from and how they are shaped by other forces—especially Episode 19: Progressive Souls religion. The show’s mission is to provide its audience with the historical knowledge and intellectual tools to exercise good judgment and be effective citizens. Listeners in 120 countries have downloaded “Ministry of Ideas” over 200,000 times, making it one of Buzzfeed’s “27 Podcasts You Need to Start Listening to in 2018.”

Episode 17: Shifting Blame

“This is simply the best podcast out right now....“Ministry of Ideas” looks at the historical roots, bringing in a range of experts, and making us think differently about the world.”

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, News Presenter and Reporter, BBC World Service

A RELIGIOUSLY LITERATE TAKE ON THE NEWS Religion and the “culture wars” are central to many of the day’s biggest news stories, including the populist wave sweeping global politics, Middle East peace, economic inequality, and many others. Unfortunately, the “religion beat” has all but disappeared as news organizations downsize. When religion is covered, it’s often in a way that reproduces many of the problematic assumptions embedded in the culture.

The RLP helps fill the gap with content that brings a religiously literate lens to the news. In the past year, the project produced 33 original articles on topics ranging from the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar to Donald Trump’s participation at the National Prayer Breakfast and white Evangelicals’ response to migrant family separation.

This content reaches thousands of people around the world each month through promotion on HDS and RLP social media channels, which continue to grow rapidly.

“When you say ‘Trump and Evangelicals,’ you think that this is clearly already framed as a story that’s about religion...but do I actually hear anything about the religious beliefs bolstering these people’s understanding of themselves? And I thought, ‘Actually, I’m not seeing much of that in these stories...and in a lot of coverage that I paid attention to.’”

Jason DeRose, Western Bureau Chief, National Public Radio News

BRINGING UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION TO THE WORLD

RELIGIOUS LITERACY PROJECT

BY THE NUMBERS

Religious illiteracy is a national and international problem. In the U.S., for instance, respondents correctly answered only 50 percent of the questions on a 2010 Pew religion survey—including such basic knowledge as “the name of the holy book of Islam” and “the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation.”

MORE THAN

192

The RLP is at the forefront of the effort to increase global religious understanding through the revolution in digital technology and online education. Through massive open online courses produced for the HarvardX platform, the RLP brings deep knowledge of religion to hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

225,000 PARTICIPANTS FROM

33 TEACHING CASE STUDIES PRODUCED FOR USE IN

COUNTRIES ENROLLED IN HARVARDX

HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOMS, INCLUDING FOR

MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSE

WORLD RELIGIONS COURSES, U.S. HISTORY COURSES,

‘WORLD RELIGIONS THROUGH THEIR SCRIPTURES’

WORLD HISTORY, AND SOCIAL STUDIES BROADLY

THIS FALL WILL MARK

250

GRADUATES FROM HDS RLP COURSES

“WORLD RELIGIONS THROUGH THEIR SCRIPTURES” (SCRIPTURESX) brings together leading scholars in the

165 24,000

world’s major religions: Christianity,

739k

ORIGINAL

Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism. After launch in 2016,

NEWS ARTICLES GARNER

the course attracted an international, multicultural audience of over 225,000 participants from 192 countries who

UNIQUE VISITORS TO RLP WEBSITE

VIEWS

examined sacred texts, considered their interpretation, and learned how religions influence—and are influenced by—the diverse political and cultural contexts in which they exist.

55

MAJOR UNIVERSITIES, NEWS OUTLETS,

NGOS, GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES,

“RELIGION, CONFLICT, AND PEACE” was designed particularly for educators,

AND MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT COMPANIES

journalists, public health workers, foreign

HAVE JOINED AND ACTIVELY PARTICIPATED

service officers, and government officials.

IN RLPI SYMPOSIA

The course explores contemporary conflicts in different regions of the world so that students may identify and analyze the role religions play both in promoting

LISTENERS FROM OVER

and in mitigating violence. “Religion,

120 COUNTRIES HAVE DOWNLOADED EPISODES 200K TIMES

Conflict, and Peace” has reached over 22,000 participants in 184 countries since its launch in 2018.

THE RLP ENGAGES WITH PROFESSIONALS FROM

60

DIFFERENT ORGANIZATIONS, INCLUDING: BORDER ACTION NETWORK,

BOSTON UNIVERSITY, CATHOLIC CHARITIES BOSTON, CENTRO PRESENTE, CREATIVE ARTISTS AGENCY, HUMANE BORDERS,

“The focus for me is on teaching [ScripturesX] students to study religion, to distinguish from how it’s practiced by believers, not teaching them to follow the religion, but to disperse easy stereotypes and make the religion appropriately interesting and complex.”

Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, MIT, NPR, OXFAM, UNICEF, U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PATROL, VIACOM, THE WASHINGTON POST

PHOTOS: BR1 (including cover), Religious Literacy Project, Jason Knight, Evgenia Eliseeva, Laurie Shaull, Robert A. Coles, Margaret Kruger, Joe Sherman, Dan Pecci, Alamy, Adobe Stock, Flickr Creative Commons (Elvert Barnes, Thomas Hawk), Wikimedia Commons (Staff Sgt. Justin Phemister, Michal Raspberry, Robert Coles, USAID) The Religious Literacy Project | Harvard Divinity School | 42 Francis Avenue | Cambridge, MA 02138 rlp.hds.harvard.edu | Email: rlp@hds.harvard.edu | Twitter: @HarvardRLP

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S TUD ENT S: S CH OL AR S AND LE AD E R S WH O SE RVE

Students come to Harvard Divinity School to deepen their understanding of the world’s religious traditions and the way they shape virtually every area of human activity. They translate that knowledge into action as scholar-activists, religious leaders, and ethical, religiously literate professionals who work for a better world. Here are some of the remarkable men and women who were on campus last year.

MARGARET BOTROS, MTS ’19 The daughter of Egyptian Coptic Christians, Margaret Botros focused on fulfilling the course requirements for admission to medical school as a student at Harvard College. In her senior year, though, she took a course in the study of religion, fell in love with it, and enrolled at HDS. Botros, who worked part-time at a laboratory in Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Nephrology, both as an undergraduate and during her first year in the MTS program, still plans to go to medical school and says that religious studies will make her a better doctor.

“Premed advisors often treat humanities as secondary and expendable luxuries, but they’re not. This is a study that matters. Religion will impact my practice and the lives of my patients. Being a doctor is not just about ‘Did you deliver treatment correctly?’ It’s about ‘Do you understand?’”

ENOCH ABOI, MTS ’18 Pastor Enoch Aboi grew up with Muslim neighbors in Nigeria’s Kaduna state. He also grew up with conflict as his country became more segregated along religious and cultural lines. At HDS, Pastor Aboi learned to embrace difference and be a more effective peacemaker. He plans now to return to Nigeria to help with the ongoing process of reconciliation.

“It doesn’t matter whether someone is Christian or Muslim. It doesn’t matter what their ethnicity is. In Nigeria, I will work to see the human being in that person, regardless of the difference, and to be able to connect with them with the respect and dignity that they deserve.”

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 31

ZACHARY DAVIS, MTS ’19 As a Mormon from southern Utah, Zachary Davis learned that divinity schools were “places of dangerous speculation on the road to atheism.”

After working on HarvardX online courses for HDS professors Laura Nasrallah and Diane Moore, though, he found himself drawn to the critical study of religion—and to HDS’s commitment to knowledge for the betterment of the world. At HarvardX, he also saw the power of technology, which inspired him as a new student to create “Ministry of Ideas,” an educational program that The Guardian calls “simply the best podcast out right now.”

“We need to have a better grasp of where our ideas come from and how they are manipulated by other forces, so that when we are called to evaluate something, we’re ready to do the duty of a citizen. Being a citizen is a sacred calling, and we can’t be faithful to it if we don’t have the historical knowledge and intellectual tools to exercise good judgment.”

ETHAN FALLEUR, MDIV ’19 Ethan Falleur grew up Catholic and gay in the heart of America’s Bible Belt. He came out while a student at Dartmouth College, where he studied religion and music.

His family was supportive, but many friends back home were not. “I remember posting on Facebook for National Coming Out Day,” he says, “and watching the number of friends go down because people were not comfortable associating with me as an out gay man.” Falleur came to HDS to pursue ordination in the Episcopal Church, where he wants to serve as an example for LGBTQ youth.

“As a queer man in the church, I hope that I can be what trans actress Laverne Cox calls a ‘possibility model.’ She’s a black trans woman, phenomenal actress, and she said, growing up as a black trans person, she didn’t see people like her on TV or in books and movies. We’re starting to see a lot more queer clergy and LGBT-affirming churches, but that fight is not over. So if I can be, to use her words, a possibility model for somebody, then that’s the best I could hope for.”

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 32

JILL GAULDING, MDIV ’20 The co-founder of the nonprofit legal and policy advocacy organization Gender Justice, Jill Gaulding works to eliminate inequality based on gender bias. A graduate of MIT, Gaulding came to HDS to complement her knowledge of cognitive neuroscience with Buddhist insights to get a richer understanding of perception and discrimination.

“Thousands of years ago, Buddhism called out the three poisons—delusion, attachment, and aversion—and told us that we’re making things up inside our heads, and that it’s really important to be aware of that. It’s the same basic insight about how we operate as human beings that we get from cognitive science, and it’s vital for public policy around things like discrimination.”

MAFAZ AL-SUWAIDAN, MTS ’18 Mafaz Al-Suwaidan grew up in Kuwait and came to HDS to study religion and culture, with a focus on Islam. A creative writer and journalist, she explores various Islamic texts and their relationship with religious and cultural identities. This year, she continues her studies in Harvard’s doctoral program.

“People say, ‘I want to challenge the patriarchy.’ Of course I want to challenge the patriarchy. And when I read—the fact that I’m doing this—it’s already being challenged. I see very clearly that my gaining knowledge does serve the world.”

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Chief Counsel Shaped by his time at HDS,

Stanton has become one of the School’s most trusted advisors

“In an effective law firm cultural environment, there’s a very small difference much of the time between being chair and being chaplain, so everything James Luther Adams had to say still rings true.”

Tom Stanton, HDS ’68 TOM STANTON, HDS ’68, ONLY ATTENDED HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL FOR one year, but the experience had a big influence on the rest of his life.

You can see it in his career path. Inspired by his HDS field education experience at an inner-city church, as well as his studies with Professor Harvey Cox, Stanton decided to practice law in part to help stimulate urban development and revitalize cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other Rust Belt metropolises.

Most of all, you can see the impact of Stanton’s time at HDS in his close and continuing relationship with the School. He’s been a member of the HDS Dean’s Council—a group of the School’s most devoted supporters—since 2011. In 2013, Stanton became chair of the council during the record-breaking Campaign for Harvard Divinity School.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 34

THE C AMPAI GN FOR HD S

“My time at HDS was deeply meaningful,” he says. “It’s a very special place, doing so many things right in terms of educating scholars, fostering deeper, broader, and stronger religious understanding, and sending principled leaders out into the world to bring what Paul Tillich referred to as the ‘religious dimension’ to all aspects of life. It certainly helped me sort things out.”

A lifelong midwesterner from the small town of Erie, Illinois, Stanton grew up in a churchgoing family. He learned the importance of hard work in seventh grade when he took his first paying job after the sudden death of his father, a tenant farmer and church elder. Stanton worked throughout high school but still graduated as valedictorian, senior class president, and center fielder for the varsity baseball team. He attended Knox College as an Illinois State Scholar and received generous financial support, but still held down multiple jobs, at one point working as a railroad hostler and nightshift mail handler.

A history major at Knox, Stanton was also drawn to religious studies and did coursework in contemporary theology with Professor William A. Matthews, an authority on Paul Tillich and Alfred North Whitehead. The subject of his senior thesis was the missionary efforts of Protestant denominations to establish small liberal arts colleges across the American heartland in the nineteenth century.

Impressed by Stanton’s scholarship, Knox College’s dean, Hermann Muelder, who supervised Stanton’s thesis, nominated his advisee for a Rockefeller Theological Fellowship and encouraged him to pursue graduate work in religion. Stanton received the fellowship, was admitted to HDS, and came to campus as a bachelor of divinity candidate in the fall of 1967.

He stayed only one year, but Stanton still speaks glowingly of his time at the Divinity School.

“I had a wonderful experience at HDS,” he says. “I took ethics with James Luther Adams. I was in the inaugural class

of Harvey Cox’s church in the city course. I studied the Bible with G. Ernest Wright and Helmut Koester. I lived in Divinity Hall just down from Peter Gomes and spent many evening hours in long conversations with him and other classmates.

It was a very special time.”

Ironically, Stanton’s year at HDS helped him to realize that he wanted to pursue a career in the law, where he could bring his religious knowledge and ethics to bear, particularly on urban environments. A top student at Northwestern Law School, where he received a full scholarship, Stanton had his choice of some of the country’s most prestigious law firms after he graduated. He joined Cleveland-based Squire Sanders in large part because its public sector practice provided an opportunity to represent state and local governments and to “get back to the inner city.” Before long, Stanton was helping to shape housing and urban development policy on a national scale, representing governments, public authorities, and developers in the effort to create and strengthen vibrant communities across the country. Thanks to his efforts and those of his partners, the firm evolved to include one of the nation’s leading public infrastructure practices.

“The New Communities Act of 1972 gave federal funding and support to the creation of new cities, both in existing urban areas and in greenfield settings,” he explains. “I got involved in several projects throughout the country. I also drafted Ohio legislation for the creation of New Community Authorities, which is still used for urban development infrastructure support around the state.”

Stanton served as chair of Squire Sanders for 20 years as it grew into an international firm with over 1,500 lawyers across 46 offices in 21 countries. He says he’s particularly proud of the firm’s work with former eastern bloc countries making the transition from command economies to new legal and economic structures after the fall of communism.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION FOR “ONE HARVARD” The Campaign for HDS enabled students and faculty across the University to engage in the study of religion and its influence on the world’s most pressing challenges. The One Harvard initiative at HDS—established with a generous gift from Jim Hackett, MBA ’79, MTS ’16—was conceived to support HDS faculty who teach about half of the religion courses at Harvard College, providing critical engagement with scholars and students across disciplines. Hackett’s gift will help expand the Divinity School’s pioneering work to educate ethical, religiously literate leaders in every field.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 35

“The capital campaign was a transformational moment for HDS. The renovation of Andover Hall in particular will help the School become even more of a preeminent center for the education of religious scholars and community leaders and for hosting interreligious conversations that can help to reduce intolerance and division that plague the world.”

Tom Stanton, HDS ’68

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 36

“This was essentially more public sector and community development work on a global scale,” he says. “We spent a lot of time and effort, developing new legal structures, training young lawyers, helping to re-establish the rule of law in the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Poland, and other emerging countries. It was very rewarding to support that kind of change, to see the appreciation for it and to assist in the transformation of those countries.”

Recognized as a national leader in the legal profession, Stanton today chairs a roundtable comprised of the heads of 30 top global law firms. Here, too, he says his HDS background comes into play.

“In an effective law firm cultural environment, there’s a very small difference much of the time between being chair and being chaplain, so everything James Luther Adams had to say still rings true,” he says.

Throughout his career, Stanton maintained his relationship with HDS. In 2011, then-Dean William Graham asked him to join the School’s Dean’s Council, where he became one of the School’s most trusted advisors. When the council’s previous chair, William Rainier, stepped down in 2013, Dean David Hempton approached Stanton to take the reins as HDS embarked on the largest capital campaign in its history. It wasn’t a small request, given Stanton’s other board and visiting committee responsibilities at Northwestern Law School, Case Western Reserve University, and elsewhere. To no one’s surprise, however, Stanton has thrived in the job, thanks in large part to his regard for Dean Hempton’s leadership.

“Working with David is my favorite assignment,” he says. “He’s so engaging.

Wonderful sense of humor. Great clarity of vision for the School. He’s a natural leader and it’s simply a pleasure to support his efforts in any way possible.”

With Stanton as Dean's Council chair, and in close coordination with the HDS campaign co-chairs, HDS blew past its goal, raising over $77M—mostly from Dean’s Council members. Moreover, his enthusiasm for the School was infectious, inspiring others to donate and get involved. During his tenure, the council has expanded, ensuring that the success HDS experienced during the campaign will continue now that it is done.

“The capital campaign was a transformational moment for HDS,” he says. “The renovation of Andover Hall in particular will help the School become even more of a preeminent center for the education of religious scholars and community leaders and for hosting interreligious conversations that can help to reduce intolerance and division that plague the world.”

Moving forward, Stanton believes that HDS can be a truly global institution, advancing understanding of and among religious traditions to create a more pluralistic and peaceful world.

“From the Religious Literacy Project, to Religions and the Practice of Peace Initiative, to the Pluralism Project and the great work at the Center for the Study of World Religions, HDS can, should, and must continue to extend its global reach,” he says. “What it’s doing is so valuable. We just need to make the School’s mission more well-known and supported, so that its impact can be even greater.”

—Paul Massari

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Ministry of Management Education At HBS, van Bever educates leaders to make a positive difference in the world

“The most important lesson that we teach the students in the ethics component of our course is that you are not the person that you hope you can be or wish you could be—you are the sum of the decisions you’ve made.”

Derek van Bever, MBA ’88, MDiv ’11

IN THE GOSPEL OF MARK, THE PHARISEES COMPLAIN to Jesus when they see his disciples gathering grain on the Sabbath, a day of rest and worship according to Jewish law.

Jesus responds by reminding them of the example of King David, who fed his hungry companions on the Sabbath with “the bread of Presence,” traditionally sanctioned only for use by priests. “The Sabbath was made for humankind,” he concludes, “and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

Welcome to your first lesson in Derek van Bever’s business ethics class.

“It’s a wonderfully rich, revolutionary reminder that the Sabbath is supposed to be a blessing, not a burden,” says van Bever, MBA ’88, MDiv ’11, who teaches Harvard Business School’s required Leadership and Corporate Accountability course. “And so, I think of this lesson when we’re discussing the impact of the market economy on our lives: ‘Is the economy serving us, or are we serving the economy? Who’s serving whom here?’ God never told us to serve at the altar of efficiency. Capitalism is not a religion, it’s simply an economic order. So we want to be constructive and consider how we shape that order to better serve humanity.”

As the director of Harvard Business School’s Forum for Growth and Innovation and senior lecturer of business administration, Derek van Bever makes management education his ministry. In so doing, he draws on his HDS experience and challenges future business leaders to evaluate their actions—and the actions of the organizations they lead—through a rigorous ethical framework.

A successful entrepreneur and executive, van Bever co-founded and helped lead two consulting firms: The Advisory Board Company (ABC), a global research, consulting, and technology firm serving hospital and university executives, and The Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a global thought leadership and advisory network. As chief technology officer for CEB, van Bever helped steer the company through and beyond its initial public offering in 1999.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 37

CEB grew fast. Over time, van Bever found himself increasingly troubled by his firm’s shift in focus from serving its members to pleasing the markets. He came to HDS “looking for sanctuary” and for some perspective on what had happened to the company he helped to build.

“Little by little by little, quarter by quarter, we started to shift our focus from what would make our members happiest to what would make the market happiest,” he says. “We didn’t do anything illegal or unethical or immoral, but it was deeply disappointing nonetheless. In coming to HDS, I wanted to step back from the ‘high hurry of business’ to think about how we bake an enduring value set into the companies that we’re running, such that, in St. Augustine’s terms, we accomplish that swerving of the will that causes us to be our best selves.”

His original ambition was to use religious and theological knowledge to “go out and help other business people avoid making the mistakes I had made, to retain the focus of their company through toils and snares, and emerge triumphant.”

A wry smile spreads across van Bever’s face today when he thinks of what he now sees as the naïveté of that vision, revealed to him in a conversation with Professor Emily Click that provided one of the most powerful—and humbling— moments of his time at HDS. “Professor Click said, ‘Derek, I was a minister for 10 years,’” van Bever remembers. “‘One thing I learned for certain is that people heading into a swamp seldom ask for a map. But when someone finds themselves in quicksand, they will reach out to any arm that’s offered to help them.’ That insight had such truth and such humanity to it. We have to make our own mistakes and then we have to forgive ourselves.”

Chastened but not deterred, van Bever pursued his distinctive ministry. He pitched his vision from school to school, but got a cool reception because he had no PhD. Then, in 2012, HBS professor Clayton Christensen—himself a deeply religious person—asked van Bever to join the teaching team for Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (BSSE), the most popular elective course in the second-year MBA curriculum.

“At its core, BSSE is about change,” he says. “If you build a successful company, something in the environment will change and your organization will have to adapt. All of the forces that are involved in advancing your core business are going to resist the change. So leaders have to balance between encouraging the core business and planting the seeds for the next big thing. And the irony is that the better, the more successful the company, the harder it is to change. We try to prepare our students for the essential loneliness of that leadership job.”

After several years of success teaching thousands of BSSE students, van Bever also took on Leadership and Corporate

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 38

Accountability (LCA), the Business School’s required firstyear ethics course. Created in the aftermath of the Enron debacle, LCA tries to orient students to the fundamental ethical questions of leadership: What is my responsibility to investors, customers, employees, and society? How do I prioritize those responsibilities? Where do economics, the law, and ethics overlap? How can I make the wisest possible decisions?

“It’s the issue of how leaders choose the harder right over the easier wrong, as the West Point model has it,” van Bever explains. “The most important lesson that we teach the students in the ethics component of our course is that you are not the person that you hope you can be or wish you could be—you are the sum of the decisions you’ve made. So you need to look at yourself in these situations and gain perspective on yourself as a decision maker and as a leader. Ultimately, that is the highest standard that you have to hold yourself to.”

Religion is one of the last taboos in the HBS classroom, van Bever says. In part to address this concern, last year he wrote the first “religion in the workplace” case for LCA. The subjects were litigation arising from perceived discrimination at Masterpiece Cakeshop and Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Our students are concerned that their increasingly global careers will take them into positions of leadership in contexts where they really do not understand the beliefs and religious practices of the people they are leading. They’re also interested in how, and how much, a leader can make the workplace reflect his or her religious beliefs.”

As director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation, van Bever collaborates with Clay Christensen not only on course curriculum but also on research. He says that Christensen’s influential theory of disruptive innovation is overused and mostly misunderstood. At its core, disruption is a theory of competition that explains, to use a biblical analogy, how David can sometimes beat Goliath. Xerox, for instance, became a leader by selling large industrial copiers to heads of IT through a dedicated sales force. When Canon came along with a desktop copier sold to administrative assistants through retail channels, however, Xerox, the giant of the industry, chose not to respond.

“A disruptor will either go after a segment of the market in which the incumbent is uninterested or it will go after a segment of the market that the incumbent has concluded that it can’t profitably serve,” van Bever explains. “Through some innovation, it builds a fundamentally lower-cost model that it uses to attack the incumbent from below.”

Applying the theory to mainline religious organizations, van Bever, who is also on the ordination path in the United Church of Christ, says it’s possible that Protestant denominations experiencing dramatic declines in membership are being disrupted by organizations less bound to a resource-

“I want the students I teach to self-identify as leaders who are going to make a positive difference in the lives of the people around them. I want them to leave Harvard Business School looking over their own shoulder and asking, ‘Does this behavior live up to my highest standards for myself?’”

Derek van Bever, MBA ’88, MDiv ’11

intensive physical structure like a church building. He says that denominational leaders need to ask themselves some hard questions about their mission and how they operate.

“As they think about the changes in the world, do all of their responses center on drawing people into this physical plant?” he asks. “Is that the definition of success? If it is, it can be disrupted by organizations that don’t have a concern for this expensive resource at the center.”

As evidence, van Bever cites the plethora of alternatives and emergent organizations identified by HDS Ministry Innovation Fellows Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston: The Dinner Party, The Laundry Project, Crossfit, Soul Cycle, and many others. All look to provide members with a sense of connection, community, accountability, meaning, and purpose in a way that’s attractive, particularly to young people. To compete, traditional religious organizations need to focus on their competitive advantage: the wisdom represented in their

core beliefs, typically expressed in scripture.

“Denominations have some core beliefs to which their adherents can attach, something for which they yearn,” van Bever says. “I think that’s a real point of distinction. So, rather than placing the building at the center, they might ask how better to place scripture and Spirit at the center. What appeal would that hold? Why would people ‘hire’ that set of beliefs?

These are the questions to ask if you’re trying to figure out how vulnerable you are to attack by organizations that are increasingly attracting the allegiance of the generations coming up.”

Whether in religion or business, van Bever says that there are two kinds of people: those who imagine that the world acts upon them and those who imagine that they act upon the world.

His mission—his ministry—is to engage the latter so that they can become ethical leaders who ultimately contribute to humanity’s flourishing.

“I want the students I teach to self-identify as leaders who are going to make a positive difference in the lives of the people around them,” he says. “I want them to leave Harvard Business School looking over their own shoulder and asking, ‘Does this behavior live up to my highest standards for myself?’ That is a core lesson of the ethics component of our curriculum, and I hope it’s one that our students carry forward with them throughout their working lives.”

—Paul Massari

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 39

HDS FINANCIALS 2018 Endowment Value ($M)

$656.6

Revenues

$628.1 $639.3 $552.6

$456.6

$609

$638.1

TOTAL REVENUE $49.4 MILLION

$655

61% ENDOWMENT

$570.6 $527.6

$477.6

11% CURRENT USE GIFTS & GRANTS

9% OTHER REVENUE

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

Endowment Distribution ($M)

Expenses

$30 $28

$24

$22

$23

$24

$25

TOTAL EXPENSES $42.8 MILLION

$30

$28 $25

19% TUITION & FEES

50% COMPENSATION

$26

16% OTHER

2% DEBT SERVICE 3% DEPRECIATION 8% SPACE & OCCUPANCY 2% SUPPLIES 19% SCHOLARSHIPS & AWARDS

2008

2009

2010

2011

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • 52

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

PHOTOS: JONATHAN BEASLEY, KRISTIE WELSH, JOE SHERMAN, KRIS SNIBBE, BR1, RELIGIOUS LITERACY PROJECT, JASON KNIGHT, EVGENIA ELISEEVA, L AURIE SHAULL, ROBERT A. COLES, MARGARET KRUGER, DAN PECCI, AL AMY, ADOBE STOCK, FLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS (ELVERT BARNES, THOMAS HAWK), WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (STAFF SGT. JUSTIN PHEMISTER, MICHAL RASPBERRY, ROBERT COLES, USAID), AND COURTESY OF JUDITH BUTLER, MARGARET BOTROS, ETHAN FALLEUR, AND JILL GAULDING

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • AU

45 FRANCIS AVENUE | CAMBRIDGE, MA 02138 YOUTUBE LOGO SPECS

PRINT main red

gradient bottom

C0 M96 Y90 K2

C13 M96 Y81 K54

PMS 1795C

on dark backgrounds

standard

standard

no gradients

no gradients

watermark

watermark

stacked logo (for sharing only)

stacked logo (for sharing only)

PMS 1815C

white

black

C0 M0 Y0 K0

C100 M100 Y100 K100

WHITE

on light backgrounds

BLACK

FSC logo etc.

DEAN’S REPORT 2018 • AV

Non Profit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Boston, MA Permit No. 1636