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.
