Credit to His Faith

For Christopher Hampson, issues around debt forgiveness involve both moral and legal dimensions, and pursuing a joint degree at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) and Harvard Law School (HLS) enables him to think through the many dimensions of creditor-debtor relationships through the lens of religious traditions as well as through legal parameters.

Hampson is emphatic that human problems cannot be addressed through rules alone. For that reason, he studies how faith traditions have dealt with complex moral and ethical human challenges, particularly around forgiveness.

"What I am interested in is thinking through the formal rules and the driving principles for human relationships—as well as promises and what we are trying to do in the future with credit," he says. "That should help us think about what we should do when we reach a situation where someone really cannot pay."

Not that ethical principles are absent from current laws, he explains. There are bankruptcy provisions, and every state has exemption laws and collections laws, which means the creditor cannot force the debtor on the streets to repay a debt.

But there are also larger issues. For instance, "It is one question when your creditor is a local bank; it's another when your creditor is the United States of America or the state of Colorado and your debt is a traffic fine or a hundred-dollar judgment fee to help defray court costs, or it's a fee for a public defender."

The issues need to be understood by reading both legal and religious texts, Hampson explains.

"Both religion and law involve communities of practitioners that are engaged in helping people resolve very practical issues in their lives. Both are involved in exploration of normative questions. What concerns people? What authorities are they invested in?"

For instance, a contract, Hampson points out, is a legally recognized promise. The issue is so central to human lives that many religious traditions address it.

"In many religious traditions the idea that one should keep one's promises is a sacred principle. At the same time, religious traditions have grappled with the question of what to do when a promise becomes an unforeseen circumstance. Or, what to do when you just made a foolish promise."

After all, there are many reasons why people don't repay debts, he continues.

"Some people are irresponsible with their money. Some people are slammed with a medical emergency or a financial crisis—or they thought that the business would work and it just didn't."

Principles of debt forgiveness are at play in the three major Abrahamic faith traditions: the Jewish faith, the Christian faith, and the Islamic faith.

"There is an internal conversation within Islam about what Islamic finance means in a contemporary, globalized society and what the values are within that tradition. I would like to continue to build the facility in different traditions to be able to discuss the issue," he says.

There are a lot of different ways in which questions about forgiveness, grace, and law play out all across the law. During his time at HDS, Hampson is planning to focus on many of the religious and ethical dimensions of these issues of debt.

For Hampson, reading legal texts and religious texts is quite similar.

"We spend a lot of time at the Divinity School reading texts and talking about what they mean. We do that at the Law School, too. It's a craft."

Hampson entered Harvard first as an undergraduate and concentrated in the study of comparative religion. The next step for him was to continue his study of religion, which he combined law as he saw the many overlaps, especially in his current focus on debt forgiveness.

He has taken courses with HDS faculty J. Bryan Hehir, David Lamberth, and Mara Willard on the role of religion in public life and Christian ethics. Hampson appreciates that the HDS environment encourages honest inquiry into what religion means and also what it means to take leadership in the area.

"We are fortunate to have a dean who cares about the role of religion in public life," he says, referring to David N. Hempton's vision that HDS continues to be a leader in tackling religious illiteracy.

Hampson, who will graduate in 2016 with a JD from HLS and a master of theological studies degree from HDS, plans to use his remaining time exploring this set of issues in greater depth through the Islamic Legal Studies Program at HLS and through independent studies at HDS.

Hampson plans to research debtors' prisons over the winter term and part of the spring term. He hopes to take classes that will help him understand the rights that creditors have and that will deepen his understanding on interest rates and how those rules might be impacting relationships.

As an undergraduate, Hampson came to the comparative study of religion under HDS professor Diana Eck and realized that studying the comparative and methodological framework of other religions was necessary to know "what is essential or unique potentially to one religious tradition as compared to others."

He now laughs as he recalls how when he entered Harvard College from a place of faith as an undergraduate Christian student, he asked Harvard for a Christian roommate.

"I think I was much more worried about such things back then than I am worried now," he says lightheartedly, while recalling those early years.

Harvard gave him a Christian roommate. But they also gave him a Mormon roommate and a Hindu roommate. Across the hall lived another Christian and a Muslim.

"We would joke that Harvard had created this 'religious/studious wing' and that was us." Hampson recalls having "great conversations" with this multireligious community, but also finding places in the classroom where the "conversation got cut off."

That was also part of what motivated Hampson to join The Veritas Forum, a Christian organization whose mission is to promote dialogue on religion, worldview, and life's biggest questions on university campuses. Hampson was on its staff for two years, stepping down to return to graduate school in 2012.

"I found that the mission of The Veritas Forum has been very warmly received across the board, even by those who have been bemused by Christianity—as they think this is practicing a way of talking to each other about what we really care about in an open forum. It is about communication and open understanding. If we don't do it well in our universities, no one else will do it. We will have generations of people equipped with how to deal with difference."

The challenge eventually is how to take many of these issues to the public square. He names Jesus Christ as his biggest source of inspiration for how religion can be brought into public life.

"He throws off people's understanding of what they think. He is very progressive in some places. He is very conservative in others. He engages with the public square—at least the way the Gospels account it—in a very deliberate and explosive way. He dives right into areas of turmoil. He is a very interesting model for what religion in public life can mean."

And, of course, as he adds, Jesus then inspired Leo Tolstoy, who inspired Gandhi, who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.

"So the lineage of this form of thought is very old and has done some very wonderful things for public life."

—by Kalpana Jain