Video: What is a Multireligious Divinity School?

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JANET GYATSO: Good afternoon, everyone. Will you take your seats? And we'll get going. So welcome, welcome. This is a very exciting beginning of the bicentennial year of Harvard Divinity School. And we're going to have a series of celebrations and a whole variety of other events throughout this year. And this is the very first. So, welcome. 

And this is going to be a panel discussion with a bunch of highly qualified and interesting experts on the topic of the nature of a multireligious divinity school. Actually, the title of the panel is What is a Multireligious Divinity School? And the answer to that is Harvard Divinity School. 
[LAUGHTER] 
So, um-- 
[APPLAUSE] 
However, there is a further question, namely, what does that mean? So first, let me introduce to you the speakers for today. And then I'll say very, very few, brief introductory remarks. And then we'll get going. 

First of all, we have Professor Diana Eck, who is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And she is also a member of our faculty of Divinity School. 

Her work has a dual focus in both India and America. Her work in India focuses on popular religion, especially temples and places of pilgrimage. And her works-- her books include Banaras-- City of Light, and Darsan-- Seeing the Divine Image in India, and a recent book, India-- A Sacred Geography. Her work in the United States focuses especially on the challenges of religious pluralism in a multireligious society. 

Since 1991, she has headed the Pluralism Project. And she has published a book relevant to that project called A New Religious America-- How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. 

And her book-- another book of hers, Encountering God-- A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, talks about the relevant topic of the intersection between Christian theology and interfaith dialogue. And one more note, Diana in 2005 was the president of the American Academy of Religion. 

Secondly, we'll have Professor David Hempton, who is the dean of the faculty of Divinity here. He's also the Alonzo McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies. And he's also John Lord O'Brien Professor of Divinity. 

Dean Hempton joined the faculty in the spring of 2007. And he was appointed as the dean in July 2012. Before that, he was teaching at Boston University, and before that, Queen's University Belfast. 

Dean Hempton is a social historian of religion, with particular expertise in populist traditions of evangelicalism in Europe, North America, and beyond. And he's the author of many, many books, including Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850; Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Societies, 1740-1890; Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland; The Religion of the People; Methodism-- Empire of the Spirit; Evangelical Disenchantment-- those are all separate books. 
[LAUGHTER] 
And finally, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century. 

Next, we'll be hearing from Professor Jacob Olupona, who is Professor of African Religious Traditions. He has a joint appointment as professor of African-American studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as well. 

Professor Olupona joined the faculty of Divinity in 2006. His current research focuses on the religious practices of the estimated 1 million Africans who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years. 

And he's working in particular, or has worked in particular, on the so-called reverse missionaries who have come to the United States to establish churches-- African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the United States. 

His earlier research ranged across African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yoruba festivals, and so on. His books include City of 201 Gods-- Ile-Ife in Time, Space, and the Imagination, Orisa Devotion as World Religion-- The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture, and Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community. 

Next, we'll be hearing from Professor Stephanie Paulsell, who is the Susan Shallcross Swartz-- sorry-- Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies. She joined the faculty of HDS in 2001. And she served in the post of associate dean until 2005.
 
Professor Paulsell studies the points of intersection between intellectual work and spiritual practice, between the academic study of religion and practices of ministry, and between the contemplative and active dimensions of the vocations of minister and teacher. 
She's the author of a book called Honoring the Body-- Meditations on a Christian Practice. And she's co-editor of The Scope of Our Art-- The Vocation of the Theological Teacher. Her current research is on Virginia Woolf and religion. And she-- I'll also mention, she's an ordained minister in the Christian church of Disciples of Christ. 

Ahmed Ragab is the Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School. And he's also an affiliate assistant professor in the Department of History of Science. And he's also the director of the Science, Religion, and Culture Program at Harvard Divinity School. 

Professor Ragab is also a physician. And he's also a historian of science and medicine. And he's a scholar of science and religion. He received his MD from Cairo University School of Medicine and his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. And he joined the Divinity School in 2011. 

His work spans various fields and disciplines-- history of science and medicine, science and religion, the development of cultures and science and cultures of religion in the Middle East and the Islamic world. And he also studies various questions related to science and religion in the US, with a focus on American Muslim communities. In his most recent book projects, he is investigating the history of prophetic medicine in the medieval as well as the Islamic world. 

And finally, Professor David Lamberth is Professor of Philosophy and Theology in Harvard Divinity School, where he teaches a range of courses in Western theology and philosophy of religion that emphasizes modern liberal thought, and probe the interconnections between theological and philosophical reflection in American and continental thought. 

He joined the faculty of the Divinity School in 1997 after spending two years at Florida State University. And he also served a three-year term as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2000 to 2003. 

His book William James and the Metaphysics of Experience exhibits his interest in the revival of pragmatism and demonstrates the inherent engagement with religion in James' philosophical system, as well as James' pluralism. 

He's currently preparing two books, one of which is called Religion-- A Pragmatic Approach, which analyzes both historical and contemporary treatments of religion and the pragmatic tradition. And he's also working on a volume on William James for the Routledge Philosophers series. 

I myself am Janet Gyatso. I originally was teaching at Amherst College. And I came to Harvard Divinity School in 2001 as the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies. And I'm currently also the Academic Dean and Dean of-- Associate Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs. 

My area of specialty is Buddhist studies, with especially-- with specialty in Tibetan Buddhism, history and culture, and more recently, in religion and science. 

I just wanted to say as an opening remark that the establishment of my chair, this Hershey Chair in Buddhist studies at the Divinity School at the beginning of the Millennium, was not the very first position. Notably, I was preceded by John Carman in South Asia at Harvard Divinity School, as well as a very long association with William Graham and Diana Eck in FAS. 

But after that position was established here, it started what I would call a cascade into several more hires in non-Christian religions here at the Divinity School, including Islam, including Hinduism, African religions, and others. 

Soon after I arrived at Harvard Divinity School, we actually changed the very structure of our MTS curriculum to integrate these other religions other than Christianity into the main section of our disciplinary approaches to the study of religion, and not just simply as other religions per se. 

We also started what's called the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, which was to start to actually teach ministry here at the Divinity School. Not necessarily from a Christian perspective, but first of all, from a Buddhist perspective. And we are actually currently working on doing the same thing to begin to teach ministry from a Muslim perspective as well. That's going forward beginning now. 

I just wanted to say that the very title of our panel today raises a lot of questions about our identity as a school, but even more so certain quite complex intellectual issues, I'd say, about the very nature of the academic study of religion, what we're trying to do here, and how we imagine the future of religion and its study in the world. 

So I actually sent to the panelists some questions. Whether they'll actually address them or not, I have no idea. But I was hoping that they might address at least, for one thing, there's the two possible readings of the very term "multireligious." One would refer to the varying religious affiliations of individual faculty and students at HDS. The other would refer to the various religions and traditions that we teach and study at HDS. 

And so we're certainly multi on both accounts. But these two kinds of diversity, which have been growing in recent decades here, involve somewhat different kinds of academic pedagogical and community issues. 

Among other things, they raise the question of the relationship between the student or scholar's own personal identity or commitments and the topic that they study. It also raises the question of, what role does, or should, personal commitments play in the study of religion altogether? 

And what space can a multireligious curriculum and/or community leave for critical discourse? Who is allowed to be critical, and of what? What larger presumptions inform our decision to go multi about the role of the academy, about the role of religion in the world, and the relation between the two? And finally, what about the secular in our divinity school? Do we study that as well? What does that even mean? 

So I just wanted to throw some questions out there just to have in your mind. And I think you will be edified in various ways by our various speakers today. So please join me in welcoming them all. And we're going to start today with Professor Eck. 
[APPLAUSE]

DIANA L. ECK: (WHISPERS) Thank you. 
Let me begin by saying I think it was supposed to be because my name was at the beginning of the alphabet. But as I look around, I think it's because I've been here the longest. 
[LAUGHTER] 
When I look back over the years that I have been here, the decades, really, and especially as I look out today and see so many friends and teachers in this audience, former deans-- and it is just a great, great joy and pleasure to see you. 

I hope you'll forgive me by saying that I begin with words from my own mentor here, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who delivered his inaugural lecture at Harvard Divinity School in 1964. That was 52 years ago. And I think he would be especially gratified by the panel today. 

He told his audience in the Memorial Church then in the heart of the university, "It is the business of a university to discern and clarify what is going on inside a galaxy or a neuron, or indeed, a religious community." 

"Part of the excitement," he said, "of academic inquiry is the constant discovery that more is going on than one might have supposed. That what seemed simple is complex. That what seemed static is in motion. That what seemed a disarray of brute facts is a sophisticated system of subtle understandings and interrelationships." 

Now, in the more than 50 years since that address, there has been well-funded academic research that has discerned and clarified galaxies, and neurons, and stem cells, and human genomes. It's not clear, however, that we've made enough progress in discerning and clarifying the energies of religious communities. 

We too often stand in almost mute astonishment before the many lineages of the Muslim Brotherhood, or the thousands of religiously-based NGOs, or the liberation theologies of Central and South America, the religious energies of American Christian nationalists, the wayside healing shrines of the Balkans, the 50 million Hindus who converge in pilgrimage to bathe in the Ganges in the Kumbh Mela. 
Our understanding of our fellow human beings as they gather in communities, as they live their lives, proclaim their visions one way or another, and die their deaths, has to keep pace more adequately with the velocity of global change. And that is one of the challenges of a multireligious divinity school. 

I'll mention three of them. The first of those challenges, that one of simply discerning what is going on-- going deep, taking the energy and the time to dig into one place or another more deeply than simply the shallow news bites of the evening. 

This is worthy of a life's work. It is worthy of many lives' work if we had them all. And people of many perspectives, many faith communities, here contributing, committed to that task of understanding. No one does everything. 

But we do what we do in the good company of one another-- and learning from one another all along. So that is an intellectual challenge of the most important magnitude for our world today. 

The second is to study the connections. And that's where I have begun to devote most of my energies. The religious communities of humankind are not separate chapters bound together in a world religions book or separate courses in the catalog, but are deeply involved in one another's history, bound together as neighbors in villages and cities throughout the world. 

This has actually always been the case. But it's true vividly in the world in which we live today, where migration has literally changed the face of the world. It's true in our nation, which has become truly a multireligious nation over the last 50 years since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that has opened the doors to immigration from all over the world. Our universities have become multireligious universities. The face of Harvard College, of Harvard University has changed radically over the last two and three decades. 

And that is true of a divinity school like our. What we call "these religions" are in constant process of change. And one of the ways in which they change is in connection and encounter with one another. One of the ways in which people change is in that connection and encounter with one another. 

And it's that that we also need to study, to study the connections. And this emerging field that is becoming very popular across the United States is a field of inter-religious studies-- taking into our scope as scholars not simply one or another religious community, tradition historically, et cetera, but the ways in which they have intersected and intersected in tension and in cooperation in today's world. 

And this year, I am delighted to be teaching a course with a colleague who was one of the pioneers of inter-religious studies, Jenny Peace, a professor at Andover Newton, to teach this case studies course in American religious pluralism, involving both theological and historical civic perspectives. 

We're really challenged today to think beyond the boundaries of a world religions paradigm, and respond to the kind of questions in public and civic life that come from our encounter and engagement and tensions in and among religious communities, and the implications of those for our society. 

These are really increasingly important concerns in what constitutes, I think, a new paradigm in religious leadership. A requirement that one become not simply religiously literate in one way or another, but inter-religiously literate-- to study the interrelations, to study the shape of pluralism, to develop a kind of pedagogy of pluralism, and fostering relationships between religious leaders of different faith communities and those who are leaders in secular society. 

And there is a way in which working on global issues, on national issues, even on college issues, on university issues, is critically important to know these connections-- to know what people are doing as they come together in interfaith or multi-faith contexts, as they join in projects together. One of our projects in the Pluralism Project has been really to study the interfaith infrastructure of the United States and have a sense of what it that is going on as people encounter each other. 

And then a third challenge, and that is moving into very critically-- and this is what Janet mentioned-- into this methodological terrain of dialogue. A way of working in which the voices of the people we study are part of our dialogue, become integral to the process of our understanding. And we ourselves, of course, come to our study with a voice, with a particular historical intellectual religious context, secular context. 

This is not a problem. This is only a problem if we're not self-conscious about it. And gaining that increasing clarity about our own situatedness as religious people, a secular people, our own forms of questioning, our own positionality, whether religious or secular, even anti-religious-- this is critical, lest our own subjectivities become thoughtlessly, unwittingly universalized in our work. 
So this is also a kind of theological reckoning. And I would close, then, with some thoughts on that from Wilfred Cantwell Smith, again, at that very first convocation address many, many decades ago. He called for a new kind of theological thinking that I think we are beginning to develop here, that would take seriously the voices and visions of equally rigorous religious thinkers who are not of our own tradition. 

In that case, it was mostly Christian theologians here. And the challenge was to recognize that Muslim and Jewish and Hindu theologians, philosophers, and thinkers were critically important to the task of theology. He said, "From now on"-- and I love that "from now on." 

"The articulation of our faith must take into account the world of religious vibrancy and intellectual depth that the study of the world's religions reveals." "I don't know how we will contend with these questions," he said. 

"But I do know that from now on, these are the questions with which we must contend." And indeed, that is why we're gathered here today, to talk about what a multireligious divinity school is about. 

He concluded, "The new world that is waiting to be born is a world of cultural pluralism and diverse faith. Let no one imagine that building a new world community will be easy. Is it even possible? I do not know. 

But it is the fundamental challenge facing humanity today. Whether we shall rise to it or not remains to be seen. My own faith is that it can be achieved." 

And finally, in concluding, I'd simply like to invite those of you who are interested to come to the Pluralism Project at 25 gathering that will be here at the Divinity School September 22 to 23, with a lot of former pluralism project researchers who have scattered across the country and are doing a multitude of things. 

And its overall title is Diversity and Inclusion in the American Crucible. And if you look it up online, pluralism.org you'll see the registration form. And we would love to see you there. Thank you so very, very much. 
[APPLAUSE]

JANET GYATSO: And next, we'll hear from Dean David Hempton. 
[APPLAUSE]

DAVID N. HEMPTON: I was just handed a kind of Divinity School multireligious fan on the way up. 
[LAUGHTER] 
It's neither square nor quite a circle, nor-- 
[LAUGHTER] 
Not quite rectangular-- um, moves and is dynamic. So, what is a multireligious divinity school? 
I'd like to start with a personal story, which I think may sound a little strange to an American audience. But it's much more common in other parts of the world, including the part of the world I grew up in. 

I grew up in a working-class Protestant family in East Belfast and soon entered an educational system that was deeply segregated and remained so. That is, Protestant and Catholic kids were educated in different schools. And that remains largely the case. 

Insofar as my memory can be trusted, I have no recollection of ever entering a Catholic school or place of worship before the age of 18. Ironically, the first Catholic place of worship I ever set foot in was as a curious and awestruck tourist to the Cathedral Church of Santa Maria in Palma on the island of Mallorca. To this day, I know that I have visited and attended more worship services in Catholic churches outside of Ireland than inside of Ireland, despite living the majority of my life in that country. 

A quick follow-up to that story. In 1970, I entered Queen's University Belfast, a university without a religious studies department, which was founded in the 1840s with the express mandate that it should not teach religion or theology. In fact, for that reason, the Queen's Colleges in Cork, Galway, and Belfast were nicknamed "godless colleges." This was done-- this formation of these universities was done ironically to try to appease non-Anglican, that is, the non-established church religious traditions, and avoid religious conflict. 
Queen's Belfast still does not teach religion or theology, but it does now have an Institute of theology that coordinates the degrees which Queen's confers on students from five affiliated denominational colleges-- Presbyterian, Evangelical, Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic. 

So, despite being roiled by religious conflict for centuries, the premier university in Northern Ireland still struggles to deal with religion in an academic environment that can bring together Catholic and Protestant students, never mind other world religions, traditions. These educational realities of segregation and denominational exclusivity did not alone cause violence in Ireland, but they have certainly contributed to the separations and stereotypes that often precede and undergird conflict. 

In similar vein, since becoming Dean of HDS, I've received a number of messages from our alums in different parts of the world expressing their gratitude to HDS for its treatment of religion as a rigorous academic field of human inquiry and for its religious pluralism, neither of which exists in many parts of the world, where the teaching of religion is often the preserve of clerical elites in singular and confessional traditions. 

What these stories suggest to me is that neither a complete avoidance of religion nor exclusive or monopolistic sectarian teaching of religion is without its negative consequences in the world order. With those stories in mind, let's get down to the question. What is a multireligious divinity school? I have five very brief overlapping sets of questions which I think merit attention. 

One, there's a terminological problem here. There's a paradox in the title itself. Because "divinity school" connotes Christian. The phrase "multireligious divinity school" is therefore somewhat problematic in itself, even if the alternatives are very hard to come by. We've thought of them. 

Second, what are the compositional desiderata in a multireligious divinity school? HDS's recent practice has been to appoint professors and enroll students who may be religious practitioners and/or students whose primary objective is academic study and scholarship. 

Moreover, many of those professors and students may have no religious beliefs whatsoever and may even be hostile to religion. That proportion is likely to increase as the share of nones or unaffiliated continues to rise in Western societies over the next quarter of a century. 

Also, in terms of composition, who or what gets to determine the multi of multireligious? And how are those decisions taken? Explicitly and consciously, based on principles and objectives? Or unconsciously and obliquely, based on cultural adaptation and absorption? In other words, they just simply happen. 

The history of HDS seems to suggest that the students, more than the professors or the staff, have driven its increasing pluralism. I think that's clear from our 200 years, whether the categories are race, gender, or religious tradition. 

Moreover, what are the appropriate spatial and geographical parameters of multireligious? For example, should a divinity school reflect the religious constituencies of its city, its region, its country of location, or the world as a whole? Does Harvard and other universities who aspire to global significance and influence have different criteria for religious diversity than more specifically regional colleges or in particular countries? 

Third, what are the curricular desiderata of multireligious divinity school? Specifically, how should religion be studied in a multireligious school? At HDS, certainly within the historical worlds I have operated within, there's been a strong emphasis on practice, or what we might call lived religion. That is, religion with all the messiness of diverse practices, cultural expressions, changes over time, and attention to all of the religion and questions, politics, culture, society. Attention to lived religion in all its forms and expressions means that we should also treat current practices seriously, however sharp-edged and exclusive they may happen to be. 

I do not see it as HDS's job to promote a kind of neutral syncretism. Differences and disagreements need to be honored, not etherized. However, I do think that over time, education in a multireligious academy, simply by learning and seeing the beliefs and practices of other traditions, inevitably places one's own practice in a bigger context. This process need not necessarily compromise commitment and authenticity, but it should facilitate a better understanding of the religious other, as well as of oneself. 

Of course, this kind of practical but not ideological relativism, that is, it's not a relativistic project, it happens, may sometimes produce the reverse effect, namely, a doubling down on claims to exclusive truth. But if that happens, that's also part of the discussion, I think. 
Fourth, how does a multireligious school build a community of respect and mutual understanding? In thinking about this, I was drawn back to the practical issues we've been dealing with as a community for over a decade now. 

See, for example, the document "Multireligious Etiquette-- A Brief Guide to Being at Home in the HDS Community," produced by the Office of the Chaplain and Spiritual Life at HDS. In this document, there are 10 practical recommendations that deal with hugging and touching, dietary restrictions, bodies and attire, rituals and practices, and holy days and calendars. 

This guide encourages us not to essentialize based on religious tradition, to ask questions of others without embarrassment, to expect and to make accommodations to others, to care as much about the sensitivities of others as ourselves, and to contribute to community life, not retreat into sectarian isolation. 

Fifth, then, and last, I think we should ask a question of ourselves. What would a multireligious academy do that a monoreligious one could not, and vice versa? 

In a world that is multireligious, an academy that is self-consciously multireligious provides a community context and a curricular content that prepares practitioners, and scholars, and combinations of both for the world in which they will graduate. A multireligious school provides a relatively safe space in which one can experience, study, and work to understand religion in all its complexity, and to appreciate difference as a positive, not a negative reality. 

Finally, we need to be careful not to present HDS as embrace of multireligious diversity, as an unalloyed progress narrative. We need to be constantly vigilant and appropriately self-critical. 

Change often brings pain as well as opportunity. The expansion of diversity for the many can lead to a reduction of cultural familiarity and sense of security for others. One person's diversity can be another's vacuous syncretism. In the late Professor Peter Gomes' 2004 commencement address, he identified himself as an out-of-the-closet Protestant Christian and an African-American man who would not have been welcome at HDS in the recent past. 

At the same time, however, Gomes also experienced other efforts at inclusivity as a loss to him. He stated at the start of our faculty meetings, the dean once led in prayer. Then we observed silence. And now there is nothing. Or as Professor Janet Gyatso put it in her 2003 convocation address, we need to think about the distinction between neutralizing sectarian affiliation and eliminating religion altogether. 

So, through ongoing debate, struggle, and dialogue over centuries, the HDS community has somehow decided what it values and what it has defined as religious inclusivism, pluralism, and diversity. 

As the school looks toward the 21st century and beyond, these conversations are sure to be complicated, sure to be controversial, and will be contingent, as Diana has already said, upon changes in the social salience of religion nationally and globally. I'm delighted, therefore, that we're beginning our year of bicentennial celebration with this very difficult question. As Dean of HDS, I really welcome this conversation. Thank you. 
[APPLAUSE]

JANET GYATSO: Thank you so much, Dean Hempton. And now we'll hear from Professor Olupona. 
[APPLAUSE]

JACOB K. OLUPONA: Thank you very much for the invitation. Happy birthday to Harvard Divinity School. 
[BRIEF LAUGHTER] 
I will begin by praising the famous men and women who taught religion in Africa before I came on board in 2006-- [INAUDIBLE]

--and Professor Lamin Sanneh. My response to the question, what is a religious divinity-- what is a multireligious divinity school, will come from what I'll probably call an African and an Africanist response. 

A multireligious divinity school in the 21st century in America is a mosque. It is imperative that the study of religion recognize and reflect the social, economic, cultural, theological diversity of Harvard Divinity School's place, its citizens, and the world, given that this is one of the leading divinity schools in the country. 

Irrespective of what the tradition of origin is, this multireligious perspective should be a given for all serious schools of divinities everywhere. Of course, our own divinity school currently reflects that in its composition. 

With respect to African religions and religions in Africa, the multireligious, multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural context of the continent and its diaspora communities around the globe demand that the study of religion, in whatever sense, must also reflect their diversity. 

What diversity means here is not just religious diversity itself, but diversity of people, of ethos, culture, gender, and so on. 
In the African context, diversity is a very robust concept. We are talking about diversity with respect to issues of age grade, motherhood, profession, or caste, even secret societies and so on. So theology and religion must reflect that type of mindset and critical understanding of society even in the modern age. 

Teaching about religion in Africa is not just limited to teaching about religious traditions. We teach about the people and their ethics. We teach about the society itself. As we examine the myth and rituals of these traditions, they reflect these complexities of the continent, distribution of people, the geography, and so forth. And indeed, of course, we try to see how the transcendent and the sacred relate to the society and the culture in general. 

When I was talking to the King of Ile-Ife about how he was crowned king as a young man, we reflected upon how even though Africans place a great deal of value and respect on seniority and age, and generally, kings are often appointed or selected among certain senior age grades. The cosmology then itself realizes the importance of youth, as it is reflected in the proverb of [INAUDIBLE] Ile-Ife, which means it is with the wisdom of the young and the old together that the city of Ile-Ife was established. 

The symbolic reference of 201 girls in my book, City of 201 Girls, refers to the perpetual possibility of adding another deity to the Yoruba pantheon. As a result, there is always a large number of different traditions that exist together in a complex network. 
It is not impossible in studying Yoruba religion to begin to talk about Islam or even to begin to talk about Christianity. They make copious references to that. Whenever the diviner casts the divination chain and a particular verse comes up, he becomes a Muslim almost immediately. 

In addition, it is very expensive system because new ways of thinking and being can always be incorporated. Because it is a diverse cosmology, it caters to diverse worldviews and identities, instead of fighting them off or making them into an other that needs to be feared. 

A good illustration is how the Yoruba worldview-- in it, the disabled and the physically challenged are regarded as virtuous and people of the gods and orisha. And they are given special treatment in the society. 

My African religion students marveled at the complexity of such social, religious narratives. Maybe the Yoruba religious worldview has something to teach our friend Mr. Trump about disability and the physically challenged members of our own community. It would be insane for an African to laugh at a disabled. 

In teaching religion in Africa, we must reflect this complexity and diversity. In most African philosophies and religious thought, there is always room for every aspect of life. In fact, life is incomplete if you try to ignore, negate, or exorcize aspects of life. Everything must be accounted for, dealt with, and given its place. 

And to ensure the balance and fullness of life, every aspect must be included. And this often implies a balance of opposites, such as youth and seniority. And thus, the type of color blindness that has emerged in the United States around issues of race and ethnicity will not gain much currency, as it attempts to paper over difference as opposed to identifying it, understanding it, finding an appropriate social niche for it, and then celebrating it. 

The lesson here is that contrary to what the case often is in the West, teaching this in the Divinity School allows our students to see other sides of religion, but also of themselves as individuals, and life as a larger-- as part of a larger whole. 

I would also like to draw attention to the fact that in most societies in Africa, there is always a great deal of diversity among religious traditions themselves. Again, in my book, City of 201 Gods, I discuss how my parents were Anglican missionaries. And I was quite comfortable with that tradition for quite a while. 

But at the same time, I also had an extended family that has devout Muslims. And we also had others who took part in traditional religion as well, what they often refer to as paganism. 

To properly understand a country like Nigeria, you have to be conversant with the important role of Islam, Christianity, and hundreds of traditional religion and the role they play in the society, not to mention the great deal of diversity within the practice of these traditions. 
Africa is not alone in pluralistic and diverse religious nature. And even within societies that are dominated by one religious tradition, they are always internally diverse, if no other reason than the fact that they grew up out of religious environment and foundations that has influenced and given rise to its current form and iteration. 

Here in the Divinity School, the study of religion in Africa, be it Islam, Christianity, or Indigenous religion, allows us to teach from a perspective of what we often described as theory from the South, or indigenous epistemology. And by that, we simply mean that there is a recognition of the tradition, of the limitations of Western models in studying religion. 

It is important for our students to engage themselves in these alternate ways of making sense of the world. In this way, in the context of religion and theology, they thus have a plurality of ways of knowing a meaning making that they can use to better understand the experience of others, but that they can also use to reflect on and illuminate their own societies and experience. 

The great writer Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart and the famous Nigerian author, once said, "The world is like a dancing masquerade. If you want to see it well, you cannot stand in just one place." And I believe that this pithily sums up the importance of diversity in both the ritual and religious contexts, but also the academic community as well. Thank you very much. 
[APPLAUSE]

JANET GYATSO: Thank you very much. And next, we'll hear from Professor Paulsell. 
[APPLAUSE]

STEPHANIE PAULSELL: Thank you very much. Janet gave such nice introductions, she skimped on her own a little bit. So I will just say that it's already been mentioned by the dean, but in 2003, Janet gave a convocation address that is really one of the founding documents, I think, of our current form as a multireligious divinity school. 

And I think you can find it on our website under the Harvard Divinity bulletin. I remember sitting with Dudley Rose listening to it on the other side of the building-- because this was a parking lot-- under another tent and just feeling thrilled at what could be. 

Teaching at HDS during the past 15 years as the school has changed and reached toward new visions of itself has been one of the most intellectually thrilling experiences of my life. 

When I was a graduate student in religion and literature back in the 1980s, I don't think I could have ever imagined that my future work would involve thinking about how to educate students from many different religious contexts for ministry together in one program, or that religion and literature would turn out to be such a useful thing to have studied in preparation for this work. 

Serving on the committee that reimagined and revised the MDiv curriculum alongside Dudley Rose, and Anne Monius, Ronald Thiemann, Mark Edwards, and Karen King, and continuing to rethink and revise it in this faculty and with the many students who have come through here over the last decade has been a new education for me, and one I am fortunate to still be in the midst of. 
When I began teaching at HDS in 2001, there were already Jewish and Muslim and Buddhist students pursuing the MDiv degree, even though the degree itself was located in the area of Christianity and culture. 

These students petitioned where they could to use courses in the holy books of their tradition to meet the requirements of the MDiv. They took, as students from many religious traditions do today, courses in, for example, Christian preaching, and thought creatively and analogously about how to marshal what they learned there in their own communities. 

When we revised the curriculum, we imagined, I think, that that kind of analogous thinking would continue, and it has, but not only for students in traditions other than Christianity, but for Christian students as well. There's a lot of work left to be done here in developing courses in the pastoral practices of the religious traditions represented in our student body. 

But when Christian students leave HDS with an MDiv now, their understanding of pastoral care has been deeply and profoundly shaped by Buddhist thought and practice. The Buddhist influence on the theory and practice of pastoral care is now a distinctive and abiding feature of our MDiv. 

Whenever I talk about the MDiv program in context outside of HDS, the question I am most often asked is, what kind of spiritual formation can HDS possibly offer to students from so many different traditions? 

At the heart of this question is a conviction I share, the conviction that anyone preparing for ministry, no matter what form that ministry takes, needs to cultivate a life grounded in contemplative practices that open space for ongoing growth, continual change, permanent quest, practices which help ministers live and work on the threshold between their interior lives and the life of the world all around them. 

Ministry is some of the most human work that there is. And so all ministers need practices that help them deepen their humanity so that when we meet others in moments of birth and death, crisis and joy, we have something rich to bring. Ministers need to know and engage the spiritual practices of their community to draw on the wisdom that has been passed down through the centuries in distinctive forms. 

In a context of religious diversity, I and my colleagues are often asked, how do you provide formation in such practices for everyone? Now, there are a lot of ways that spiritual formation happens here, from the great work, both visible and hidden, of our chaplain and our denominational counselors, to the spiritual formation that happens in field education sites, and the intersection of those sites with our students' lives at HDS. 

What I'd like to talk a little bit about, though, is the spiritual formation we do in common here, even amidst the diversity of belief and practice. This kind of spiritual formation is not by any means limited to MDiv students, but it is an indispensable part of their education. 

In any entering class of MDivs at HDS, there's a lot of religious diversity. But one of the pitfalls of our multireligious environment is that the diversity among religious traditions often obscures the diversity within religious traditions. 

Now, this isn't always a bad thing. Christians who might feel a bit at odds with one another in a more homogeneously Christian environment might feel more connected to one another in a place like this, where they will all, Pentecostals and Lutherans and Roman Catholics alike, be seen as the Christians. 

But of course, there's much more diversity among us than the categories Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and so on can express. Because within each tradition, there's a great diversity of belief and practice. And we have many students who belong to more than one tradition and many others who belong to none. And as Diana Eck noted, the traditions themselves are intimately and inseparably involved in one another's histories in a thousand ways. 

But all of us, no matter our creed or lack of one, are here to study. We read. We write. We learn new languages. We make ourselves available to new ideas. 

I heard our recent graduate Casper ter Kuile, who led the group of religious nones, n-o-n-e-s-- we also have religious nuns, n-u-n-s, here. It might be my Southern accent, but I have a hard time keeping them apart. 

Casper led the group of religious nones when he was a student here. And he said, as I heard him say recently, that his ministry at HDS-- that his ministry was to help millennials have confidence in the spiritual practices that they are already doing and to think more deeply about them and to do them with even greater attention-- reading novels and poetry, sharing meals with others, protesting injustice, working for change. 

And we've tried to do something similar in the MDiv program to help our students see the work that they will do here at HDS, the work they will all do, as a set of spiritually formative practices. Reading and writing, the most basic elements of an HDS education, have long histories in nearly all of our religious traditions as spiritual practices. 

The spiritual formation that comes with making oneself present to language and ideas that are not our own, that comes with being absorbed in something that is not us, that comes with struggling and struggling to find the words to say what we most want to say, that comes with occasionally placing one word next to another and finding that a door has sprung open to give us a sense of how things might be otherwise, is there for all of us who spend our days reading and writing. We should have confidence, I think, in the spiritual power of these practices. 

Those of us who worked on the revision of the MDiv curriculum were very influenced by the philosopher Simone Vey in this regard. She argued that school studies, no matter the subject matter, no matter whether or not we're good at them, are formative practices that have the potential to make us more present to God and to our suffering neighbor. Working on a math problem, or closer to our lives here, a translation, requires us to cultivate a capacity for attention to what is other than ourselves. 

Our human tendency is to domesticate the other, to make it more familiar, easier to be with. But Arabic or Hebrew or Sanskrit won't be domesticated or familiarized. Languages might change over time, but not because we said so. 

Cultivating the capacity to open our attention to a language that is not ours might bear fruit one day, Weil says, our prayer and in our engagements with others. Because we might learn, through our struggle with another's grammar and sentence structure, to be patient and let meaning unfold as it will in forms we could not have imagined before. We might be less eager to domesticate another's difference or another's suffering, move less quickly to slot God or our neighbor into a category with which we are comfortable. 

Sometimes, to be present to God and to each other, we have to be willing to be lost and bewildered. And we get a lot of opportunities to be lost and bewildered here at HDS. We shouldn't let those opportunities pass us by until we have rung a blessing from them. This kind of spiritual formation is available to all of us. 

There's another kind of spiritual formation going on here that we all share in common, and that happens in our shared life of religious practice. Any attempt to gather ceremonially at HDS has been a contested sight over the years. All of our gatherings, including the convocation we'll engage in this afternoon, emerge from a context of continual thought and negotiation. 

I'd like to say a word about the way the worship context on Wednesday, on Wednesday noon worship, has been transformed in the time that I've been here. Not everyone at HDS is directly involved in this kind of spiritual formation. But it reaches all of us, I think, whether we attend the services on Wednesday or not. 

When I first came to HDS, the Wednesday noon service was ecumenical. We had a terrific chaplain. And many students were involved in creating and sustaining Wednesday noon service each week. It was always expansive, always tried to be inclusive of the growing religious diversity in the school. 

But certainly, it was marked, in form and in content, most visibly by Protestant Christianity, even when other resources were brought in. Eventually, our students said, we have another idea about how we might spend those Wednesday hours. 

We're curious about each other's religious lives. We still want to gather for Wednesday noon worship, but we want to gather as we are. And under the gracious leadership of our current chaplain, Kerry Maloney, the current form of the Wednesday service took shape, with a different student group taking responsibility for the service each week and everyone else coming and participating to the extent they feel able. 

When the Muslim students are in charge, they lead Muslim prayer, drawing on the richness and specificity of their traditions. When it's the Christians' turn, we sing hymns or have Eucharist. We do Torah study with the Jewish students. We meditate with the Buddhists. 
We still have services that cut across traditions when groups like Queer Rights, or Racial Justice and Healing, or Women's Circle lead us. But in so many ways, our particularity has become much more visible. 

There is spiritual formation here for the students who prepare and lead these services. They are formed, as all ministers are, by the deep dive into the resources of their tradition required to prepare a meaningful hour of prayer or worship or meditation. 

Those who attend are formed as well. Some come to participate in a ritual that is deeply familiar to them, already part of their lives. Others come to pray alongside their friends in solidarity, or to catch a glimpse of their spiritual lives, or to see a tradition they love in action. 

And even those who don't come to Andover Chapel at noon, even those who aren't even aware that it's happening are shaped by it, because it keeps the practices of the religions we study alive and vibrant in our school. It holds together love and knowledge, and keeps that potent intersection open and available for us all. Thank you. 
[APPLAUSE]

JANET GYATSO: Thank you so much, Stephanie. And we'll move now to Professor Ahmed Ragab. 
[APPLAUSE]

AHMED RAGAB: Good afternoon, everybody. [CLEARS THROAT] With more and more with every wonderful talk, it seems I have less and less to say. 
[BRIEF LAUGHTER] 
So I'll just do my best. Thank you very much for this invitation. I think this is a very important opportunity for us as we celebrate 200 years to think not only about what has been accomplished over 200 years, but also where we want to be in the coming years. 
When thinking about a multireligious divinity school, I come to think about the different meanings of religion to each and every one of us. For people of color, for Brown, Black, yellow, red, and other colors, religion is not simply a set of beliefs, ideas, texts, rituals, or even communities, or whatever the category of religion might be. 

Religion becomes also an identity. An identity that, in many cases, is hoisted upon people, is forced upon them, is seen as intractably attached to them. Brown and Black religion, religion of color, in general, becomes the symptom and the cause of the Brown and Black condition. 

In the white gaze, the Brown and Black religion is the reason why the Brown and Black person is boisterous, or violent, or even peaceful, or lazy. It becomes, again, a symptom of why this Brown and Black person is Brown or Black or is seen within these categories of Brownness and Blackness. 

Religion, in this sense, becomes naturalized in that it becomes part and parcel of the identity of the person. It becomes part of their history, and at times, even part of their DNA. 

One of the major facets of marginalization and discrimination is the denial of the ability to be an individual. For a Brown or Black person, you are denied the ability and the right to be your own person. 

If a Black teen kid gets shot, he has to apologize for gang violence. If your name is Ahmed or Mohammed, you have to apologize because some Frenchman shot people in the street or blew themselves up. 

Religion, in this sense, becomes part and parcel of this particular identity. It becomes inseparable. Sometimes it could become suffocating. In this sense, a multireligious environment is, by definition, multiracial-- precisely because of these variable definitions of what religion actually means for different people and in the society that we live in. And in being a multiracial school, it becomes part of the race situation in this country and around the world. 

In this view, multi religion is not a position or a place that one can be in. It is not something that you acquire by recruiting few more students of color or a couple of more faculty that speak in a funny way. 

It is, rather, a disposition, an active disposition that is constantly becoming, a disposition that entails an understanding of the structures of violence and discrimination, and an active, and sometimes even militant struggle, in order to undermine and dismantle these structures. 

Religious in multi religion is also a description of an analytical category-- an analytical category that defines and discriminates and builds boundaries between these things that are worth of knowing, and these modes of knowledge that are worthy of a scholar, and other things and other modes of knowledge that are simply unworthy of knowing or unworthy of scholarship. 

In thinking about multireligiosity, we are confronted by the fact that this kind of disciplinary orientation that we live in, the disciplinary world that we live in, the scholarly tradition that we come from, is one that is built on the necessity of fixing objects and fixing subjects, of insisting on objects being fixed and unified in order to be understandable and analyzable. 

And as such, being multireligious in itself is an endeavor towards uncertainty. It is a process through which these analytical categories are being uncovered, and the structures of epistemic certainty and epistemic violence are being also uncovered, threatened, and often subverted. And again, it becomes a question of uncertainty, a question of problems-- a lot of problems. 

There is one in Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, there is one paragraph that I think describes a lot of-- or really speaks to the experience of many people of color, obviously at his time, but also today, in this country and beyond. 

He writes, "Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question. Unasked by some through feelings of delicacy, by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it. 

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately. And then, instead of saying directly, 'how does it feel to be a problem?' they say, 'I know an excellent colored man in my town,' or 'I fought at Mechanicsville,' or 'do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?' 

At this, I smile, or I'm interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer as the occasion may require. To the real question, 'how does it feel to be a problem?' I answer seldom a word." 

Being a problem, in Du Bois' sense, characterizes the existence of many people who belong to different marginalized groups based on race, gender, sexuality, or many other forms of discrimination and marginalization. And in Du Bois' terms, a multireligious divinity school is a problem space. It is a place that is full of problems and that actively seeks out problems. 

It is a problem because it is full of uncertainty, and intentionally so. It is a problem because it understands its position in a particular society that is built on fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, among many other forms of discrimination and marginalization. 

A multireligious divinity school, thus, is a place that allows these problems and these problems people to exist as they are, in their own problem-ness, celebrating their problem-ness, but also having the right to become their own individual problems or to give up their problem-ness altogether if they choose to do so. 

And a multireligious divinity school is a space that is very hard to describe and very hard to define, because it has never been but it's always becoming. As such, the answer to the original question, what is a multireligious divinity school, in my view, is that a multireligious divinity school is a problem. But it is definitely a problem worth having. Thank you. 
[APPLAUSE]

JANET GYATSO: Thank you. And our last speaker will be David Lamberth, Professor Lamberth. And let me just say that after that, we will have a little bit of time for questions, answers, and discussion. 
[APPLAUSE]

DAVID C. LAMBERTH: It's great to be beginning a third century with this fine institution. I want to touch on two main points. I want to begin first by taking note of a few details in our school's history to mark what our current status as a multireligious school might indicate, and then second, think about what distinctive opportunities and challenges are there for us as we look to a new third century of service to society through our work in this university. 

Now, as many of you will know from our website or our admissions material-- if nowhere else-- the original purpose of Harvard College, founded in 1636, was to educate ministers for the new Mass Bay Colony-- a Christian, Protestant, Puritan, and Calvinist community. The college itself, as indicated on its earliest motto, was dedicated to truth for Christ and church. 

When we were brought into being as a school separate from the college in 1816 called the Theological Seminary of Harvard University, our school was explicitly dedicated to preparing ministers-- in contrast to our competitors then, Yale and Andover. 

However, the school was, from the outset, non-denominational, which meant dedicated not to a particular Christian creed, but rather, more broadly, to the pursuit of the Christian truth. That mission remained in place, albeit with some changes, significant-- nonetheless, until about two decades ago. 

Over the last 15 or so years, we have evolved into being a multireligious divinity school. We hire faculty who specialize in many different religions and parts of the world. And we seek to broaden our expertise with each hire we make, as well as maintain traditional strengths. We recruit students from many traditions with broad career interests, inclusive of the kinds of service we've always prepared students for, but by no means limited to those. 

And all of us seek to bring multiple and varied perspectives to bear in our work, many of which are not overtly theological or religious, much less religious from any particular tradition. 

The panel's question today, what is a multireligious divinity school, is novel in the domain of divinity schools. But it's timely and pertinent as well, not only because we here now turn into a third century for the school, having made such definitive shifts in our own commitments, but also because we are in the context here of an evolving university. 

Harvard is now-- long since, actually-- dedicated to veritas alone, irrespective of Christ and church. But perhaps more crucially, Harvard is now not only in the service of the Commonwealth, or even just the nation, but also overtly aware of its responsibilities and desires to be a university for the much wider connected world, both as subject matter for study, but also as constituents to make us up and be served. 

Directly put then, I think that we should take the newly given reality of our no longer being a Christian school as a significant opportunity to thoroughly re-evaluate ourselves, and develop and perhaps innovate better ways to fulfill our reshaped and now novel mission. This evolution can and should continue to connect with our past. But we also should act in ways that seek to make the divinity school more valuable, more meaningful, and more effective than we perhaps have yet been. 

In the remainder, I want to highlight what I think are potentially four keys to fulfilling such a new promise of a multireligious divinity school in a globally-oriented university. These keys are, first, recognizing the primacy of our call to serve society, second, enlarging our engagement with religious professionals and leaders, thirdly, developing the convening power of ourselves and the university, and fourthly, radically internationalizing. 

First, the primacy of serving society. The university's purpose since its humble founding in 1636 was actually not directly to serve God, but rather, to serve God through serving the needs of this new society. In the case of the founding of Harvard College, the immediate social need was to have Puritan ministers trained to serve the next generation. 

In 1816, when what we call the Divinity School was founded, the school's purpose too was driven by the social context and perceived problems and needs. Specifically, in response to scientific and philosophical advances, theologians had developed more intellectually liberal, free-thinking approaches to Christian truth. Harvard had pivoted towards that at the end of the 18th century. 

But the Orthodox Calvinists in Massachusetts countered by innervating the idea of a standalone seminary in the model at Andover in 1808. And this was an immediate hit, threatening to dominate the production of religious leaders, and thus, tilt the religious landscape in Massachusetts and New England. 

Harvard's President John Kirkland responded with the plan for our own theological seminary, thus seeking to provide better solutions to social and religious needs than Andover. We were the second professional school initiated at the university following the Medical School, but before the School of Law. 

All these schools, and indeed, all our sibling professional schools that came after, whether Business, Public Health, Education, Public Policy, which is now Government, or Design, these schools were founded primarily to serve particular needs of society through research and the pursuit of truth, but also through the development and preparation of professionals trained not only in mind, but also in practice. 

This brings me to the second key I want to highlight, engagement with religious professionals and leaders. If focusing on service to the broader society is the first key, then engaging more fully with the range of religious professionals and leaders is the second, in my view. 

Historically and largely to the present, we've seen our role in this as providing the first training of professionals into the practice of ministry. Recently, as Stephanie detailed somewhat, we've overtly sought productively to broaden the category of ministry as service as much as we can so as to extend this training to our new multireligious ambitions. And that is, in my view, of great value and importance. 

But I also think that as we've shed the predominance of a single religious tradition, namely, Christianity, we should ask anew how we might engage religious leaders and professionals from the world's many different traditions and practices at different levels, thinking about what kinds of things we can bring to their practice and development and self-understanding, as well as enlarging the ambit of our own classrooms and discursive spaces even further than they are now. 

I have in mind, for example, the ways that our colleagues schools-- Public Health, Government, Education, and Business-- have developed programs and multiple degrees of different time lengths that are designed to engage mid-career professionals, professionals already in practice with religious communities, already making differences. 

We live in a world of religious conflict, misunderstanding, and indeed, mutual ignorance and frequent intolerance-- even as we live in this world at the same time of religious insight, enlightenment, grace, and service. 

Admittedly, we're a small faculty-- however, newly and importantly diverse. But to maximize our service not only to religious communities, but our service to societies globally, it's crucial for us to think anew about how we can engage a broader range of leaders and professionals from around the world. We have great intellectual strengths and remarkable range already constituted, all of which could be critical in improving this range of practice, and through them, bettering society at a wider level. But to do this, we have to look at ourselves and think about how to widen our engagement with the professions that are within our scope. 

This then lands me at my third key. We should utilize much more prominently and consistently than we have the convening power of the university, the name of Harvard, the history of its many contributions, particularly, its history across the university in addressing social problems. 

Diana Eck's Pluralism Project is exemplary here in addressing a key set of problems of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge in the United States. Though I should note that Diana really should get all the credit for this, and not have the Divinity School stepping in and taking that over these last 25 years. The Religion and the Practice of Peace Initiative just now underway under David Hempton's leadership is another good example of this kind of thing. 

I suggest that we build on these intentionally and concertedly, and try to find sustained and new engagements on specific issues and problems within the contemporary religious landscape as something we can contribute to and try to address. And then crucially, that we use the power that Harvard brings, not only to begin these, but to sustain them over time. 

For that kind of project to be a success, and indeed, for all our ambitions as a multireligious school to come to fruition, finally, I come to my fourth point, that we need to internationalize, and internationalize ourselves in all respects. 

We began locally and evolved in the mid to late 20th century into a nationally important institution under our Christian truth commitment. But to truly engage the multireligious aspect of this new idea of a multireligious divinity school, we not only need to represent so many religious traditions, but we also need a fully international community of participants, of students, of collaborators, of faculty. 

Our faculty is presently significantly internationalized, perhaps more than it ever has been. But the key to this, in my view, is to enlarge and widen the number of international participants among our student body, broadly construed, whether in our degree programs or other kinds of initiatives we might develop. 

So in sum, I see four keys to realizing this promise going ahead-- recognizing the primacy of our call to serve society, enlarging our engagement with religious professionals and leaders, deploying the convening power of the university more actively in our work, and internationalizing. 

What would be the scope of the benefits here, should we pursue this ambition fully? First, we would enliven even more our classrooms and contexts of thinking and doing research. The people who we have our conversations with in these contexts are so critical to what we actually think, and we to them as well. 

Second, I think we could contribute more than we presently do to the actually dynamic professional domains of a wider variety of religious communities, broadly construed, that we are actually challenged to serve. 

Thirdly, we could increase the impact that we have on society locally, nationally, and internationally. This is not something to fear, but rather, something critically and responsibly to engage. 

And through all of this, I think we could bring to fruition, for our generation and the generation to come, the values that we discern as most important through our knowledge practice and service. Thank you. 
[APPLAUSE]

JANET GYATSO: Thank you to all of the speakers for a wide array of insights, of questions, of ideas. I do want to give us a little bit of an opportunity to discuss and raise questions. I'm happy to call on anyone in the audience who would like to raise a question. 
I think it's the case that we don't actually have mics for the audience. So that would mean you just might have to speak loudly or come up to the front-- but anyone who would like to ask a question or say something. And I will also welcome comments from our speakers directed at others as well, if you would like to. First come, first served. 
AUDIENCE: I have a question. 
JANET GYATSO: Yes, sir, over here. Yeah. Can you stand up at least? Yeah. 
AUDIENCE: Yes. I think you started-- you did start out by noting the somewhat inconsistency, if not oxymoronic, contrast between multireligious and divinity. And we obviously-- presumably, obviously can't get rid of the name "divinity," or there'd be a few alumni who might object. History might intercede. 
But if we could, would you? And failing that, are there other ways around that name inconsistency that might get us past the impediment raised by the term "divinity," like "divinity business school" or--? 
[LAUGHTER] 
JANET GYATSO: Are you directing the question-- would you like to direct it at one of the speakers or--? 
AUDIENCE: Well, any and all speakers. But we could start with the good Dean. 
[LAUGHTER]

JANET GYATSO: The good Dean. 
DAVID N. HEMPTON: Well, I think some of us have already had those kind of conversations and haven't found a great resolution to them. Because you often come back to, you know, this is the worst name except for all the rest. 

Because, you know-- I mean, one option would be to think of Harvard School of Religion. But, you know, "religion" also has pretty negative connotations in the world as well. Some people in my travels say that at least "divinity" has the benefit of opaqueness, that no one's quite sure what it means. 

So it's not-- it's not an easy problem to solve, the nomenclature one. And especially, you know, I think David's absolutely right, that the next decade or two, I think we should aim to internationalize even more than we are at the moment. I mean, our percentage of international students kind of hovers around the kind of 14% to 18%, and it would be really great to see that rise. 

And I sometimes wonder what the impact of our name has in places that are not so familiar with that essentially Western Christendom tradition of divinity. So it's a great question. I don't know if there's a very obvious answer to it. But I'd love to hear my colleagues' view on it, because I think it's a really important issue. 

JANET GYATSO: [INAUDIBLE] Stephanie. 
STEPHANIE PAULSELL: Thank you very much. This is something we've talked about a lot over the years. And the Dean pointed out rightly that "divinity" carries with it a Christian connotation. But I think it also carries a connotation of universities. I mean, not every divinity school is associated with a university, but most of them are, I think. 

And there's something about the word "divinity" that, to me, connotes the serious study of religion, you know, for people who are going on to teach and be scholars, and also for people who are going on to be ministers, that that's an important-- that's part of the important work of universities, is to train ministers. 

And as we see more and more of our seminaries merging with universities, or not and disappearing, I think the universities are going to have to carry that vocation. We're going to have to be places where students can come prepare for ministry. And to me, the word "divinity" associates with that. 

JANET GYATSO: I just would want to ask, I'm not so convinced that the word "divinity" carries those Christian associations. So I'm not quite sure why that's the case. So maybe one of you could answer that. 

And I just wanted to add also that another one of the problematic words that we have had, that we're working with is "ministry." But in the case of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, you know, it's just a word that we explain. And I don't really-- 

So one possibility is to take a word that already exists and give it-- and sort of stretch its meaning. And in usage, it comes to have a different meaning. But what about this Christian association with "divinity"? Is that necessarily the case? 

DAVID C. LAMBERTH: So, no, it's not necessarily the case. And interestingly, in the case of our school, we really only became known as the Harvard Divinity School in the 20th century after the failed merger with Andover. So it's a relatively recent use in our case. The Latin is quite obscure actually in terms of what it means strictly. 

And "ministry" as well in Latin means service. And it shows up in secular contexts as well as religious ones. But there are other-- the ministry question is perhaps more easily fungible than the question of the name of the school. 

We could go the direction, for example, that the School of Education has gone, which is to have a similarly structured set of degree programs, but that are actually different degrees-- the Ed School has 13 one-year degree programs-- so that they don't have to fight the demon of an overarching name and curriculum for the various things that they're capable of providing to students. 

So there may be a couple of different ways to think about some of these issues. I'm not sure it goes to the broader question of the school. 
DIANA L. ECK: Yeah. I mean, I've thought about this a bit. And I think we need to think beyond the alumni of the school. I mean, let's just take, for example, the topic that we're addressing today, and think if there is a name for what it is we do and aspire to do that is in keeping with that. And we probably ought to think about it before someone with, you know, $100 million donates to the school and it becomes named after that person, which I hope we don't. 

But I mean, something like the Harvard Institute, or the Harvard School of Advanced Studies in Religion and Religious Leadership. Now, I mean, you'd have to come up with something a little simpler than that. But I think the serious study of religion and the undertaking of training in religious leadership, this actually communicates more across cultures, I think, than "divinity" does. 

And I don't think that it is an impossible thing to envision a name change for this school-- preserving its history, recognizing the things that everyone has said today, but also recognizing the changed world and the international, sort of, importance of having a place that does this. Because there's not very many places that do it. 

JACOB K. OLUPONA: I don't think this will be a problem in societies and cultures where the practice of religion and the study of it are very close. In most African universities, the department of religious studies, 3/4 of them are ordained. 
I was the only unordained person in my own department at Ife in Nigeria. And of course, as a son of an Anglican archdeacon, I was protected, and we never raised this issue. So perhaps it has to do with this whole notion of secularization and teaching religion in the so-called secular university. 
JANET GYATSO: Any comments from the audience? We have just a little time maybe for another question, or a comment, or still on the same topic. Yes. Yes, sir. 
AUDIENCE: Just a quick follow-up question on this. 
JANET GYATSO: Loud, loud. 
AUDIENCE: Is there evidence of how much the name, the Divinity School name-- like, what's the practical effect of how that association with Christianity has affected the enrollment or any objectives? 
Like, so I come from-- I'm unitarian universalist. So we sometimes spend a lot of time arguing over minute name changes or details that ultimately don't have a lot of practical effects. So I guess my question is, what's the-- is there a practical effect to-- how much of a problem is it that it is the Divinity School? Or can this be a name that, you know, it's historical, we explain it, and we can move on? 
JANET GYATSO: David Lamberth. 
DAVID C. LAMBERTH: I don't know. I don't know anything about what effect it has on our recruitment of students. But I know-- but you can take the airplane test, which is sit down on an airplane, wait until the person next to you asks you what you do or where you are, and then say, "oh, I'm a student or a faculty member at Harvard Divinity School," and then see what ensues. So I don't think it communicates as clearly perhaps as what Diana just said does. 
DIANA L. ECK: Well, and the other thing is just ask colleagues in other schools. I think in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, there is an appalling ignorance-- still, after all these years-- of what it is that we do over here. And they have a sense that somehow we do something that is concocted with-- well, they're not sure, really. But, you know-- 
[LAUGHTER]

"Divinity" does carry a connotation that is not really part of what it is we all do. 
JANET GYATSO: I'll just say that in the Buddhist world internationally, lots of students are trying to come here, would be happy to come here. And I think in that context, Harvard Divinity School, the word "Harvard" really is the part of the name that helps. Divinity, schmivinity-- that's fine. 
[LAUGHTER]

AHMED RAGAB: I think you're absolutely right. The word "Harvard" becomes really the key thing for many people. But I think also part of the problem that is attached to the name "divinity" is that it has a distinctly Western connotation that becomes almost difficult to translate to other languages. 

I mean, I can't think of a very clear translation to Arabic, for instance, to tell family and friends where I work, right? So you could come up with a name that basically says the equivalent of a school of religion, or a school of religion and theology, or something like this, but the actual word with its history is deeply Western. And that is, in itself, an important thing to think about. 

Now, again, we have to contend with the fact that there is-- historically, we use a lot of words and a lot of things and terms and names that are deeply Western and have long, and in many cases, troubled history. 

But we also need to recognize the fact that we may need, at one point or another, think about something else that really expresses what is actually being done, or at least makes it easier for people to communicate what is being done. So, you know, like what Diana was saying, something that communicates clearly what is being done might be important for thinking about the school in the future. 
JANET GYATSO: But one of the problems with that, of course, is, as you pointed out in your own talk, the very fundamental place of uncertainty and problematicity in the school makes it very difficult to communicate clearly what we're doing. 
I also want to just point out that the word "religion" as well has just as many problems, so. 
[LAUGHTER] 
I think that we are now out of time. I'm hoping that the whole panel raised all sorts of questions. Those of you who are students, or our fellow faculty, or here, these kinds of issues are going to continue to inform us in the classroom and outside. And all of our other guests who are here, these are definitely conversations that is not ending right now. But thank you for being here. 
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