Video: Harvard President Drew Faust's Remarks at HDS's Bicentennial Celebration

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DAVID N. HEMPTON: So good afternoon, everyone. And welcome. It's my great pleasure to welcome all of you to our celebration that marks the close of our year-long bicentennial celebration. 

It's really been an extraordinary year, from the convocation address delivered by our former dean, George Rupp, to an inspiring visit by 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Leymah Gbowee, from the celebration of the significant anniversaries of the Pluralism Project, 25 years old, and the religion and ecology project founded at Harvard, to last night's Ingersoll lecture on immortality by one of our country's premier novelists, Marilynne Robinson. 

Throughout the year, our campus has been the site of Faces of Divinity, the thought-provoking exhibit produced by Professor Anne Braude that charts Harvard Divinity School's opening to new voices and new ideas right across the decades from its founding in 1816. 
So I encourage you to set aside some time to explore that exhibit in all of our three campus sites-- Andover Hall, Rockefeller Hall, and Divinity Hall. It tells a remarkable story of the influence of this school and its change over time. 

So today has been no different. We have honored our past with a panel on the revolution in women's studies that occurred at Harvard Divinity School in the '70s and '80s, and has really pushed out into other campuses and across the United States and the wider world. 
We have reflected on our role at the university and in the world today in one Harvard and in discussion with the deans of Harvard Schools of Business, Law, and Education. What a remarkable group of people. 

And we looked recently just in the last panel at urgent priorities in the present and the future. And our conversation with some of the country's leading thinkers and activists on the challenges of poverty, violence, and justice was really an astounding panel for those of you who had the privilege of being there. 

So now, and I'm not entirely sure it's OK for the dean of the Divinity School to say this, but we're going to become a party school. 
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Only for a day. Don't get excited. 
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So when the dust has settled and the music stops, we will go back to work on our core mission-- to advance knowledge of global religions, to prepare faith leaders from all the major religious traditions, to educate ethical religiously literate and compassionate leaders in all fields who work for a better world. 

So I hope that today's events have given you a sense of that mission and perhaps the excitement we feel here at HDS about pursuing it with even more determination in our third century. We mean business. 
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So thank you for joining us on this very special day for Harvard Divinity School and for Harvard. It's now my great privilege and honor to welcome Harvard University's president, Drew Gilpin Faust. Her presence with us is an indication-- 
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Her presence with us is an indication, both of the critical role that Harvard's leaders have played in the school's founding and advancement, and as she recently wrote in Harvard Magazine, "to HDS's place as a pinnacle of pluralism and as a powerful convener of experts from right across the university." 

President Faust, a distinguished historian in her own right, who has produced work of remarkable ethical and moral depth on our nation's encounters with war, death, and suffering-- we are very delighted to have you with us. 

So thank you most sincerely for your inspiring leadership at Harvard, for putting up with your deans, and for your steadfast support of the Divinity School, and especially for honoring us with your presence on this historic occasion. Thank you so much. 
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DREW GILPIN FAUST: Thank you, David. It's wonderful to be with all of you today to mark the bicentennial of Harvard Divinity School. Like the best birthday parties, this one I has been going on for many months, celebrating the work that has engaged this remarkable school for 200 years, from its beginnings as the first non-sectarian theological school, to its position today as the most religiously diverse divinity school in the United States, and I would venture, the world. 
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Yay! 
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And if I may point out a worldly reward, it has just been ranked by its peers as the best theology, divinity, and religious studies school in the world. 
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Yay. 
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The rigorous encounter with multiple traditions or with no tradition at all is what makes Harvard Divinity School unlike any other place. Where else can a student cross from God's motel to the humanist hub in a matter of minutes? 

Harvard philosopher George Santayana, who lectured at the Divinity School a century ago, said, and I quote him, "that every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy, a special and surprising message, and that the vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in." 

The Divinity School opens a window to these worlds by training students who can bring people together across a varied landscape of religions and cultures. We have only to consider Dean Hempton's initiative on religions and the practice of peace to know that we could not have a more insightful, compassionate guide as we deepen our understanding of religion in a global context. 

Now, we may think of this devotion to inclusion and religious-- [CLEARS THROAT] excuse me-- diversity as fairly recent, but at least one graduate wrote about it more than a century and a half ago. His name was Arthur Buckminster Fuller, an abolitionist and brother of feminist writer Margaret Fuller. 

He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1847 determined, as he put it, to save souls, until he found himself in the Civil War serving as a chaplain to a Massachusetts army regiment, ministering to men and even women of many faiths and backgrounds. He wrote, "Roman Catholics and members of every Protestant sect, believers and non-believers, Union and Confederate soldiers, a Delaware regiment full of slaveholders, and more than 2,000 emancipated slaves." Some of whom he united in marriage. 

And like the surgeons who operated on any patient, Unionist or rebel, as he put it, he preached to all of them, not about any sectarian faith or doctrine, but in his words, on those great themes only and in that spirit only in which all can take an interest and feel like their conscientious opinions are respected. 

Arthur Fuller was killed at the Battle of Fredericksburg, but not before he served as the only chaplain for 680 soldiers in a Virginia hospital and reflected on his experience of war. He wrote, "usefulness and goodness seem to me now the great objects of existence, and to make each other better our chief duty." 

That call to usefulness and goodness, to serve people of all faiths and backgrounds, is one that Harvard Divinity School has answered across the centuries. It answered that call in 1816 during a strange, cold summer when a red fog hung over Cambridge. A bitter theological war gripped the churches of New England. 

And Harvard established this school for what it called the impartial and unbiased investigation of Christian truth-- a place literally founded in a fog in order to help us see more clearly. And ever since, it has lifted us up and cleared our sight. 

Because Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson challenged tradition. Paul Tillich transformed theology. And Constance Parvey and Letty Russell broke barriers for women in the ministry and feminist theology. 

And as it served people of all faiths and backgrounds, the Divinity School itself became more inclusive, identified not by any one set of doctrines but by a growing, and sometimes a little unsettling, commitment to pluralism. 

I tell Harvard undergraduates who never knew him about how Peter Gomes inspired generations of students, as you know, often by confounding expectations as a gay, Black, Baptist preacher, and a Republican. 
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A self-described Afro-Saxon. 
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Someone who once said about himself, "my anomalies make it possible to advance the conversation." What better way to describe the Divinity School itself? A place where students encounter more than 30 religious traditions and then go fight Ebola in West Africa by understanding Liberian burial practices, or track hate crimes in Boston's Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Hindu, and Christian communities, or appear in crowded jail cells across the world to reduce the torture-- use of torture in 40 countries. 

What better example than former Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, MTS '84, the first permanent US representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council, whose education here, from conceptions of God, to studies of peace, enabled her to fight injustices in Syria and Libya and Iran by forging practical links to spiritual concerns that, as she puts it, are what really animate people around the world. 

How indeed do we make conscientious opinions respected, or negotiate when religious identities are at stake? The Harvard Divinity School and its alumni have helped to call forth and honor what novelist Marilynne Robinson calls the separate language in each of us, at the same time, guiding us toward shared understanding. 

As we remember Arthur Fuller and anticipate the usefulness and goodness of new graduates, I'm struck most of all by the continuity of your courage. The Divinity School is the second smallest in size of Harvard schools. Yet, never has its work been larger or more vital. 
The Divinity School is just a decade old when Ralph Waldo Emerson became one of its early alumni. He tried being a pastor, but soon discovered he had to make his own path as a writer and a lecturer. And when he was invited to speak here to a graduating Divinity School class, he was worried about the students, all seven of them-- 
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--whom he believed must not be dampened by their training nor daunted by their civic task. And so, from a podium in Divinity Hall in 1838, he addressed them with a daring and democratic and inclusive notion that the divine speaks within each of us, and that, in Emerson's words, "faith makes its own forms." 

For 200 years, the Divinity School has made its own forms. Its graduates are activists, and novelists, and journalists, and scholars, diplomats and ministers. All at the core is a living spirit that animates this school and this university. 

We celebrate that spirit. We honor every new leader, every new generation literate in religion and grounded in ethics, who broker peace and give relief and build understanding. 

You give us hope, as Emerson put it, as broad as the unbounded universe. May that unbounded spirit continue to find its own forms now and for the next 200 years. Thank you very much. 
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