Denson Staples, MDiv ’18

“Whether in academia or as an ordained person, I want to grapple with these gripping questions of faith and its implications for how we live with each other today, tomorrow, and in years to come.”

Denson Staples is a third-year master of divinity candidate. He loves a good surprise, good barbecue, and chasing sunbeams. Denson dedicates this interview to the memory of Lee Covington—whose other-oriented spirit of hospitality nourished many—and to Lee’s partner, Mack.

Religion, Violence, and Peace

I’m interested in how people use the Bible and the Qur’an to justify or incite acts of violence, or on the other hand, to inspire people to build peace within and across their religious traditions. There’s a lot of room within both Islam and Christianity to find ways to justify acts of violence or to create peace.

Before coming to divinity school, someone said, “How do you prove God exists?” I don’t know that I can prove that God does or does not exist, but what I do know is that people believe there’s a God and they do things with that belief, and so our world is profoundly shaped by religion. Therefore, it matters. I’m moved by the way people imagine their faith and the way they use it to transform themselves in the world.

We live in a particular historical moment when secularism is very persuasive to a lot of people. But if we’re trying to be in conversation with people who use their religion to do things that we admire or do not admire, we need to realize that their rationales don’t come from a secular world.

Religion in My Life

I’m working at a church this year, and being in church almost every Sunday—after spending several years avoiding churches, maybe avoiding God because of things I had heard in church growing up that didn’t sit well with me—has made me think about how I use religion in my life. Like, why am I coming back to something that has been so harmful in some ways? Part of it is my recognition that, while some of my formative religious experiences growing up were tainted by what I would call toxic theologies, those same moments also planted deep seeds of hunger and longing to find a sense of the divine.

I think I use religion in my life to try to figure out what the promise is for people in believing in divine experience. What promise do we find there that we cannot find elsewhere, if there is one?

On God

A lot of homophobic and anti-black rhetoric that seems to sit comfortably enough with some church folk tends to make God very small. I have a hard time believing that God’s vision for humanity doesn’t have enough room in it for people who are queer or for people who are not white. I think what I’m struggling to do is figure out language that stops flattening God, that stops making God a smaller being than God might be.

I feel like I’ve had many experiences of what I know God is not, and through those experiences, I’m coming to a place of knowing what God might then be. But I haven’t yet arrived at that destination. Maybe it’s not a destination at all.

My Proudest Moments

There’s an annual LGBTQ conference at Harvard and last year the conference committee reached out to our Queer Rites group at the Divinity School to ask us to read at the Morning Prayers services at Memorial Church for the week leading up to the conference. I worked with five other Divinity School students to create a sermon series that explored the nexus of queer experiences and conceptions of the divine. This gave me a voice to start grappling with some of the questions that brought me to Divinity School.

Before HDS, one of my proudest moments was working as an employee at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where I worked for two and a half years after I graduated from college. I had the chance to provide conflict management trainings for young people—middle schoolers, high schoolers, and also civil society leaders age 18-35, military personnel, and specifically United Nations Peacekeepers. A lot of folks from the U.S., the Middle East, and North Africa that I trained and worked with had harrowing stories about their own coreligionists who used religion to do things that are, to me, unconscionable. After witnessing these acts, rather than conceding their faith or negating it, these young people started to dig deeper and say, “I know that’s not what’s true about Islam,” or, “I know that’s not what’s true about Christianity.” They would go into the public sphere and start articulating counter-narratives. They became more public with their faith so they could push back against violent articulations of their faith. To claim faith in a public way is to make yourself a target for some folks, and they did it anyway.

Privilege

Even on your worst day in graduate school, you’re getting an advanced degree, which is a privilege. The vast majority of the world doesn’t have that privilege. So I’ve got a hunger to see Divinity School folks be actively engaged beyond the classroom and translate what we study into practical outcomes for human life. Even when we doubt we’re truly making a difference, I think we do well to consider how to turn this privilege into action.

After Graduation

I’m planning to keep as many doors open as possible. I’m considering getting ordained in the United Church of Christ. I’m also considering applying to PhD programs in religion. And a small part of me would love to find a way to continue working with Christian and Muslim faith leaders. Whether in academia or as an ordained person, I want to grapple with these gripping questions of faith and its implications for how we live with each other today, tomorrow, and in years to come.

My Dream Day

My dream day includes riding my bike to a hiking destination, having a picnic with a friend, and then playing beach volleyball in the evening. That’s a good day. That was my escape from the life of the HDS Summer Language Program. I took New Testament Greek. It was a roller coaster.

Photos: Laura Krueger