News

Where the Present is a Continuation of the Past

October 30, 2018

History books are filled with accounts of the past, shaped by the perspectives of those who wrote them. A reader’s imagination may conjure events across the miles and millennia based on those accounts, but at best their own life experiences and interests...

Quiz: Día de los Muertos and Halloween

October 30, 2018

Test your knowledge of some of the lesser known aspects of these two fall holidays. For more information and background on Halloween, see our interview with HDS Professor Kimberley Patton. For more about Día de los Muertos, including a special exhibit at...

Unexpected Convergences: Religious Nationalism in Israel and Turkey

October 30, 2018

This article by Jocelyne Cesari, T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding, compares Israel and Turkey to demonstrate how religious nationalism can be analyzed by a combination of historical institutionalism and...

Harvard Educators Preach Religious Literacy at Chicago-Area High School

October 29, 2018

On hand to hear from Religious Literacy Project director Diane Moore and her team were teachers from 15 high schools in and around Chicago.

Video: Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam

October 29, 2018

How did pious medieval Muslims experience health and disease? Rooted in the prophet’s experiences with medicine and healing, Muslim pietistic literature developed cosmologies in which physical suffering and medical interventions interacted with religious...

HDS Visiting Scholar Examines Gender and Ritual in Urban China

October 26, 2018

On a recent autumn afternoon in a packed Braun Room on the HDS campus, Anna Sun, a 2018–19 research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at HDS, spoke about her research project this year, titled, “Women in Prayer: Gendered Religious Life...

Huddled Around the Last of the Light

October 25, 2018

On October 23, 2018, MDiv candidate Amy Weston gave the following sermon during the Tuesday morning Ecumenical Eucharist in Andover Chapel. ♦♦♦ Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers...

Humans of HDS: Bearing Witness

October 25, 2018

"Ever since I was little I did nothing but read, and I always think, what’s the point of acquiring knowledge if you’re not going to share it and exchange it or try to dissect it with the help of others."— MTS candidate Edwin Alanís-García

The Bits the Bible Left Out

October 24, 2018

HDS Hollis Professor of Divinity Karen King studies texts from Christianity’s first centuries to reinterpret the history of the early church.

Student Op-Ed: Defending Trans Lives Is a Massachusetts Value

October 22, 2018

"Campaign ads that stoke fear about trans people in bathrooms pose a far greater threat to our lives than trans people pose to anyone with whom we share a public accommodation," writes MTS candidate Sam Ames.

Video: Christian Slavery in the Protestant Atlantic

October 22, 2018

Katharine Gerbner, McKnight Land-Grant Professor and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, discusses how religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world.

Exploring Native America

October 19, 2018

PBS’s latest series, Native America, explores the world created by America’s first peoples. The four-part series, which premieres October 23, reaches back 15,000 years to reveal massive cities aligned to the stars, unique systems of science and...