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A conversation with the three Hindu monastics visiting HDS this year, each representing a different Hindu tradition: Swami Sarvapriyananda (Ramakrishna Mission), Brahmacharini Shweta Chaitanya (Chinmaya Mission), and Sadhak Akshar–Guru: Mahant Swami...

Robert Franklin is worried about America. He sees distance, mistrust, and division in society eroding the foundations of U.S. democracy. A student of political science, Franklin understands that changing demographics, geographic isolation, identity...

Sometimes the Rev. Katherine Buechner Arthaud, MDiv ’86, wonders if she’s making a difference. The crowd in the pews on Sundays can be small in the rural Vermont churches she serves. She’s not sure that her sermons always resonate with parishioners. A...

Besides epidemics, wars, violence, and starvation, there is another source of disaster that is often overlooked: "a lack of love." So said His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, to a capacity crowd at Harvard's Memorial Church on...

The course of my entire adult life changed on a single day in October 2015, when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was then an academic sojourner, dislodged into a temporality of ever-changing...

In 1816, when Harvard Divinity School was established, its founders aimed to ensure that “every encouragement be given to the serious, impartial, and unbiased investigation of Christian truth.” Two hundred years later, HDS has expanded its mission. With...

Vanessa Zoltan is not sorry for co-founding a podcast that treats J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books as sacred texts. She’s not sorry for her new show, “ Hot and Bothered,” which encourages listeners to write and find meaning in romance novels. Most of all...

The tradition of HDS graduates speaking and acting publicly—and often prophetically—extends back to the School’s earliest years. In his address to the graduating class of 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson, HDS ’26, railed against a church “which seems to totter...

David Little, ThD ’63, should have ended up in the pulpit if his family tree is any indication. His father was a fifth-generation Presbyterian minister. His brother, cousin, uncle and nephew all became clergy as well. Truth be told, Little intended to be...

In November 2018, the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature sponsored a session “Krister among the Jews and Gentiles,” to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Krister Stendahl, who taught at HDS from 1954-1989, with a hiatus to...

Soon after the 2004 presidential election, HDS professor Amy Hollywood was asked to participate in a panel discussion on the outcome of the voting. Hollywood remembers, "All I did was to present a hypothesis that I'd read in a smart web newsletter...

Harvard Divinity School has long been at the forefront of the study of religion. From the New Testament scholarship of Helmut Koester and Krister Stendahl to the founding of the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Women’s Studies in Religion...