Alumni Profiles

The Rev. Mel Kawakami, MDiv '74, ThM '85, is a retired pastor and pastoral counselor for the United Methodist Church. He spent his career helping communities devastated by unexpected loss, including his tenure as pastor of the Newtown United Methodist...

The day that Abel Rodriguez won his first asylum case was the best of his career as an immigration attorney. He was overjoyed and his work seemed full of meaning after accompanying his client through a process that was long and stressful but ultimately...

2020 Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honoree Milia Islam, MTS ’04, was eight years old when her family moved to the United States from Bangladesh, settling eventually in Fulton, MO. The small town was overwhelmingly white and very...

Recognized this year as a Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honoree, Ephraim Isaac’s sixty-year career includes an almost absurd number of achievements. As an academic, Isaac, BD ’63, has taught at Princeton—both the university and the seminary...

“It’s rare for a divinity school to have such a diverse group of people,” says Israel Buffardi, MDiv '19, of HDS. “[It allows for] building community with all different types of people and finding connections with each other and the values in their lives...

The United States is suffering through an epidemic of youth mental illness. For Varun Soni, MTS ’99, the crisis is not only one of mind, but also of spirit. The nonprofit, independent news site The Conversation reports that “from 2009 to 2017, major...

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...

As the director of Harvard Business School’s Forum for Growth and Innovation and senior lecturer of business administration, Derek van Bever, MBA ’88, MDiv ’11, makes management education his ministry. In so doing, he draws on his HDS experience and...

Tom Stanton, HDS ’68, only attended Harvard Divinity School for one year, but the experience had a big influence on the rest of his life. You can see it in his career path. Inspired by his HDS field education experience at an inner-city church, as well as...

Jalane Schmidt could hear the chants across the street from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia on the night of August 11, 2017. “Blood and soil!” the torch-bearing marchers shouted as they gathered in front of a statue of Thomas...