Gomes Honors

The 2018 Peter J. Gomes STB '68 Memorial honorees speak for the final installment of this year’s Divinity Dialogues. The panelists were: Robert Michael Franklin, MDiv '78; Jalane D. Schmidt, MDiv '96, AM '05, PhD '05; Simran Jeet Singh, MTS '08; Karen I...

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...

Simran Jeet Singh was running home from his office at New York University when he heard the slur. His first impulse was to ignore it as he had so many times in the past. Then he stopped, stiffened, and turned back to the young man who had shouted at him...

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...

"The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun. “It's not even past." Faulkner’s sentiment was top of mind for HDS Senior Lecturer Ann Braude when she and her team of three doctoral students took on the Herculean task of telling the...

Karen Tse, MDiv '00, walked into a prison in the African nation of Burundi and found children: an eight-year-old boy tossed into jail for stealing a mobile phone; twelve-year-old girls imprisoned for "sex crimes"; a two-year old girl who had spent most of...

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...

Alumni/Alumnae Council Chairperson Christopher J. Hanson, MDiv ’10, moderated a discussion with this year's Gomes Honorees about their time at HDS, their views on the importance of School, and their work in the world. The panel was part of HDS's...

Few changes have been more dramatic in the long history of Harvard Divinity School than the inclusion of women—both as scholars and the subject of scholarship. In that context, 1973 was a milestone. That year, HDS established its Women’s Studies in...

Charles Adams knew he wanted to be a preacher. He didn’t know if he was old enough for the pulpit, though, so he asked his mom. He wasn’t happy with the answer. “I asked my mother when we came out of church one day, ‘How old am I?’ ” he remembers. “She...