Gomes Honors

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...

The 2020 Gomes Honorees work at the intersection of religious and disciplinary boundaries Harvard Divinity School takes a different approach to the diversity of modern life than the “othering” that seems increasingly to roil societies around the world...

The 2019 Peter J. Gomes STB '68 Memorial honorees speak on the topic of “spiritual innovation.” The panelists were: Erik Martínez Resly, MDiv ’12, founder and co-director of The Sanctuaries in Washington D.C. Salma Kazmi, MTS ’09, founding executive...

The HDS community is home to practitioners and scholars of dozens of different religions—and to those who have no formal religious affiliation at all. One is as likely to bump into a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka on campus as a Unitarian Universalist from...

Some people think that politics and art don’t mix. Impose a political message, they say, and art becomes contrived and manipulative. Bring too much art to politics and it becomes unserious and impractical. Rev. Erik Martinez Resly, MDiv ’12, is not one of...

When Salma Kazmi got to her job at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) on the morning of September 11, 2001, she found a telephone message from her boss. “Something terrible has happened,” it said. “Please call me immediately.” After she...

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...

In 1815, the Reverend William Ellery Channing laid out a vision for the graduates of the institution that would become Harvard Divinity School. In a fundraising circular written over the signature of Harvard President John T. Kirkland, Channing wrote that...