Religious History

HDS Professor Catherine Brekus discusses how people have turned to religion in times of crisis.

Stephanie Paulsell, Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at HDS and Interim Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, interviews her husband Kevin Madigan, Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at HDS, about pandemics in...

In light of reports of migrant deaths and inhumane conditions for children, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. took to social media last week to criticize U.S. immigration policy, comparing the country's detention centers to "concentration camps."...

Peter Hayes (Ph.D., Yale, 1982) specializes in the histories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and, in particular, in the conduct of the nation’s largest corporations during the Third Reich. Dr. Hayes gave this year's Dudleian Lecture on "Kristallnacht...

November 11, 2018, marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, a conflict that claimed the lives of nearly nine million soldiers and civilians, with more than three times that number wounded, taken prisoner, or gone missing. One century later...

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...

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...

In the deadliest incident of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history, 46 year-old Robert Bowers allegedly shot dead 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during morning Shabbat services on Saturday, October 27. During a gunfight with...

Scholars discuss methods, histories and futures of thinking about Islam within religious studies. This day-long conference is in honor of Professor William A. Graham, who retired in July 2018 after a long and distinguished career at Harvard. It includes...

Given its practical goal, its theological purposes, and its lack of accountability to external data of the sort in which archaeologists trade, biblical historiography has a malleability that many modern readers find difficult to approve, writes Professor...