Online or at Harvard Divinity School, James Room (Swartz Hall), 45 Francis Ave., Cambridge
Major religious traditions call on their adherents to respond to the causes of suffering, those who suffer, and the prevention of suffering. The ways we respond and serve can take many forms including activism and holding political office. How does spiritual practice support the difficult work of speaking truth to power as well as being in positions of power without losing focus on the relief of suffering?
In this book talk and conversation, Lori E. Lightfoot, Esq., 56th Mayor of Chicago, and Pamela Ayo Yetunde, J.D., Th.D., author of Casting Indra's Net: Fostering Spiritual...
Religion and spirituality play a crucial role in shaping drivers of climate change and responses to it worldwide. In this online conversation, Harvard Divinity School faculty members Matthew Ichihasi Potts, Terry Tempest Williams, Janet Gyatso, and Diane L. Moore will examine the religious and spiritual implications of climate change.
Online or at Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge
Yasmin El Shazly will discuss the importance of ancestor worship in Deir el-Medina—particularly of Amenhotep I and his mother Ahmose-Nefertari. Prominently featured in homes, artwork, and tombs, these two royal figures held important positions in the Egyptian "hierarchy of being" and exerted great influence over the daily lives of Deir el-Medina residents.
This session will be a discussion among presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, we will return to the overarching questions that framed this collaboration: What does the academic study of religion teach us about the complex histories and legacies of slavery? How can a deeper understanding of the roles of religion enhance our commitment to reparative action in our contemporary times?
On March 6, Tracey Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will interview Dain Perry, a direct descendant of the DeWolfs of New England, the largest single slave-trading family in the United States, and his wife, Constance Perry, to discuss the reparative and healing work that they engage in as they tour and present throughout the United States.
On February 27, Terrence L. Johnson, Professor of African American Religious Studies, will examine how the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison establish a framework for exploring the role of religion and ethics in grappling with the memory and history of African enslavement.
Building beyond the work of the 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Report, Harvard Divinity School will host a series of online conversations with members of the HDS faculty to engage these vital questions from their expertise within the study of religion. Expand your understanding of the history and continuing implications of slavery in service of advancing racial justice in our own time and context.
On February 13, Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, will consider the stories of many of Harvard Divinity School’...
This conversation is the first of the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery | A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers are David F. Holland, John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at HDS, and Kathryn Gin Lum, Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Stanford University.
It has long been a historical truism that, in the early modern West, pseudoscientific racial hierarchies replaced religious hierarchies as the...
Building beyond the work of the 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Report, Harvard Divinity School will host a series of online conversations with members of the HDS faculty to engage these vital questions from their expertise within the study of religion. Expand your understanding of the history and continuing implications of slavery in service of advancing racial justice in our own time and context.
On February 27, Terrence L. Johnson, Professor of African American Religious Studies, will examine how the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison establish a framework...
Harvard Divinity School, Memorial Church, 1 Harvard Yard, Cambridge
New York Times bestselling Author John Green will be the first speaker in the 2022-23 William Belden Noble Lectures. Green is author of "The Fault in Our Stars," "Turtles All the Way Down," and "The Anthropocene Reviewed," among others. He is also widely-known video blogger, podcaster, and philanthropist. The title of his lecture is "How the World Ends."
The lecture is the first of four this academic year. The four-part series will take a plunge into the moral and ethical questions surrounding the global climate crisis and the role of religious institutions, organization and...
Arnold Arboretum (Hunnewell Building), 125 Arborway, Boston
Dr. Liseli A. Fitzpatrick, a Trinidadian-scholar in the field of African Diasporic cosmologies and sacred ontologies, will lead an engaging lecture and discussion exploring African mythologies and folkloric cultures.
Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard—Online
Heather R. White, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Gender and Queer Studies and 2021-22 Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associate, will deliver the lecture, "Safe, Sacred, Free: Queer Movements and Religious Spaces."
The after effects of the January 6 insurrection continue to reverberate across America. Since that fateful and disturbing day, pushbacks against the teaching of race in America, abortion rollbacks, and Covid denialism have swept across the country. What has been the role of evangelical Christianity in fueling these issues?
Professor Anthea Butler's lecture will explore the historical antecedents of Evangelical beliefs and political action leading up to today’s troubling times, and the prospects for the future of religion, peace and political action in America.
This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker for this community tea ceremony is Brian Kirbis of Theasophie.
Tea Master Brian Kirbis, who will open each of our sessions with a tea pouring to set a tone of well-being and attention, will take us through a formal tea ceremony. As a global community online, we will be able to sit and sip in collective silence to contemplate all we have heard and taken into our minds during these sessions....
Kim Stanley Robinson’s thriller The Ministry for the Future (2020) is science fiction that reads as hard-edged journalism. With short chapters and a myriad of characters, Robinson creates a kaleidoscope of perspectives on a global climate collapse coming in 2025. Bill McKibben writes “In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change...
Initiation – In Love Solidarity is a choreographic narrative exploring the embodiment of the Middle Passage, and the resilience and evolving identities of women in the African diaspora. A film component of the work was created at historic sites in New England related to the transatlantic slave trade and emancipation. The imagery of the cowrie shell is present throughout, chosen as an emblem of the transformative identity of the Black female body.
This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speakers are Chloe Aridjis, award-winning novelist, Sea Monsters (2020) and organizer for Writers Rebel, and Wanjira Mathai, Regional Director for Africa at the World Resources Institute.
Activists Aridjis and Mathai are powerful, fierce, compassionate leaders in the global environmental movement. A writer and an organizer, they are also the daughters of iconic conservation heroes: Homero Aridjis,...
Victoria Chang writes in her New York Times Notable Book of 2020, Obit, “I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.” After the deaths of her parents, she refused to write elegies; instead, Chang wrote poetic obituaries of the beautiful, broken world that surrounds her (many see them...
This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker is Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs at Harvard Divinity School.
We are not the only species that lives and loves and grieves on this planet. Janet Gyatso will focus on the phenomenology of being not just among humans but with all other sentient beings. How we can cultivate the capacity to have such experiences, in ways...
Maya female ceramic figurines from the island of Jaina in Campeche, Mexico, produced in the Late Classic Period (600–900 CE) are admired for their lifelike, poignant, and sometimes amusing characteristics. Long assumed to be elite women or moon goddesses, these figurines reveal a complexity of Maya social life, especially for women, that is rarely seen in other painted ceramics or monumental sculpture. They also offer insights into the culture of Jaina Island, including disturbing enslavement practices.
Mary Miller will discuss various interpretations of Jaina figurines—...