Events

    Call, Respond, and Serve: The Role of Spirituality in Public Theology and Politics

    Location: 

    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...

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    Examining the Religious and Spiritual Implications of Climate Change

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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.

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    Divine Mortals: Royal Ancestor Worship in Deir el-Medina

    Location: 

    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.

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    Reflecting on Religion and the Legacies of Slavery

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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?

    ...

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    Slavers and Slavery: A Dialogue with Descendants

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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.

    ...

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    Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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’...

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    Religion, Race and the Double Helix of White Supremacy

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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...

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    Religion and the Legacies of Slavery | A Series of Public Online Conversations: Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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...

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    William Belden Noble Lecture Series: John Green

    Location: 

    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...

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    Peril to Democracy: Racism and Nationalism in America

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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.

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    The Climate of Community

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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....

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    The Climate of the Future

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker is novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.

    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...

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    Harvard Dance Center Showing: Initiation – In Love Solidarity

    Location: 

    Harvard Dance Center—Online or in-person

    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.

    Saturday, November 13, 4pm & 7pm: ...

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    The Climate of Resistance

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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,...

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    The Climate of Grief

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    This conversation is part of the series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker is poet Victoria Chang.

    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...

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    The Climate of Compassion for All Beings

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    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...

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    Psychedelics: The Ancient Religion with No Name?

    Location: 

    Harvard Divinity School—Online

    The most influential religious historian of the 20th century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs, and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? Join us for a discussion between CSWR Director Charles Stang and Brian Muraresku about his new book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, a groundbreaking dive into the role of psychedelics...

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