“Part of our work around solving or responding to the environmental crisis we're facing is understanding the assumptions and the stories that we carry into it,” says Lara Freeman, religious studies teacher at Westtown School outside Philadelphia. Freeman, MTS ‘06, is a former student of Religion and Public Life (RPL) Associate Dean for Religion and Public Life Diane L. Moore and has long incorporated into her classroom the religious literacy method advocated by RPL. 

This year, Freeman was inspired by RPL’s religious literacy and climate resources for educators and is adapting and expanding her environmental justice course to incorporate RPL’s learning tools. This is the fourth iteration of Freeman’s course and demonstrates the collaborative potential between educators and RPL in which RPL and educators learn from each other, building, refining, and improving teaching materials based on mutual expertise.... Read more about Religious Literacy Belongs in the Climate Justice Classroom: HDS Alum and Educator Empowers Students by Bringing RPL Frameworks to Life

On April 14, 2023, Religion and Public Life Fellows with expertise in policy, environmental science, Native and Indigenous rights, and education discussed the ways religious and spiritual literacy can enhance policy and scientific efforts to understand the drivers of climate collapse and advance climate justice. The panel featured Cythia Wilson, RPL Native and Indigenous Rights Fellow; Teresa Cavazos Cohn, RPL Climate Justice Fellow; and Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, RPL Government Fellow. Sarabinh Levy-Brightman, RPL Education Fellow, acted as moderator.... Read more about Video: Religious Literacy and Climate Justice

On March 23, 2023, the Divinity School hosted Religion and Public Life Visiting Scholar in Conflict and Peace Raef Zreik. The question of Palestine and the Palestinians, according to Zreik, is shifting more and more from an external matter to an internal question of Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people writ large. Zreik interrogates the ways questions of war and peace, borders, security, or the ‘two state’ solution become more and more internal to Israel. Related intimately to the state's identity, character and constitutional structure and democratic nature, these questions highlight the merging conversation of existence and essence.... Read more about Video: The Palestinian Question as a Jewish Question

"Whatever your gifts are, those are needed." 

This April, Harvard Divinity School students, faculty, and staff organized the first-ever Climate Justice Week, an initiative to honor Earth Month by proactively tackling the urgency of the climate crisis.

The goal of the week was to provide HDS and the Harvard community with opportunities to build connections, activate their passion around environmental justice, and understand the critical role that...

Del Castillo has stayed close to HDS since graduating, and she is now a climate justice researcher at Religion and Public Life, where she explores the role religion and spirituality play in the movement for environmental justice. Her work resides at the intersection of religion, climate, and racial justice, and she helps provide resources and opportunities for members of the HDS community to engage with climate justice.

“If I could describe my research, it is listening to students and thinking about how we could innovate ways for students who come through the doors of HDS to feel ready to tackle the climate catastrophe,” Del Castillo explains. ... Read more about With Climate Justice Week, Anna Del Castillo, MDiv ’21, Brings Hope Into Grief

On March 20, 2023, HDS hosted the final installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers were Karen L. King, David F. Holland, Dan McKanan, Terrence L. Johnson, and Tracey Hucks. 

This session was a discussion among presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, presenters returned 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?

Harvard Crimson writers Julian J. Giordano and Sami E. Turner cover the sixth and final event in the HDS series of public online conversations titled “Religion and Legacies of Slavery,” which aims to build on Harvard’s landmark Legacy of Slavery report released in April 2022. The event, “Reflecting on Religion and the Legacies of Slavery,” featured the series' contributing faculty, who reflected on the core questions of the webinar series, and on the school’s ties to slavery and its responsibility to educate the next generation of religious scholars and leaders. The event was hosted by Diane L. Moore, faculty director of Religion and Public Life; and Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.... Read more about RPL in the News: "Harvard Divinity School Faculty Discuss Teaching the Legacy of Slavery"

On March 6, 2023, HDS hosted the fifth installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers were Tracey E. Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies, Dain Perry, and Constance Perry.

Slavery is most readily associated with the U.S. American South with the geographies of the North often eclipsed. Tracey Hucks lead a discussion on slavery and the slave trade that focused on New England and the DeWolf family of Rhode Island. The DeWolf family was understood as the largest slave-trading family in the United States and Dain Perry, a direct descendant, will be featured in this webinar. The event will also highlight the reparative and healing workshops co-facilitated by Dain and his wife Constance Perry conducted throughout the U.S. at religious, social, and educational institutions.

Amahl A. Bishara, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, and author of Back Stories: U.S. News Producation and Palestinian Politics, discusses her book Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence and Roadblocks to Political Expression. The book looks to sites of political practice, such as journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road, to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in circumstances of constraint. Drawing on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media, Crossing a Line illuminates how expression is always grounded in place, and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.

The discussion was moderated by Raef Zreik, Religion and Public Life Visiting Scholar in Conflict and Peace. The event was co-sponsored by The Center for Middle Eastern Studies Harvard University.... Read more about Audio: Book Event: Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence and Roadblocks to Political Expression

Harvard Crimson writers Julian J. Giordano and Nicole Y. Lu cover the fifth event in the HDS series of public online conversations titled “Religion and Legacies of Slavery,” which aims to build on Harvard’s landmark Legacy of Slavery report released in April 2022. The event, “Slavers and Slavery: A Dialogue with Descendants,” featured HDS professor of Africana Religious Studies Tracey E. Hucks, who moderated a discussion on reparations and the legacy of slavery with Dain Perry, a descendant of the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history, and Constance R. Perry, whose ancestors were enslaved. The event was hosted by Diane L. Moore, faculty director of Religion and Public Life; and Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.... Read more about RPL in the News: "Husband Descended From Slave-Trading Family and Wife Whose Ancestors Were Enslaved Speak at HDS Event"

On February 27, HDS hosted the fourth installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speaker was Terrence L. Johnson, Professor of African American Religious Studies at HDS.

The 1619 Project spawned an unprecedented national conversation in and outside the classroom on slavery’s ongoing afterlives in American society. The enthusiastic response to the project was not universal. A few historians noted in a letter to the Times that the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding of ideology.” The challenge raised here underscores central ethical concerns at the center of American national identity: who is responsible for slavery? What role does religion play in addressing the lingering “afterlives” of African enslavement in the United States? Do African and African American scholars play a unique role in public debates and scholarship on slavery? Terrence Johnson 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.... Read more about Video: Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations

"Enslavement was a family matter for our founders. Virtually every Divinity School affiliate who spoke out against slavery had close family members who profited from enslavement. And many of them profited indirectly as well. . . . Part of my inspiration for telling this story through the lens of family history is the work that many Divinity School students are currently doing on ancestral healing [meaning] seeking to redress past harms and their ongoing legacies in ways that include our ancestors—both ancestors who perpetrated the harms and ancestors who suffered them.”

—Dan McKanan, “Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories,” Religion and the Legacies of Slavery... Read more about How Family History Can Inspire Accountable Reparations and Foster Ancestral Healing

Harvard Crimson writers Julian J. Giordano and Sami E. Turner cover the fourth event in the HDS series of public online conversations titled “Religion and Legacies of Slavery,” which aims to build on Harvard’s landmark Legacy of Slavery report released in April 2022. The event, “Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations,” featured HDS professor of African American Religious Studies Terrence L. Johnson, and was hosted by Diane L. Moore, faculty director of Religion and Public Life; and Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.... Read more about RPL in the News: "Harvard Divinity School Professor Discusses Religion and the Movement for Reparations at HDS Webinar"

On February 13, HDS hosted the third installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speaker was Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity at HDS.

Harvard Divinity School was founded nearly forty years after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, yet many of our school’s founders and early students were intimately familiar with both enslavement and the slave trade.... Read more about Video: Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories

On February 10th, 2023, Harvard Divinity School alumnx working as community organizers came together to discuss their insights from their work on the ground and how their time studying religion has influenced their work with communities in pursuit of social justice. This event was part of the Leading Toward Justice webinar series, which is jointly sponsored by Religion and Public Life and HDS Alumni Relations.... Read more about HDS Alumnx Share Insights from the Intersections of Religion, Ethics, and Community Organizing

Harvard Crimson writer Tyler J. H. Ory covers the third event in the HDS series of public online conversations titled “Religion and Legacies of Slavery,” which aims to build on Harvard’s landmark Legacy of Slavery report released in April 2022. The event, “Harvard Divinity School and Slavery: Family Stories,” featured HDS senior lecturer Dan P. McKanan, and was hosted by Diane L. Moore, faculty director of Religion and Public Life; and Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.... Read more about RPL in the News: "Harvard Divinity School Senior Lecturer Discusses Role of Slavery in School’s Founding"

On February 6, 2023, HDS hosted the second installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers were 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 dominant framework for understanding human difference and justifying oppressive colonialist practices, including slavery. Recent research has challenged this axiom to suggest how important religious conceptions of difference remained to the racist imagination into the modern period—and, indeed, into our present day. The convergence of racialist and religious orderings of humanity converged in American institutions like Harvard University, persisting in ways with which we have not sufficiently reckoned.... Read more about Video: Religion, Race, and the Double Helix of White Supremacy

“Some legacies of enslavement in the New Testament [have worked] to justify enslavement, racism, and colonialism through the identification of enslaved persons as outsiders, idolaters, and heathens—[all terms that have] been racialized in white supremacy; deployed in colonialism with regard to non-Christians and non-Westerners; and used to justify Christian enslavers as righteous and enslavement as divinely sanctioned.

[But other legacies have worked] to develop a theology of God who shares in pain and suffering and who requires justice; to promote resistance to enslavement as an unjust institution; to tell other stories, complex stories, true stories; and for us to ask more about religion and the legacies of enslavement.”

—Karen L. King, “Enslavement in the Formation of Earliest Christianity,” Religion and the Legacies of Slavery... Read more about Interpreting Stories of Enslavement in the New Testament

This conversation was the first of the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speaker was Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at HDS.

Although the U.S. is a multireligious society in which an increasing number of people check "none" to the question of religious affiliation, historically the Bible has exerted an enormous influence in many domains of American life, and arguably it continues to do so. It is important, therefore, to ask what it means that Christianity was formed, and its sacred scriptures were written, in the ancient Mediterranean world where enslavement was ubiquitous.... Read more about Video: Enslavement in the Formation of Earliest Christianity

Harvard Crimson writer Tyler J. H. Ory covers the first event in the HDS series of public online conversations titled “Religion and Legacies of Slavery,” which aims to build on Harvard’s landmark Legacy of Slavery report released in April 2022. The event, “Enslavement in the Formation of Earliest Christianity,” featured HDS professor Karen L. King, and was hosted by Diane L. Moore, faculty director of Religion and Public Life; and Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.... Read more about RPL in the News: "Harvard Divinity School Hosts Conversation on the Presence of Enslavement in Early Christian Stories"

On November 16, 2022, Susan Hayward discussed religious literacy in international affairs for the final session of the Fall 2022 Council on Foreign Relations Academic Webinar Series. Susan Hayward is the Associate Director of the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative.... Read more about Video: Council on Foreign Relations Academic Webinar: Religious Literacy in International Affairs with Susan Hayward

Harvard Crimson writers Ellie S. Klibaner-Schiff and Mariah M. Norman cover the new HDS student organization Jews for Liberation, featuring S. Lovett-Graff and Francesca Rubinson, two HDS students involved in Religion and Public Life's Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative (RCPI).... Read more about RPL in the News: "Meet Jews for Liberation, the HDS Student Group Bringing Politics and Spirituality Together"

Phillip Picardi, MRPL '22, was not a stranger to the notion of religious literacy when he joined the inaugural cohort of master of religion and public life (MRPL) degree candidates in the fall of 2021. During his tenure as the chief content officer at Teen Vogue, he repositioned the magazine to cover not just fashion but also issues of social justice. "A lot of journalists don't believe that journalism should be advocacy," Picardi says. "I think they're wrong. Journalists should be speaking truth to power."... Read more about RPL Alumnx Profile: Phillip Picardi, MRPL '22

What are the consequences when we don’t know about one another? 

What is the risk of not having our stories known and heard?

These are two key questions that frame a recent conversation with Dr. Simran Jeet Singh, Executive Director for the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program and author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. The event, hosted by Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, was held as a lunchtime event for secondary educators committed to teaching and learning about religious literacy.... Read more about A Muslim-American Educator on Teaching Sikhism: My Correspondence with Dr. Simran Jeet Singh