USA Today Journalist, Harvard Extension School Instructor
As a journalist, I constantly see how partisanship has come to dominate American culture. I pursued the MRPL degree because I wanted to get a better understanding of the religious influences of polarization in America. My time as a student has led me to be more critical of the underlying structures that shape the day-to-day news cycle and more inquisitive about the nuances that are present in society. In addition, I’ve become an even more voracious reader, and I’ve gained a good deal of fluency with academic concepts.
The MRPL program has introduced me to leading scholars and thought leaders. I’ve been exposed to new ways of thinking every single day. The student body is diverse and talented and caring. This is the most nurturing environment I’ve encountered as an adult. The relationships and rich traditions at HDS are irreplaceable.
JENN LOUIE, MRPL ’23
Founder of MoralInnovation.com and SpiritualCareProject.com
My time as an HDS student has been mind- and heart-altering. I pursued the MRPL degree because it was a massive departure from my career in tech and offered me a distinctly new perspective and praxis by which to explore the moral conflicts facing society that manifest in online tech, especially in social media. I wanted to learn about moral formation and what has shaped moral conflicts, social justice movements, and peacebuilding.
This program has unsettled normative assumptions and opened new pathways for how I aspire to innovate in the future. My time here has given me the generative space to trace the material and moralizing dimensions of online technologies. Learning about coloniality, about the ways universalizing assumptions are a form of cultural and structural violence, and how theoretical framings of race and religion have shaped our moral ontologies has been huge for me. The program has strengthened my motivation to address systemic social inequity that gets replicated in tech solutions. I am pursuing this effort by developing the Moral Innovation Lab, which elucidates the moral systems embedded in tech and asks how we can innovate consciously toward better moral futures.
