Student Highlight: Sheila Hodges MTS ’26

Arts and Popular Culture

CRPL was one of the reasons why I chose Harvard Divinity School! It challenges the idea that religion should remain inside the confines of a building. Instead, CRPL teaches that religion can be a public good in various sectors of society and is crucial to bringing about a just world at peace. And due to my background in journalism, I was placed on the art and popular culture track.

One of the most impactful things I learned from CRPL was to lean into the messiness of just peacebuilding. Nowadays it feels like people are too scared to have difficult conversations about basic yet complex things like “what is the good,” “what is truth,” “what is peace,” etc. It is a false sense of peace to remain distant from everyone and still be united—we must be up close and personal, acknowledging each other’s rough edges to truly make a beautiful, united mosaic.

I loved our classes on moral imagination. I have always seen myself as a very imaginative individual, so learning about how imagination could be used to bring about just peacebuilding was affirming. Moral imagination challenges people to dream together and requires humility and selflessness. We all must be willing to relinquish aspects of our dreams to make room for others.

I have another year of Divinity school left—woot woot! This upcoming year is looking very exciting with my continued participation in the Child Protection Certificate (a collaboration between UNICEF and Harvard’s FBX Center for Human Rights), my enrollment in some amazing classes at the law school, and some personal work on my Catholic media start-up. I have some ideas for where I want to be after divinity school, but we’ll see what God wants—his plans are always better than mine.