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

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

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