RPL in the News: "Harvard Divinity School Hosts Conversation on the Presence of Enslavement in Early Christian Stories"

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.

During the discussion, King listed several areas in which enslavement runs through New Testament literature: the presence of enslaved persons and enslavers, references to enslavement in Jesus’s parables, discussion of the roles of enslaved and enslavers in Christian households, and the social assumptions that shaped underlying news, ethics, political life.

“The presence of enslaved people in ideologies, discourses, and practices — these enslavement permeate Christian stories and teachings, which themselves express a wide variety of attitudes, aims and assumptions involving complex relations with different groups in different ways,” King said.

“Examining these may sharpen our capacity to take account of religion in addressing and redressing the legacies of enslavement at Harvard and beyond,” she added.

Read the full piece on the Harvard Crimson.