Harvard Divinity School

In this talk, Sapir Sluzker Amran and Dr. Yali Hashash explored the role of powerful civic grassroots movements in Israel/Palestine that center feminist-queer-class-race intersectionality and solidarity while challenging secular liberal thinking about feminist leadership. They discussed the role of alternative and community archives by showcasing feminist activism from the 1950s onwards and highlighting Mizrahi feminist struggles for housing in Israel/Palestine. This event took place on March 1, 2022. Learn more: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/home

Yeshe Tsogyal, the leading female presence of Tibet, appears in two distinct genres of literature, autobiographical and ritual practice texts (sādhana). In this talk, Anne Carolyn Klein/Rigzin Drolma drew on recent practice texts related writings to conclude that this sādhana is at core a conversation about one’s own relation to a divine feminine, which gradually reveals a wholistic divine, a non-binary writ large, that is nonetheless fully feminine in image and metaphor. This event took place on February 28, 2022. Learn more: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/transcendence-and-transformation

Ever since Columbus reported he was hailed as "a celestial being" in 1492, stories of unexpected apotheoses have haunted the modern age. From Haile Selassie to Prince Philip, men unwittingly turned divine have much to reveal about empire, race, and the relationship between politics and divinity, as HDS alumna Anna Della Subin argues in her recent book "Accidental Gods". In conversation with Charles M. Stang, she explored how deification has been both a means of liberation and a way to sanctify oppression; how accidental gods are present in the canonical texts of comparative religion; and how myths of European explorers mistaken for “white gods” imbued whiteness with a divinity still entrenched today. This event took place on February 17, 2022. Learn more: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/

n this talk, Dr. Elizabeth Pérez discussed practices of embodied knowledge production and transmission in such Afro-Diasporic religions as Cuban Lucumí, Haitian Vodou, and Brazilian Candomblé. In conversation with CSWR Research Associate Dr. Giovanna Parmigiani, she connected the insights from her first book on sacred food preparation with current scholarship on gut feelings, knowing, and beings in Black Atlantic traditions. “Gut & Other Knowledges in Religions of the African Diaspora” is part of the CSWR’s new initiative, “Transcendence and Transformation." This event took place on February 23, 2022. Learn more: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/transcendence-and-transformation-events-calendar

Annual Greeley Lecture for Peace and Social Justice The after-effects of the 1/6 Insurrection continue to reverberate across America. Since that fateful and disturbing day, pushbacks against the teaching of race in America, abortion rollbacks, and Covid denialism have swept across the country. What has been the role of evangelical Christianity in fueling these issues? Anthea Butler, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, examined the historical antecedents of Evangelical beliefs and political action leading up to today’s troubling times, and the prospects for the future of religion, peace, and political action in America, in her lecture. This event took place on February 10, 2022. Learn more: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/

In this event, Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative Fellow Oriel Eisner, activist Neomi-Nur Zahor, and journalist Basil al-Adraa discussed their experience engaging in immersive solidarity work and shared resistance in the last year as a part of a renewal of efforts in joint struggle against the Occupation. This event took place on February 15, 2022. Learn more: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/programs/

Heather R. White, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Gender and Queer Studies and 2021-22 Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associate, delivered the lecture, "Safe, Sacred, Free: Queer Movements and Religious Spaces." This event took place on February 15, 2022. Learn more: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/

Diana Espírito Santo is associate professor of social anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In this lecture, she examined the ambiguous, dark spaces of paradox from the point of view of two distinct ethnographic sites: Brazil and Cuba, with Umbanda and creole espiritismo respectively. In exploring the various vignettes—of a self that must forget itself in order to retain its mode of conscious trance in Brazil, of the impossibility of knowing one’s spirits in a multiplying metamorphic cosmos in Cuba, both signaling the general breakdown of reality and its knowability—she thought through an interstitial, in-between, impossible logic, and called out the gaps in scholarly approach premised on the notion that knowledge is there to be grasped, with the right techniques. This event took place on February 16, 2022. Learn more: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/transcendence-and-transformation

Did you know that Christmas was illegal in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681, and anyone caught celebrating the holiday would be subject to a fine of 5 shillings? And who was responsible for canceling Christmas? Was it pagans, or liberal policymakers, or the anti-religious? Nope, it was one of the most pious groups of people at the time: the Puritans. "Puritans abided by what's sometimes been called the regulative principle of Biblicism, which is that not only do you need to do what the Bible enjoins you to do, but you should avoid establishing, as practices of spiritual significance, things that the Bible does not expressly endorse," says HDS Professor David F. Holland. “And so the absence of Christmas in scripture was the primary source of the kind of Puritan concern about it and condemnation of it.” But there was also another big reason for the ban, namely that Christmas had a tradition of being a time of social disorder, similar to Carnival. And that disorder, drunkenness, irreverence, and often sexual licentiousness, was something Puritans found unacceptable. Even though anti-Christmas sentiment and culture was still very much prevalent in New England until the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas became a national holiday in 1870 thanks to one particular phenomenon. “What really kind of gives Christmas it's propriety or its legitimacy in the culture of New England is the rise of a kind of cult of domesticity in the early nineteenth century and what some scholars have referred to as the birth of childhood,” says Holland, “the recognition of childhood as a distinctive stage of human development that deserves a certain kind of indulgence and a certain kind of happiness.”

This conversation was part of the fall 2021 series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker was writer Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan has been educating us with illuminating prose on “the botany of desire” for a very long time. He discusses his latest book "This Is Your Mind On Plants" and his landmark bestseller "How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence." Pollan’s call for change, restoration, and resiliency may be the very thing we need to bolster our consciousness in the midst of climate collapse. Respondent: Charles Stang, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions About this event series: "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now" is a ten-week series of online conversations with poets, writers, public servants, theologians, biologists, scholars, and activists who are engaged in the spiritual reckoning and awakening surrounding climate collapse, sacred land protection, and planetary health. Environmentalist, author, and HDS Writer-in-Residence Terry Tempest Williams will lead conversations concerning our response to climate chaos: How might we recast this a time of meaning rather than despair? How do arts and activism combine to let us see possibility instead of pessimism? Where do we find the strength to fully face all that is breaking our hearts?