“I came to Harvard Divinity School trusting that this path would lead me to greater alignment with what I am here to do, and that is, in part, helping people connect to themselves, to their communities, to each other, and to their understanding of the universe or the sacred or God through writing.”
Gianluca Avanzato (he/him/his) is a writer, poet, and polyglot from Upstate New York. At HDS, he is exploring the intersections of writing, healing, and storytelling. Gianluca values the vibrancy of the Roman Catholic tradition and strives for renewal in the Church. He is the producer and host of Interfaith Passages, a podcast dedicated to the way words and stories impact our spiritual and ethical lives.
Connecting with the Universe
I am Italian-American from Oneonta, New York. I was raised Roman Catholic, but my connection to that tradition didn't resonate much with me while growing up. What I was really interested in was connecting with the universe. A lot of that came through being with the land in upstate New York, being around trees, and interacting with other people.
I eventually began to take my interest in religion seriously and decided to study it in college. I went to Bahá’í Fireside meetings and local Hindu temples. I sat and meditated with Buddhists. These experiences drew me to learn more about religious traditions experientially and academically.
My Spiritual Process in Finding Self
Fellowships and scholarships have changed the trajectory of my life by exposing me to opportunities I never knew existed, having grown up in a small rural community. I have applied to several fellowships and scholarships and no matter whether I have been accepted or not, the process of applying has been rewarding and spiritual. Applying requires you to look inward and to find ways to express your volition and explain who you are and what you're seeking.
Through Interfaith Youth Core (now known as Interfaith America), I won an Interfaith Leadership Fund grant for a podcast project that combines my love of literature, spirituality, and religion. My goal for the podcast has been to create a contemplative, meditative experience where you listen to a person speak about their life as oriented around a poem, story, or quote, with me guiding the listener through the experience. I won a second grant through them and have the support to continue with the podcast.
The Russell Berrie Fellowship came at a very interesting moment. I moved to Arizona after I had come back from my Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Berlin. I was a little aimless, so I went to Arizona to live in the desert for a while. I didn't have much to tether me, so I decided to take a chance and apply for the Russell Berrie Fellowship to study interreligious dialogue in Rome, and I won it.
I managed to get a visa during COVID and moved to Rome. I quarantined for two weeks in an apartment alone and my landlady brought me groceries. It was an interesting beginning to an experience that was isolating, and really rewarding. In Rome at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, I studied interreligious dialogue and ecumenism. We looked at Islam, Judaism, and different kinds of Christianity. It was a hybrid program since not everyone was able to make it to Rome. I was one of the lucky ones, and I spent much of my time walking around this city that was largely empty, relatively speaking. It was a special experience.
While in Rome I was in community with Catholic laypeople, with priests, and with religious women from around the world. I lived near the Vatican and walked by Saint Peter's Square every day. When something would happen related to Catholicism, or something that the Vatican had taken a stance on that I didn't agree with, passing by St. Peters filled me with a rage that I did not know I had.
Similarly, when I would pass through sacred places or have a profound revelation about my relationship to the Catholic tradition, I was filled with newfound reverence. I felt like I was stepping into a spiritual home that I had been seeking. This experience in the heart of Rome helped me expand my perception of Catholicism and offered me greater nuance into the tradition, a greater appreciation. And it also angered me even more deeply. I began to ask myself: How can I be in this tradition and embody it without it being limiting, but instead expansive?
Those same questions followed me to HDS where I have found the most amazing Catholic community, and where my relationship to my tradition has deepened in really fulfilling ways. I have noticed that the people in my MDiv cohort have a sensibility and sensitivity that I find admirable, refreshing, and exciting. It makes me feel a sense of belonging. I have a new sense of importance in being actively engaged in my Catholic tradition.
Pursuit in Sacred Labor through HDS
HDS has allowed me to find a space where I can combine my passions, my interests, my skills, and my pursuit of what I refer to as my sacred labor. I came to Harvard Divinity School trusting that this path would lead me to greater alignment with what I am here to do, and that is, in part, helping people connect to themselves, to their communities, to each other, and to their understanding of the universe, the sacred, or God through writing. This summer I led small virtual Sacred Writing Circles, which are gatherings of writers and people interested in combining contemplative, spiritual, meditative, and creative writing practices. We did centering activities, reflections, prayers, and created a sheltering space from which and in which we write. It's so wonderful to see what emerges.
Encouragement and a Sense of Belonging at HDS
I would encourage incoming students to enjoy all that HDS has to offer inside and outside of classes. Outside of classes I recommend joining in on the community meals—they are wonderful. There are amazing clubs and student organizations, and we have a beautiful campus. It's such a blessing to be able to go to a green space amidst a city and be able to walk the labyrinth, sit on the grass, and be around beautiful architecture. I would encourage other fellow students to feel a sense of wonder and delight and take the time and diligence to connect with this wonderful community.
Gianluca’s podcast, Interfaith Passages, can be found on iHeart Radio, on Spotify, and on Apple Podcasts. Instagram page @interfaith.passages—An immersive, spiritual, meditative experience with music by Gus Tomizuka. You can also check out Gianluca’s website https://www.gianluca-avanzato.com/.
Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto; photos courtesy of Gianluca Avanzato
“I think a lot about the word ‘belonging,’ because it goes hand in hand with not feeling ‘enough of’ in terms of my own culture and longing to belong. For the two years I was at HDS, genuinely engaging intellectually and spiritually with some of the deepest questions that shape our humanity became an incredible lesson in owning where I am. HDS became a community I felt I belonged in. I think that's the core of HDS for me—that belonging and exploring the expression of human experience.”
Katarina Wong is a writer, artist, and curator and is the associate director of fellowships at The OpEd Project. With a Cuban mother and Chinese father, she is the first generation of her family born in the U.S. Her writing and her artwork merge themes from these cultures as a way to understand the immigrant experience and her cultural inheritances.
HDS, NYC, and the Impact of the Pandemic
I graduated from HDS with a master of theology studies degree within the world religion track and with a focus primarily on Buddhism. After almost 20 years in New York City, I left after five months of the pandemic and moved to Santa Fe. In fall 2020, so many of us were working remotely, but I think we all thought we'd get a grip on this, and that life will go back to usual.
I was working at Columbia University as program manager of arts administration at that time, and a friend invited me to Santa Fe knowing that New York was a rough place to be. I went to Santa Fe thinking I'll get a little bit of a reprieve, but then we didn't go back. As I was in Santa Fe working remotely, another opportunity came along that led me to change jobs. I am now the associate director of fellowships at The OpEd Project, which is an organization dedicated to elevating underrepresented voices in the most urgent, important public conversations happening.
The unexpected upside of the pandemic was that it gave me time. Without access to a ceramic studio, I decided to focus on completing a memoir about renovating an apartment in Cuba and confronting my own cultural heritages, which had always been very uneasy for me. I grew up feeling I wasn't Cuban enough, not Chinese enough, not American enough, though that I've come to accept that being in this liminal space between the three cultures is a place in and of itself—one I can find respite in.
Religion, Spirituality, Art, and the Relationship with Vulnerability
Another thing that happened during this time was that my undergraduate alma mater, St. John's College, started a series called Spiritual Journeys and invited me to speak about my own spiritual journey. I centered my conversation around something I had been thinking about when I was at HDS: How, as an artist, do I talk about art as I experience it in the studio as a nonlanguage-based experience with its own kind of logic? It’s always seemed like a question of translation, which fueled my interest in the limitations of language around these kinds of experiences.
Before I went to HDS, I had been reading contemporary Buddhist writers. I realized Buddhism has a whole library around the limitations of language, not about art necessarily, but about the enlightenment process, which is a nonlanguage-based experience. There is language around it in the practices, the chanting, and the ritual, but there's a gap between how far language can take you and the experience itself. That gap became interesting to me, and how sometimes we prioritize language over experience. How much does language help one get into the experience of something beyond it? At what point do we just have to stop talking?
I grew up being curious about my parents’ respective religions. In my father’s village, the religious practices were a blend of Taoism and Buddhism influenced home altars. Certain days, mysteriously, his mom would be doing something on the home altar, but he never knew what it was. It was part of the fabric of how everyone lived, but for my dad, it felt more superstitious than religious.
My mother went to a convent school where she had very good experiences. Her beliefs are definitely influenced by her Catholicism. When she came to the United States, she continued to carry her beliefs but didn’t feel the need to be active in the church; however, my parents decided to send my sisters and me to evangelical school thinking that it would be stronger academically than public school. They probably thought a little religion can't hurt you, but I had a very negative experience there. I became very cynical about Christianity, especially as it was expressed in the fundamentalist movement. I formed a lot of very strong judgments that I still can feel occasionally rising up in me today.
Through my experience at HDS, those feelings began to soften and to shift. As I get older, I see that there is so much in religion, in spirituality, in art, in relationships that the only way to go deep is to allow yourself to be vulnerable. When I was in my 20’s my heart was more on my sleeve. Then, through lived experiences, I built defenses around that vulnerability. That's the thing that I find needs to come down first: breaking that barrier, being vulnerable to one another and to oneself by letting yourself be vulnerable by asking questions about practices and being open to experiences that are not your own. Curiosity goes hand in hand with, or maybe leads the way towards, vulnerability. If you can be deeply curious about someone else's experience and put judgment aside, that's a way of allowing yourself to be vulnerable.
Following the Unexpected Rhizome Path to a Place of Belonging
I chose HDS somewhat serendipitously because of a conversation I had with Sohyun Bae, a friend and fellow artist who had attended. I had never thought of divinity school as a place where you could ask the questions I had been grappling with, but we got into a conversation about the question of translation and nonverbal experiences, and she said I should consider Harvard Divinity School. So, in following one of those unexpected little rhizome paths, I applied and was accepted.
When I got to HDS, I really had to confront my own biases. My time at HDS gave me an opportunity to rethink Christianity. Some of the courses I loved taking were around early church history and some of the esoteric movements. I found I was able to reconnect with Christianity, not in a way that I would consider myself Christian, but I gained an appreciation for the beauty and the meaning that this religion can bring to people. On that level I began to feel, who am I to judge? I let go of some of the antipathy that I had towards Christianity that I experienced as a kid.
There's something about the HDS community that was so welcoming and so intellectually curious, pulling people in from everywhere, studying all these different things that allowed me to be open. I remember at orientation the words, “you all belong here,” which reminded me of my reaction when getting my HDS acceptance letter. I thought, oh my god, I got the other Katarina Wong's acceptance letter. I'm just going to show up and hope that she doesn't show up. I was experiencing “imposter syndrome,” but as I made friends and I talked to other people I found out that everyone felt that way.
I think a lot about the word "belonging,” because it goes hand in hand with not feeling “enough of” in terms of my own culture and longing to belong. For the two years I was at HDS, genuinely engaging intellectually and spiritually with some of the deepest questions that shape our humanity became an incredible lesson in owning where I am. HDS became a community I felt I belonged in. I think that's the core of HDS for me, that belonging and exploring the expression of human experience.
For Incoming Students and the Recently Graduated
To incoming students, I would say, take advantage of everything that HDS has to offer, including the whole Harvard University system and consortium. I audited a lot of classes and attended many of the Harvard public offerings. I made it my full-time career for two years to follow my curiosity and see where it led. Use this as an opportunity to build beautiful relationships with others, especially those who you might not otherwise. My HDS experience and the people I met are what helps sustain me even today.
For those who are moving into a post-HDS career, whether to get your PhDs, or on to chaplaincy and onto a career, the opportunity is to continue those relationships. Use your experience at HDS to consider the most important and pressing problems that we're challenging today—social justice, climate change, inequity, and so much more!—and ask yourselves, How can we be in this world with integrity and with love? That is a super important question—one that HDS helped me to think about differently and to reshape those conversations with others.
Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto; photos courtesy of Katarina Wong
“My favorite course last semester was “Cultures of Resistance” with Professor Manuela Coppola. In this class, we had the opportunity to dive into our varied lived realities and then tie that to strategies of de-colonialism, asking ourselves how we can use language and theory to build modes of resistance that have the potential to dismantle hegemony. Harvard Divinity School is a place filled with people who are passionate about fighting for institutional change, and I think that is an incredible thing.”
Ryan Conston is a second-year MDiv candidate and is on track to attend medical school after finishing his HDS degree.
Practicing Medicine as Ministry
I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, which as one would say, is part of the Bible Belt of the USA. I hail from a ministerial family; I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the ministry of both my paternal grandparents and my parents across the nation. This upbringing taught me what it means to partake in what I would describe as “the work of faith,” which is at its core about giving and making a positive impact. And so even while I am here at Harvard Divinity School, a key goal of mine is to steward the time, connections, and resources I have here, with the intention to give back to socially and economically marginalized communities.
One of the things I noticed about the faith communities I was raised in was how they embraced the spiritual dimension of healing, which inspired me, my family, and my peers. We really grew to value the way ministers empowered the communities they were serving, while on the pulpit and beyond. That is something I have always wanted to emulate. On the flipside, however, sometimes insufficient attention was given to our physical well-being.
My medical vision of improving the lives of the marginalized occasionally evokes memories of struggle. As an unintended consequence of growing up socioeconomically disadvantaged, those around me made uninformed health choices that became a cultural habit of being Black in the Deep South. I learned firsthand the concept of food insecurity by seeing how those around me could “eat” themselves into chronic illness through food that keeps you “full and happy” but inadequately nourished. Having witnessed this, my intent now is to dedicate my study and profession to exploring how ministers and community leaders can promote healthful lifestyles and help alleviate this kind of suffering. In this way, I am asking the question, “How can we practice medicine as a ministry?”
Let Thy Food be Thy Medicine
During my undergraduate days, I began to see medicine as a ministry through my service at refugee care centers, children's hospitals, and assisted-living facilities. And so, even while I am currently at HDS pursuing my MDiv in theology and ethics, I am also on a pre-med track, interested in the idea of food as medicine. Healthcare provision and ministry are deeply intertwined, and therefore I see this degree program as perfectly suited for that work.
To be honest, I comfort eat a lot, too, so I understand the sentimental connections we have between our heritage and the food we consume. I think it is important to study and preserve these histories about what our ancestors ate. Something I have been studying intensively is the ways in which agricultural practices from Africa have informed the food cultivation and consumption practices of Black people living in America today. What I have come to realize is that we have always been intelligent and resourceful in the way we cultivated, processed, and distributed our food.
Today, however, we face unique and novel challenges regarding how our food is processed, and it is quite literally killing people. Food education is an important thing, and I make sure that I, too, am always learning to incorporate wisdom in my dietary choices.
Hopefully, through advocacy in the areas of food justice and food sovereignty, we can maintain the nutritional quality as well as the cultural significance of the foods we eat.
This is not to say there are no good things about southern food. We’ve got great cookouts, fish fries, red beans and rice, Cajun dishes, and so on. My wish is simply that as a community, we would explore our roots more deeply and the significance of our land, food, culture, and health. I believe in the power of the saying, “Let thy food be thy medicine.”
Even as Your Soul Prospers
There is certainly an intrinsic link between health and the psychosocial aspects of our lives, which is what I feel is the missing link in medicine today. Frankly, our bedside manner can often be reductionistic when we fail to take time to understand people, be culturally competent, and understand the holistic individual. Instead, we have a healthcare system that often ignores prevention but is unduly focused on treating disease, and I would even say maintaining disease. That is a problematic paradigm. The goal should be to make health consciousness second nature for clinically vulnerable communities so that they can be empowered to take control of their health. I want to serve as best as I can in making that transition.
As a non-denominational Christian, I honor the teachings of Jesus. One embodiment of my faith that I find to be particularly powerful is the art of fasting. I have listened to and spoken with physicians and leading experts in disease reversal about some of the groundbreaking studies on the benefits of fasting on the body (Shout-out Black Religion, Spirituality, and Culture Conference Planning Committee).
It is quite fascinating how the human body sometimes has the ability to heal itself using such embodied spiritual practices. One of my favorite scriptures in the Bible, 3 John 1:2 says “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” See that? Even as your soul prospers. My belief is that God cares just as much about our physical well-being as he does our socioeconomic well-being and our spiritual well-being.
The Dance of Divinity and Medicine
If you were to ask me why I am making this stop at Divinity School while on my way to medical school, I will tell you that the envy of my life is “the straightforward route,” Things have not always happened that way. But I am still thankful that God has given me this journey.
I empathize with it. I think it affirms my desire to discover other interests that I may have while on the way to my destination. I am also indebted to a mentor of mine, a retired physician who encouraged my decision to come to HDS. Prior to my conversations with him, I had never heard of an MDiv. After I looked the program up, I found the Field Education component particularly interesting and that kind of fully sold it for me.
I am here because I believe this degree will teach me to be the kind of doctor I want to be: One that is ethically sound and compassionate. In a post-pandemic world, these are qualities that are especially vital. Looking to the future and seeing what public health has the potential to look like is an exciting prospect to think about.
One of the things I have appreciated the most is the close reading of texts and deconstruction of religion that happens at HDS. We learn to develop our own voice even while we are learning about how others voice religion. It is a bit like learning a language, being able to put voice to complex thoughts, emotions, and opinions. In this way, we get to practice how to navigate nuanced discussions with others.
My favorite course last semester was “Cultures of Resistance” with Professor Manuela Coppola. In this class, we had the opportunity to dive into our varied lived realities and then tie that to strategies of de-colonialism, asking ourselves how we can use language and theory to build modes of resistance that have the potential to dismantle hegemony. HDS is a place filled with people who are passionate about fighting for institutional change, and I think that is an incredible thing.
Beauty and Belonging in a Big City
Before I arrived at Harvard, I was concerned that I would be fighting alone to find my place in such an institution, both as a person and an academic. That has thankfully been far from my experience. I really value HDS’ Harambee community of students of African descent (Shoutout exec and alumni Amaia Cook, MTS ’22, and Quinn Parker, MTS ’22, for all the genuine support this first year).
All our kickbacks and social gatherings have been a vital part of fostering a sense of belonging. Also, faculty like HDS’s Dean Teddy, Dean Potts, Dr. White- Hammond, and the wonderful people at the Office of Ministry have provided resourceful advice and helped me build solid networks. I am thankful that I did not come to HDS and feel like I had to do anything without guidance.
Boston is amazing. I love the weather here and getting to witness the seasons transforming into each other. I enjoy visiting the commons every now and then, as well as the public gardens. As a country kid, living in a big city is a new experience for me and I always have a lot to tell my family when I go back home. They enjoy hearing the stories I bring back with me, and they love that I'm learning new things and tapping into the multidisciplinary aspects of health and ethics.
Interview conducted and edited by Suzannah Omonuk; courtesy photos
“I can vividly remember going to my first Coming Out Day festival. I was walking through the Gayborhood and feeling at once among my people but also desperately wanting to be seen, identified, claimed, and known as belonging. Those kinds of things helped me to start to take ownership. I found my people. I came out. I was deeply myself. It was such a rich time for me personally that I'm enormously grateful for.”
Tracie is a trial lawyer turned MDiv candidate with a focus on Buddhism and interfaith chaplaincy in hospital and other care settings. She graduated from Harvard in ’08 with a degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and went on to earn her JD from Penn Law in '11.
Growing Up and Modeling in Milan
I grew up in North Easton, Mass, 40 minutes southeast of Boston. The world feels a lot smaller when you grow up in the suburbs. It's a kind of an under-the-magnifying-glass experience of childhood, when you live in a relatively small town where people know you and your parents.
I think that growing up as me probably looked really good from the outside, though I always felt a sort of a dissonance. I had this sense that there was something off, like I wasn't quite being seen or understood in the ways I understood myself. There was an underlying sorrow about this, though it was ambiguous at the time. I had a sense that there was something missing, that there must be a broader container for my life.
I started modeling when I was a freshman in high school at a Boston agency. When I was a senior, my agent said, "What if you went to Milan?” God bless my parents. I think back, and they really let me do a lot of things that are hard to wrap my head around even now. They let me go to Milan. I was supposed to go just for the summer before college. I remember my bookers making some reference to a future in which I would continue modeling. It was the first time I realized that I could deviate from an expected path. I ended up modeling for about two more years and living abroad throughout Europe and the South Pacific before I decided to go back to school.
Harvard and an Unimaginable Future
At the start of college, I took my first women's studies class. Everything I thought I knew about life was laid out on the table, dissected, reworked, and challenged. Personally and intellectually, it was revelatory. I became explicitly feminist with a new language and frameworks that allowed me a much bigger worldview.
At Harvard I found the Seneca, which is a women's undergraduate group, although its membership is more broadly construed now. I found these incredibly brilliant, inspiring, passionate women who became my family at Harvard and who are still people I hold dear. At the Seneca, I could really articulate the values that I was gathering through these friendships and the self-identity I was forming through my studies. I could be with people who were equally grappling with big issues around what it means to move through the world as a woman and addressing issues of equity.
By the time I got to Harvard, I was dealing more explicitly with the fear that I was gay. I was in a long-term relationship with a man who was, at the time, going to Harvard Business School. In a lot of ways, it was strange because I was surrounded by all these queer folks and feminists. I was writing papers on queer theory. Yet somehow the intellectual language gave me ways to justify away what I was experiencing as not being a kind of personal crisis.
Being gay felt truly unimaginable. It wasn't like I was just trying to figure out questions of, “Is this how I feel about women?” Or, “Is this how I feel about myself?” It was that thinking about it as a possibility was like trying to imagine a black hole. It was unintelligible. When I tried to think of the future, it just faded into black.
By the time I came to the end of my Harvard career, this was a palpable struggle and probably why I went to law school. I didn't know how else my life could move forward. I couldn't picture it. I needed some kind of off-ramp because otherwise I felt like I was going to stay in that relationship and marry that guy. I couldn't come to terms with who I was.
The “Accidental Lawyer”
I call myself an accidental lawyer because of all these reasons that I went to law school, most were under misapprehension. I wanted to be like Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist legal theorist. I went to UPenn and realized that law school was a vastly different beast than what I imagined. My idea of toiling over feminist legal theory was not going to happen. You’re not there to grapple with the deep big questions of law and how it shapes our lives. It's professional training. You're developing a set of skills, a knowledge base, and an analytic framework to execute your job. You're also developing, explicitly and implicitly, a professional identity that will help you navigate that career path.
But the joy of that time, and the way I believe in the wisdom of how life unfolds, is that going to law school gave me the space with which to start envisioning a new life for myself; to experiment with outwardly presenting in alignment with how I felt on the inside.
Philly is a super queer place. I can vividly remember going to my first Coming Out Day festival. I was walking through the Gayborhood and feeling at once among my people but also desperately wanting to be seen, identified, claimed, and known as belonging. Those kinds of things helped me to start to take ownership. I found my people. I came out. I was deeply myself. It was such a rich time for me personally that I'm enormously grateful for.
That summer, I interned at a feminist legal organization in Brooklyn, where we were writing plain-language legal advice for survivors of intimate partner violence. It was revelatory in that I found I could bridge the gap between what I was passionate about and the law. Then I took a class with my former boss, who taught Intro to Trial Advocacy. It was a totally different academic experience than the rest of law school. We read transcripts of trials and conducted a mock trial. I was really taken with the dynamic nature of trial advocacy: the dance of on-your-feet thinking and deep listening to a witness before formulating a question.
When I did my mock trial presentation, the cross went very well for me. At the end my professor slammed his hands on the desk, and said, “Miss Palmer, you're a natural. You need to be a trial lawyer.” He became a mentor to me. I ended up joining his firm: Kline & Specter in Philly. I practiced there for eight years doing catastrophic personal injury work, mainly medical malpractice, product liability, and specifically medical device, suing medical device manufacturers, and civil rights cases. This was rich and rewarding work, but hard and exhausting, too. I knew it wasn't my forever thing.
Death Anxiety and an Interest in Buddhism
I started practicing Buddhism six years ago, but it was something I was interested in since I was a teenager. Ironically, it was because I had a lot of death anxiety and the need for proof: proof of God, proof of heaven, all sorts of certainties that I wanted to alleviate my death anxiety. I picked up a book about Buddhism when I was 17 and thought, “Oh, here is a way around this!” which is funny because Buddhism is actually intensely focused on death. It was an ironic attempt to escape my death questions.
Then, six years ago, I felt this really deep need for the spiritual component of my life to be nourished. I probably researched every Sangha on the planet. I found Natural Dharma Fellowship, which was founded by Lama Willa Blythe Baker, who’s a PhD from Harvard. It had a program structure, almost like a curriculum, that finally gave me an entry point. That welcoming, inclusive community became my spiritual home.
In 2018, I read The Arts of Contemplative Care, an anthology on Buddhist chaplaincy co-edited by HDS Professor Dr. Cheryl Giles and my teacher Lama Willa, and includes a chapter by HDS’s Chris Berlin. I had that moment, almost like a transmission in Buddhism, where I felt like this was the thing I’d been moving toward. Then in late 2020, a few things shifted that opened up the possibility of me applying to HDS and leaving law, which I did. Now Cheryl’s my advisor and teacher and so is Chris. I'm also very lucky to have an incredibly wonderful wife, Cynthia, who supported my decision to leave the practice of law and move to Boston.
I came to HDS to study death, dying, and illness. I still have an enormous amount of death anxiety, only now I'm moving toward it in a different way: I’m leading with the questions of how do I meet people in that fear? How do we not paper over it? How do we, instead of trying to fix it, sit with it? I want to harness that fear and the enormous compassion that arises out of knowing those tender parts of my own experience in order to meet others in the tenderness within themselves. I want to acknowledge my humanness instead of always trying to overcome it so that I can really be with others in the fullness of their humanity.
Tracie, Now
Who am I now? I am someone who is becoming increasingly comfortable with not knowing who I am. I’m becoming increasingly comfortable being uncomfortable. I'm giving myself room to be in ways that I would have felt were unacceptable previously; to make mistakes, to upset people, to upset myself and still hold myself in that container of okay-ness. I don't have to figure it all out. Figuring it all out is not going to save me, and it's not going to save anybody else. So I’m just letting go, letting go, letting go, letting go. I'd say that's a mantra of my spiritual practice.
I'm calling these years at HDS my Years of Discernment. I’m not trying to plan too far into the future or anticipate what's going to be. I’m just doing this present moment work of being with myself, seeing those sticky moments in my awareness, letting them go and loving and forgiving myself through it all and trying to do the same for others.
So, here I am.
—Interview conducted and edited by Madeline Bugeau-Heartt; photos courtesy of Tracie Palmer
Chandra Mallampalli, 2021-22 Yang Visiting Scholar
“There is a real eagerness among HDS students to learn about the growing Christian presence in the Global South in all of its complexity. Their enthusiasm was contagious and made for an invigorating teaching experience.”
Professor Chandra Mallampalli holds the Fletcher Jones Foundation Chair of the Social Sciences at Westmont College and is a professor of South Asian history. During the 2021-22 academic year, he was one of two inaugural Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity at HDS.
Early Interest in Teaching
My career aspirations took many bends and turns, but I settled in on becoming a scholar after working as a journalist. Well after college, during the early 1990s, I traveled throughout South Asia writing articles about secularism, religious freedom, and conflict. The experience made me curious about many aspects of the history of modern India. I eventually enrolled in the PhD program in South Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In college and graduate school, I had several inspiring professors who modeled a remarkable balance between being amazing intellectuals and excellent teachers. They made me excited to pursue teaching as a profession. I have found the combination of scholarly research and teaching to be key ingredients of what has thus far been an exhilarating line of work. It is not easy to learn something well enough to teach or write about it effectively, but when coupled with interactions with students, this has been deeply rewarding.
Inside the HDS Classroom
At HDS this year, I taught “Conversion in South Asia” in the fall, and "Asia and World Christianity” this spring. Both courses were taught in a seminar format to promote vibrant discussion. Both convinced me that there is a real eagerness among HDS students to learn about the growing Christian presence in the Global South in all of its complexity. Their enthusiasm was contagious and made for an invigorating teaching experience.
In the fall, my seminar “Conversion in South Asia” looked at conversion to Catholicism and Protestantism since 1500. Conversion has become a highly contentious issue in India, with as many as nine states advancing “anti-conversion” legislation. On the one hand, conversion belongs to the missionary impulse of a salvation religion—a desire to bring a message of redemption and emancipation to others. On the other hand, conversion may be viewed as a siege on the consciousness of another person—a form of violence against that person’s autonomy.
The readings of the course present different snapshots of conversion in South Asia in different time periods and regions. They draw insights from history, anthropology and theology, and present case studies that are centered on issues of rupture and continuity, the motives behind conversion, and the ties to colonial power, global capitalism, and caste.
In the spring, my seminar “Asia and World Christianity” examined Christianity in Japan, China, India, and South Korea. We discussed the methods and motives of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries, the political climate of nineteenth and twentieth century Asia—in particular, colonialism and nationalism—local theologies, gender, and the experience of churches within predominantly Hindu, Confucian, Shinto, or Buddhist societies.
We paid special attention to the rapid growth of Pentecostal/Charismatic movements in contemporary Asia and their interaction with local forms of spirituality. The course draws from many disciplines, but primarily history, to recognize Christianity as an Asian religion and ask whether it remained that way against the history of foreign missionary involvement. We compare and contrast different Christian experiences across Asia and examine how Asian theologies have balanced local experience and a global faith vision in their formulations of belief and praxis.
Students were generous in their feedback about both courses. Besides the eye-opening material, which was completely new for many of them, they expressed their appreciation for the diverse experiences and backgrounds of their peers and how this brought new insights and energy to class discussions.
Working on My Book
I came to HDS as a Yang Scholar mainly to work on my book, South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim, and I am pleased to say it is now entering production with Oxford University Press, New York. It should be out in the beginning of next year.
The book offers a general history of Christians in South Asia, with a special focus on their deep history of interactions with members of other religious traditions—most notably, Hindus and Muslims. Being a Yang Visiting Scholar provided me with a highly supportive and motivating climate for research and writing, and yes, the book has been the main focus of my time at HDS this past year.
Expanding My Network
I was most grateful for the quality interaction I was able to have with a few scholars who made themselves available for conversation over drinks or meals at various points in the year. I guess that isn’t exactly a “surprise,” but in light of how busy we academics are, it wasn’t something I took for granted.
Also, I have enjoyed my interactions with members of the History Department, the Laxmi Mittal Family Center for South Asian Studies, and the Center for the Study of World Religions. Between these venues, I have definitely expanded my scholarly network and built quality ties with new colleagues, which hopefully will continue.
Broader Impact
I hope my work and scholarship will deepen our appreciation of South Asia as a world area and how it enriches the study of religion, society, and world history. I also hope my scholarship, especially my forthcoming book, will contribute to lively discussions about the Christian dimension of South Asian history and its importance to the study of World or Global Christianity.
So far, studies of World Christianity have been focused—quite understandably—on regions where Christianity has undergone dramatic numerical growth (for instance, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, or South Korea). What South Asia brings to this discussion is a vital inter-faith component and a focus on the plight of oppressed and marginal peoples who have become Christian. These topics are central to some of the greatest challenges of our day.
Expectations Heading into Harvard
I really did not know what to expect in terms of everyday life at Harvard, since I had never been here before this year. The requirements of the program were quite straightforward in terms of the teaching, etc., so there were no surprises on that front. What I most appreciated was life at the Center for the Study of World Religions, where we resided and where there is a highly engaging community of scholars who were great people to interact with on a regular basis.
I also appreciated getting to know the HDS students and the interfaith dimension of an HDS education. The diverse backgrounds and experiences of my students greatly enriched our discussions of the material on World Christianity.
The Yang Visiting Scholars Program created a climate where I could focus on my scholarship and enjoy the support and energy that comes from a vibrant intellectual community and vast resources of Harvard’s libraries. I hope to bring back many insights from what I’ve discovered in my research, along with the value of inter-faith and inter-ethnic relationships and exchanges. My interactions with Muslim students at an event raising awareness about the plight of China’s Uyghurs and with Hindu colleagues at the CSWR and during Diwali are some of my fondest memories from this past year.
I saw the Yang Visiting Scholarship as a great opportunity to interact with an outstanding community of scholars and to make use of Harvard’s excellent research facilities. The experience has more than lived up to my expectations.
Interview edited by Jonathan Beasley; photo: Kristie Welsh
Michelle B. Goldhaber, MDiv ’05, HDS Alumni/Alumnae Council Chairperson
“It's hard to be afar and to be distant. I feel a lot of passion for doing whatever I can to help even if I'm far away. If I can't be there to give out blankets or to administer first aid or simply be with my friends in the bomb shelters, I want to do everything I can from here.”
Michelle Goldhaber is chairperson of the HDS Alumni/Alumnae Council and is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. While a student at HDS, she started traveling to Ukraine, eventually living there for 12 years. In April 2022, she partnered with the HDS Office of the Chaplain and Religious and Spiritual Life to collect donations for those displaced because of the Russian invasion.
Finding Footing in Ukraine
I first started going to Ukraine in 2002. I was a student here at Harvard Divinity School at the time, focusing on religion and peacebuilding. I was also a competitive ballroom dancer, and my partner was Ukrainian American. I had a huge crush on him, so when I had the opportunity to focus on an ethnic community in the Boston area for my “Religion, Health and Healing” class, I chose the Ukrainian community. I got a grant to continue my research in Ukraine later that summer, and then went back in 2003 to study the language.
In 2004, I served as an election observer during the Orange Revolution, and after I graduated from HDS I went to live there on a Fulbright scholarship. I never really left after that. I extended the grant as long as I could, and when the money ran out, I just stayed on my own. Over the next several years I had various jobs, including leading experiential programs for people of different religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds, and teaching advanced English classes. Most recently, I was assisting in the development of a Jewish Studies Program at the Catholic University in Lviv, with hopes of building an exchange program with Hebrew College in Newton. So from about 2006 until 2018 I was living there in some capacity.
Peacebuilding
My first trip to Ukraine in the summertime of 2002 was pivotal because I really felt like I had a calling while I was there—a really deep experience. I felt like I was traveling through the echoes of history, including my own family history. There’s a really complicated history with Jews and Ukrainians and I'm Jewish.
My grandmother fled from there when she was a baby with my great-grandparents. They never talked about their lives there because it was so painful, so I never even knew they were from what is now Ukraine (back then it was part of the Russian Empire). At that time there were terrible pogroms in which whole villages were burned and destroyed, not unlike what is happening now.
There were also stories of how the Jews poisoned the wells in some Ukrainian villages, or took advantage of Ukrainians who were working for them on farms or in shops.
Despite those negative reverberations, as a peacebuilder, I was perhaps naively determined to try my best to ease any tensions between Jews and Ukrainians that I could, and had the audacity to think I could apologize on behalf of the Jews for some of the negative things we were thought to have done.
I had a particularly moving moment with an elderly Ukrainian man after one such apology, during which I also forgave him and all Ukrainians for the atrocities they committed, but shortly after felt appalled at myself—who was I to forgive and apologize on behalf of people I didn’t even know, especially when I never experienced the traumas and injuries they endured. I wondered what my relatives and rabbis would’ve thought.
After lots of difficult reflection and discernment, I eventually came to terms not just with my hubris and folly, but also what I’ve come to see as my role in this whole messy history and present: as an ambassador of sorts, simply being myself as a Jew in Ukraine, bringing a bit of Ukraine back to my Jewish communities in America, and hopefully in the process, dispelling some of the myths and fear in our respective narratives.
During my time in Ukraine I expanded the work I did beyond Jewish-Ukrainian relations to diversity issues in general. I organized experiential programs for people to spend time together in the wilderness helping people get to know each other as human beings and helping each other cross rivers, pitch tents, ride out an infection or a thunderstorm or whatever was going on.
At the Ukrainian Catholic University, we had the hope of developing an exchange program with the rabbinical school where I'm currently studying. We had a trip planned for July 2020, which went out the window with the pandemic. Some classmates from my school are really eager to go volunteer now. They’re brave and unafraid, and more importantly, deeply affected by the scope of human suffering and feel compelled to help however they can, and so I've been looking into if that's a good idea or not. We don’t want to be a burden on anybody or contribute to the chaos.
Marathon, Not a Sprint
I still have a lot of really close friends in Ukraine. We’re in touch regularly. Many of them have visited me here too. I had a boyfriend there for many years and we're still really close friends. I have people there who are like family with whom I lived with at times when I was there.
Luckily, most of them are in Lviv, but some were in other parts of the country that experienced much more violence and have since fled or are internally displaced. Some have gone to Poland and a couple are in Germany. Almost everybody is hoping to go back there. They’re expecting it to be temporary—an unknown temporary.
They’re getting used to this being a marathon and not a sprint and trying to figure out how to live their lives as much as they can. Many of them are volunteering, which helps them as well.
There are so many people displaced right now and so many people who have been severely traumatized. If the war were to magically stop and there was a secure peace, we wouldn’t need tourniquets or blood clotting bandages anymore, but I think we would need a lot of infrastructural support. I really don’t even know what people will do who have been refugees from places like Mariupol or Bucha or places that have been leveled, but I know they need a lot of psychological support and help rebuilding.
Helping from Afar
It's hard to be afar and to be distant. I feel a lot of passion for doing whatever I can to help even if I'm far away. If I can't be there to give out blankets or to administer first aid or simply be with my friends in the bomb shelters, I want to do everything I can from here.
Certain foods and medications are in short supply. Things like Advil and Tylenol can be hard to find. When someone donated to the boxes here at HDS, we collected them then dropped them off at a collection site. People there take the items to a sorting area—often one of the Ukrainian churches or sometimes someone’s basement or office space—and they’ll sort and pack everything. The items then get flown to Poland where they’ll be transported over the border and taken into Ukraine.
I know people in Lviv who are sorting through the items and distributing them to other parts of Ukraine where they’re most needed. They get as close as they can to the besieged cities. These are often individuals or small groups of people. It’s really a very grassroots mobilization.
People in Boston, and at Harvard specifically, are in a good position to help local Ukrainians, of which there are many. The Divinity School is just a block away from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. There are two Ukrainian churches in Jamaica Plain that are having a lot of drives and volunteer opportunities. Staying informed is also really important. Learning some basic history and being on guard for fake news and messaging, much of which is quite subtle, are key.
HDS is in a special position not just as a religious and spiritual institution, but also as an institution actively engaged in the world. I think it’s a great opportunity to partner with Ukrainians who are going to be looking to rebuild and reform, and co-create a better future. A safer place, a more peaceful place, a stronger democracy. At this stage it could simply be developing networks or conversation partners.
The outpouring right now is so real and genuine. Eventually I expect it will diminish once the news cycle shifts and moves on, but there will definitely be continued need.
Long term some of the help is political and at the national level, working on immigration policies, not just for Ukrainians, but also on our southern border, for Afghans, for Syrians, for others, simplifying and accelerating the process.
—Interview conducted and edited by Michael Naughton; top image courtesy of Michelle Goldhaber
“What kinds of new knowledges and actions can we develop collectively? How are the revealed knowledges of art making distinctly able to address and transform the hidden and not so hidden crises that are constantly suffusing our social life worlds? And how can this be connected to social and political remaking, to individual and collective care for each other?”
Kythe Heller is a poet, writer, interdisciplinary artist, ThD Candidate, and teaching fellow at Harvard Divinity School, where she is completing a dissertation in Comparative Religion with a second field in Literary Arts, Film and Visual Studies/Critical Media Practice. She is the author of the poetry collection Firebird, which was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, and several critical studies on mysticism and poetics, published by Cambridge University Press, Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, and Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal, among others. Her work has appeared widely, in American Poetry Review, Tricycle, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The MacDowell Colony, The Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard University. She is the founder and director of Vision Lab, an interdisciplinary art and research collective, the editor of Forecast Journal, an editor at Stenen Press, and a poet on the faculty of Bard College’s Language and Thinking Program.
Searching for Answers to Deep Questions
For as long as I can remember, I have had a central, abiding concern with human transformative potential. This may be part of the reason why I, and maybe you, feel such relief when we don’t have to identify ourselves with any description of ourselves—when we don’t have to invent and perform “the Harvard student,” for example. It is crucial to find places where you can be fully yourself.
The medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi speaks about “the perpetual transformation of the heart” and emphasizes how intellectual knowledge and our ideas about ourselves are inadequate, because the intellect analytically differentiates our experience into limited, fixed forms, while the heart is alive, changing, dynamically integrative. He points to the inner heart [qalb] as the site of a continually transformative knowing where we can shed everything inessential to find out who we truly are. We become conduits for the qualities emerging from this realization: compassion, wisdom, truth, peace, and many more. There is a verse I love in the Theravadan Buddhist Pali canon: you can fly like a bird, but only with two wings, gratitude and service.
What brought me to HDS was, on the surface, quite mysterious. I was working as a poet and a teacher in the Language and Thinking program at Bard College in New York with a group of artists and academics, and we decided to hold a reading and exhibition of our work. Afterwards someone with whom I was teaching but didn't know well came up to me and grabbed me by my shoulders and said, “Kythe, you must go to Harvard Divinity School. It would be perfect for the next stage of your work.” Surprisingly, I ended up coming to the Divinity School first as an MDiv candidate and then as a ThD doctoral candidate.
My dissertation, with which I am currently struggling and hoping to complete this fall, is titled Sublime Frequencies: Mysticism, Sound, and the Poetics of Unsaying. It develops a socially-engaged metaphysics of sound through comparative case studies of contemporary mystics and artists from diverse traditions whose work responds through mystical practice and their accompanying theologies and philosophies, to pressing concerns of ecological destruction, human rights, and migrancy. The work explores resonance—not only as the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations of other objects—but as a complex phenomenological model of engagement and co-existence with ourselves and with things seemingly strange and other, to attune our own encounter with ourselves and each other to transformative possibilities of resonant thinking and being.
In the Poetry of Mysticism Came Firebird
My poetry collection, Firebird, was published last year by Arrowsmith Press during the height of the pandemic. I wrote it because I wanted to understand how one might heal from life-shattering trauma. It considers, from the inside out, how the experience of trauma and human spiritual awakening might be represented in language and how they might be related, in events and their particular violences, which are memorialized in the body.
Part of what the Firebird invites is religious in the sense that all our voices are needed to live, into an opening and away from complete insanity, especially now. It's about the insanity / lostness that precedes union—or understanding. There's a focus on un-nameable love. The arc is a mystical journey. The “burning girl” character is a real "other" but is also the self ... [there is no other] as the sequence moves into the sphere of the un-nameable, perhaps impending revelation out of myth. Fire impersonates divine threat that could unify the fractured character in their helplessness. The burning girl, who runs away from home by “walking out the front door barefoot into the snow”—an act repeated in the cyclical time of the mythic phoenix throughout the book she inhabits—is at once a single body, the absence of a body, and the presence of trauma in many, actual bodies of other "burning girls" whose lives are inextricably intertwined with her own and for whom the book was written.
I wanted to write about how these story fragments, my own and those of others, are interconnected, are not unusual, how our lives speak to each other not only in the language of socio-political critique and systemic abuse, but in the subtle life with its transformations and healing beyond singular traumatic repetition [phoenix-life], which the poetic sequence of Firebird records, endures and then moves through and beyond.
A central aspect of Firebird is its role as a kind of disguised mystical training manual—there is a deep indwelling upon Farid ud-din Attar’s [and later, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī’s] poetics, especially their use of simultaneous kaleidoscopic allegories and Sufi poetic forms which relate the course of mystical study and practice with ordinary human love relationships and events. The book reinvents these forms to create a contemporary account of spiritual training where homeless teenager=wandering dervish and trauma can be re-oriented through the very terms latent in its narrative. Firebird is also steeped in the apophatic poetics of mystics I have studied at HDS, like Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, and Hadewijch, as well as those more known in the Western literary canon like Rainer Maria Rilke, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and contemporary poets like Fanny Howe, Jean Valentine, Claudia Rankine, Cecilia Vicuna, Bhanu Kapil, Nathaniel Mackey, HD, and Robert Duncan.
The book engages with socio-political concerns of abuse and homelessness and ecological devastation, not only as ideas but as they are inhabited by a body, many bodies. It makes implicit connections between the burning forests and a life that is on fire, between domestic violence, illness, poverty, racism and political hypocrisy, and with what we have been facing in the pandemic, seen as a kind of microcosmos of global experience. With this in mind, the project of Firebird naturally developed a collaborative body of multimedia work.
I was lucky to work on a full-length experimental album of Firebird in an amazing transcontinental collaboration with the experimental duo Sounds Like Things, featuring percussionist, composer, and HDS grad Andrew Stauffer, as well as cellist and composer Nicholas Denton Protsack. We explored what we called sonic ecologies of fire. In the album version of Firebird, we composed relations between spoken lines and vocalizations by me and the sound compositions offered by Andrew and Nicholas—cello and pitched and unpitched percussion, hammered dulcimer bells, found objects, including strange things like the sound of burning water, the sound of gardening gloves, fire, and snow. I also directed, wrote, and produced several videos in collaboration with dancer and movement artist Anya Yermakova and other wonderful collaborators, Max Bowens, Marizo Siller, Grace Jackson, and others. The four videos can be seen here, here, here, and here.
From a Personal Journey Came Forth the Beauty of Collaboration
During my time at HDS, as an interdisciplinary artist and scholar I have been deeply interested in the possibilities of inter-disciplinary collaboration, and as a doctoral student in 2017-2018, I made a huge effort to reach throughout all 12 of the schools at Harvard, as well as MIT, the Media Lab, and the Boston arts community, to find creative artists and makers, like myself, who were thinking outside the boxes of their disciplines.
I founded and am now the creative director for Vision Lab, an international experimental art and research collective devoted to the future of the human spirit, based at Harvard Divinity School. We put on conferences and workshops at the Center for the Study of World Religions on themes such as technology and spirituality, the ecological crisis and spirituality, social justice and the arts, practices of the spirit, and mysticism.
Somewhere between 100 to 200 people were involved in presenting work at these events as part of the creative study milieu that we created. It was wonderful. Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study then became interested. They had just opened the Kulukundis Family Gallery and invited Vision Lab to create performances that creatively and meaningfully interacted with gallery exhibits. They commissioned Vision Lab to make three pieces, the last one of which, Recordar, was performed right before the pandemic.
After the pandemic started, we realized that we had to go online. Yet being online actually opened a remarkable space for supporting each other during the pandemic. It also provided the opportunity to invite people who are not only at Harvard but are friends involved in the arts from all over the world. It also has been a genuine experiment in the non-hierarchical, in multi-diversities, in a kind of collectivity-oriented arts practice and became a space for mentorship and learning from each other, a reinventing of the idea of “the visionary” through collaborative education and social practice in the arts, by making things together.
Throughout the pandemic, Vision Lab has been meeting online with a global membership and created a large-scale online arts festival and installation called Conference of the Birds, Across poetry, film, music, visual art, installation, socially engaged practice, and new genres, this body of work was created over the course of this past year to address global pandemic, racial injustice, ecological crisis, and political malfeasance. Conference of the Birds engages a variety of techniques to enact human transformation and to invent new human futures and methods of regenerative possibility. Comprised of a core group of artists, poets, spiritual teachers, musicians, carpenters, filmmakers, scholars, activists, tech creatives, healers, yogis, futurists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and students, we range in age from nineteen to eighty, with members in diverse genres of creation, geographical location, ethnicity, gender, ability, and socio-economic situation.
Now, Vision Lab creates artistic and literary works, performances, scholarly research projects, and other innovative spaces of engagement combining radically imaginative cross-disciplinary conversations and experiential practices spanning the areas of contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice, technology, and literary and artistic practice. We have created and presented our work through public performances and workshops, residencies, conferences, and experiential retreats, in residence at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and MIT’s Experimental Collections. We’re currently gathering momentum for whatever happens next, and looking for support from institutions, writing grants for physical places and site-specific opportunities for Vision Lab. It’s been a remarkable breakthrough in terms of a collaborative space for artistic inquiry. We’re also planning upcoming collaborations with other Harvard and MIT Institutes and the larger global arts community and we invite new members and collaborative ideas and venues, so feel free to reach out.
Working Collaboratively with the Support of HDS
Harvard is beginning to recognize the importance of collaboration and interdisciplinarity, too, especially in thinking about how the practice of spirituality itself is a collective endeavor as well as a personal one, including a social and ecological justice practice for all the world’s wisdom traditions. For these reasons, I chose a comparative religion path as a ThD student, working with a variety of phenomenal scholars. I studied mysticism and philosophy of religion with Amy Hollywood and Mark Jordan, Sufism and Islamic mysticism with Ali Asani, James Morris, Nicholas Boylston and William Graham, existential phenomenological anthropology and anthropology of the senses with Michael Jackson, and alternative American religious traditions with Dan McKanan. I have also worked for many years with my fantastic advisor Kimberley Patton, who is an exceptional comparative religionist.
My encouragement to other Harvard Divinity School students is to create your own education, create things that are not present but should be. Create spaces of inquiry that are under the radar. You can do things on your own, and Harvard can be convinced to be open and supportive of these efforts, or you can pursue what you find meaningful even in unofficial ways.
Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto; photos courtesy of Kythe Heller
Further reading: Review of Firebird | Vision Lab’s Conference of the Birds
“How can we become more religious and culturally literate in both our policymaking and understanding of current issues affecting human rights when advocating for communities who have been wronged?”
Ciara Moezidis is a master of theological studies degree candidate with a focus on religion, ethics, and politics. Her more specific focuses are on the Middle East and North Africa and addressing international human rights violations such as ethno-religious persecution, apartheid, and genocide. At HDS, she is pursuing a Certificate in Religion and Public Life at Religion and Public Life, and she co-founded the Death Café, a student group for open discourses around death and dying.
Stumbling into Religious Studies
My journey to Harvard Divinity School was an interesting one, and not at all what I expected. In September 2017, on the first day of my undergraduate classes at Santa Clara University, I was taking a “Religions of the Book” class. My professor went to HDS and was talking about how formative his studies were there. A couple of weeks after that, he told the class, “The HDS Dean of Admissions is coming, so if anyone wants to chat with her, sign up. You should really all consider it.” At the time, I did not have much of an interest in religion as a career interest, but I figured my first year of college was the chance to explore so I figured why not? My professor told me I did not have to be a religious studies major, and the program and people are all remarkably diverse.
When I met with the dean, she conveyed similar things. I told her I was interested in politics, but I would love to know how religion could tie into this. The more I thought about it after meeting with her, the more I realized there was a lot I could do. Religious institutions and political institutions are both corrupt but have the capacity to make powerful changes; they are so deeply entrenched with one another.
She told me to apply to HDS’s Diversity and Explorations Program (DivEx), which is a fully-funded three-day program to immerse yourself in the HDS experience. Fast forward to November 2018, I applied and was off to Cambridge! I came to HDS with a cohort of 30 students, and I got to see what HDS was all about. After that, I was convinced. I did not know where I would be after graduation, since it was a few years out, but I knew this could definitely be a possibility. I had incredible conversations with others in my cohort and sat in fascinating classes with Cornel West, Fr. J. Bryan Hehir, and Diane Moore. There were lots of "Whoa! What?" moments. When I went back to California, I was thinking to myself: “I still don't know about this religion thing, but I am going to see what else happens throughout the rest of my undergraduate studies.”
Fusing Religion and Politics
After going to DivEx, I still was thinking, “I want to focus on domestic issues—maybe run for office one day.” In fall 2019, I received a fellowship to intern on Capitol Hill for Representative Ro Khanna from California. This experience made it clear to me that I was not as interested in domestic politics as I was in his legislative priorities on Yemen’s humanitarian crisis and the #NoWarWithIran campaign.
After that internship, I took an identity politics class and wrote my undergraduate thesis on Baha’i persecution in Iran. That was the first time I researched and wrote about religion. Studying this topic was important to me and offered up a new question: “What if I did this at a place like HDS?”
Fast forward to senior year, I was applying to international affairs programs and decided to still apply to HDS because of the positive experience I had at DivEx.
Since DivEx, I pivoted a lot. I wanted to focus on human rights and the unfortunate history that the Middle East and North Africa region has had to grapple with (a lot of it because of western intervention). It was clear to me that I cannot go into this work without understanding religion. Many policymakers approach the region in a one-size-fits-all manner without recognizing how detrimental that is to the region and international institutions’ credibility. I realized I needed greater religious and cultural literacy about the region and these issues to approach my career interests in a more holistic and nuanced manner. That is when I realized HDS was the best next step for me both personally and professionally.
Carrying Middle Eastern Issues Into HDS
Dr. Diane Moore is one of the main reasons why I came to HDS. I sat in on an interesting class of hers during DivEx, where she was teaching on Israel/Palestine.
Before I committed to HDS, I talked to her again, saying, “Hey, tell me why this is a place for me to be.” She said it's not for everyone. But it is for certain people who really want to dive deeper into theoretical frameworks with nuances that aren't being touched upon in policy, so they can bring that to the table. This sounded like something I was up for.
The Certificate in Religion and Public Life is new, so I didn't know about it until the first week of the fall. It was a bonus for me. I committed to HDS without realizing that they are building out a robust program for what I am interested in: the intersection of religion and public life in a practical aspect rather than the study of religion. As a part of that, I've been taking classes through the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. Hilary Rantisi, Susie Hayward, Diane Moore, Reem Atassi, and Atalia Omer have all been central to my HDS experience. When I think of HDS, it is these five people, even though I know there's a whole other world outside of what I'm studying, with other incredibly individuals.
Broadening into Other Schools
I applied to concurrent programs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, and recently received acceptances to both. I am currently deciding the program best for me! My hope with either of these programs is to better understand international NGOs and institutions, and what policymaking looks like in this context.
I am pursuing a policy program to round out the skills and greater understanding of religion that I have gained from my HDS experience. How can we become more religious and culturally literate in both our policymaking and understanding of current issues affecting human rights when advocating for communities who have been wronged? I also would like stronger quantitative skills, so I think the concurrent program would be a great pairing.
I do not fully know what I'm going to do. But I think, in the short-term, after graduation, I would love to move to the Middle East and gain greater experience on the ground. I could then see myself doing human rights advocacy at an international NGO, particularly focused on the Middle East and North Africa and topics of human rights violations, apartheid, and genocide.
Working with the UN
I was working as a graduate assistant for the Religion and Public Life Program in the fall. I primarily supported the assistant director of the CRPL Program, Susie Hayward, find internship sites for students and build partnerships with other organizations.
During the two months I worked with her, she came across the opportunity to help draft a report on religious or belief minorities in situations of conflict or insecurity, under the external office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Religion or Belief. Susie shared the opportunity with me saying that it seemed like something I might be interested in, and she was definitely correct.
The CRPL students—there are about 20 of us—would typically do this internship during the summer, but I knew I wanted to be interning abroad in the summer. So, I decided to apply for the fellowship to intern in the winter/spring. I was ecstatic when I received an offer. Since December, I have been working with his extern office to produce this report, which he presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March.
A part of the report, the annex, was on Baha'i treatment in Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and Qatar. It was quite cool to see that my undergraduate thesis could inform this report. His staff has a wide variety of experts on different contexts around the world, and it was a great feeling to meaningfully contribute to the annex based on my past research.
Thus far, this experience has brought to light what I would like to do more and less of. I realized I do not get as excited about research. However, this experience has solidified that these are topics that I find really fascinating and I want to dive deeper into, but maybe on an advocacy level rather than a fact-finding level.
I wouldn't have been able to access this opportunity without HDS and wouldn't have even known it existed. I am so grateful that Religion and Public Life had the tools and the access to be able to think of me and say, “This would be a good opportunity for you.”
Death Café
The Death Café is something I had always wanted to do before coming to Harvard. I had my own personal curiosities about death and was wondering why no one talks about it. It is so taboo, but we are all going to die one day, so why are we not asking these questions? I had a lot of anxiety about that, particularly during COVID-19, when there was just a mass amount of death around us, all the time. We were becoming desensitized to how many people were dying each day, forgetting that these are people, just like us, with families and aspirations.
When I came to HDS, I was like, out of all the places to do a Death Café, I feel like HDS could be the most welcoming and the least judgmental space to start it. Through Kerry Maloney, the Director of Religious and Spiritual Life, I found three other people, Kristen Maples, Jeffrey Breau, and Twyla Barkakoty, who were also interested in starting it. I didn’t know them, but we banded together and made it happen.
We launched in November and over 20 people attended. We are now having our fourth café in April. It was really important for me that we made it happen when it did. I had a few students from my alma mater pass last fall, and it was really difficult for me to comprehend any of it. The Death Café was a place to do that; honor those who have passed and break that taboo to create a death positive culture.
People who did not attend our Death Café kept coming up to me to ask about how it went, and they wanted to learn more. I've been at many gatherings and parties where people come up and say, “Tell me about this Death Café.” Then, I spend 45 minutes asking them about what they think about death. These are truly the moments when I think to myself: just HDS things!
Reflecting on HDS
I remember when I was trying to figure out if I should go to HDS, I had looked at the Humans of HDS website. Now, I sometimes think about what my advice would be to incoming students? And would a person like me, that's not studying religion, fit in this program to study religion?
One thing that I would love to convey is that HDS is a place for a lot of people, not just for the people that are studying religion or going into the deep, philosophical nature of the world around us.
You can take any interest and look at it through a political lens here. It has opened my world to think about so many of these topics that, to me, were pretty cut and dry, black and white, and now I realize nothing is black and white. I know I am going to walk out of this program with more questions than answers.
But it has also allowed me to think about how I can affect change in the world, and in a more holistic manner that people aren't thinking about. I don't think I could do that anywhere else, and I didn't think I'd get that from attending divinity school. It is so cool. I feel like more people that have my interests would honestly pursue this program if they knew what this could look like.
Interview conducted and edited by Owen Yager; courtesy photos from Ciara Moezidis
“Learning different languages is a wonderful thing. Some people are hesitant about the language proficiency requirement at HDS, but I see it as a way to gain a different perspective on life. Hearing from my Syrian tutor in Beirut about what he thinks about things in Ukraine and Russia opens a whole different way of thinking in the world view that you might not otherwise be exposed to.”
Sakiko Isomichi saw the MDiv program as a supportive way to study human perception and behavior around waste and waste management in a variety of cultures and settings. She considers waste management as a form of ministry in that it involves a need for guidance and care to educate others in the protection of life on our Earth. Proficient in Arabic, English, and her native language Japanese, Sakiko is also trained as a piano technician and as a farm hand on certified organic farms in Massachusetts.
Finding a Way to be Around Music
I grew up in Southern Japan on the island of Kyushu in the Kumamoto Prefecture, a rural community where, as a kid, I walked through rice paddies catching frogs and watching what was going on in my surroundings.
When I was 12, my parents took me to Kenya and Tanzania with my siblings. On the way to Kenya, we stopped in Dubai, where I heard Arabic for the first time. I thought it was such a beautiful language that I should really learn it at some point in my studies, but, in wanting to get to know more people in the world, I made English my priority.
I went to a high school outside of my hometown, and towards the end of my high school, I expressed to my parents that I wanted to go abroad for college. I was playing the piano at the time, but it felt too competitive for me. I wanted to find a way to be around music and not have to feel competitive. I decided that one way to do this was to make instruments or take care of the instruments. I decided I wanted to work at a piano factory in New York eventually, so I thought going to college in the U.S. could be a good step towards that plan. I also wanted to be able to speak English.
I ended up in Berkeley, California, for four months attending ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. I then moved to Boston and started going to community college. I took Arabic in community college while I continued to learn about instruments. My thought was that once I finished my associate’s degree, I would have a year to work legally in the U.S. and find my way into the piano world.
While I was in community college, I found an apprenticeship position with a piano store that had a contract with the Berkley College of Music, eventually leading me to study piano technology at the North Bennet Street School, a trade school in Boston’s North End. While in Boston, I made some piano connections with people from Martha's Vineyard, where there was a demand for this work, and which is where I am today. I still work with pianos. I like the work, but I was working on pianos that nobody really played, and I wanted my work to be a little bit more useful than that.
From Pianos to Waste Management
The environment of Martha’s Vineyard led to opportunities that raised my interest in my study in waste management. I started working on a farm on the island and began thinking about food. I also started working in a bakery that used the farm's vegetables to cook. I decided I wanted to study more social sciences as I found interest in people's perception around food and food waste, so that's when I started taking classes at the Harvard Extension School for my four-year degree.
I dreamed about having my own place of business and what to do with my eventual business’s waste, so I decided I first had to resolve the waste aspect in our living. I thought that if I work around waste, then maybe I'll come up with some solutions. After two years I had not come up with a solution, so I decided I needed to learn more about it. I took a part-time job with a pilot composting program picking up food waste from restaurants on the island to see how feasible it would be to compost on the island rather than ship off the solid waste, as we have been doing. We got to collect food waste from restaurants that would have been shipped off the island into a landfill or incineration facility.
I began organizing waste facility tours with a group called MIT Waste Alliance, a student group at MIT that was open to public. It was an excellent way to learn more about waste system and what happens to the recyclables. This was in 2016. I wanted to continue on with this study and include my interest in anthropology, so I applied to a few more programs.
Interest in Language and My “Ministry in Waste”
I wanted to combine my interest in Arabic language with my interest in waste in some way and then I learned that Lebanon had a waste crisis 2015. I wanted to learn more about that so decided this could be a good project for my master's degree.
I traveled to Lebanon in the summer of 2019, right before I started at HDS. I started doing a little ethnography as preliminary work while taking Arabic classes at the American University of Beirut. I did that for two months, and then started HDS in September.
I started as an MTS candidate with a goal to do an ethnography of waste in Lebanon. I'm most interested people's experience of waste—particularly around emotions and morality. How people feel guilty, feel disgust, and also relief when they can get rid of waste. I wanted to know what about waste is it that makes it disgusting for people, and I was wondering, do people in Lebanon experienced something similar, or different? What does “waste crisis” mean and how did they experience it?
I switched to MDiv in my second year, because I realized MDiv offered me the opportunity for field work. I realized I could work on projects that I'm most interested in as my ministry. That’s when I decided to call my studies my “ministry in waste” with the idea that one of my Field Eds was going to be in Lebanon; then COVID happened so I didn't go to Lebanon.
I did take some classes online with American University of Beirut at the same time as my HDS classes to stay in conversation with Lebanon, but for my Field Ed I did a waste talk series in Cambridge. I invited people who worked with waste on campus—from waste managers to the contractor that picks up waste from Harvard to the company that receives waste in landfill and then incinerating facility and recycling—I invited them to talk about it every week. After that field education and waste talk series, I started getting more involved in the waste in Cambridge. One of my professors suggested that since I know good deal about waste system in Cambridge, I could do a “ministry of waste” in Cambridge, which I did.
For my Field Ed last summer, I walked the streets in Cambridge on waste collection days observing how people get rid of waste and what it looks like. How does waste management look like in public? I interviewed four people in depth about what they think about food waste, and what they do with the food waste. I'm finishing up my thesis on this study of food waste in Cambridge, specifically looking at morality around people’s ideas of waste.
The HDS Support System
HDS and the Office of Ministry Studies have been a supportive of my interest in waste. During my Extension School time, I got involved in the Council of Student Sustainability Leadership, which became a critical part of my study at HDS. My Harvard supervisor was involved in organizing waste talk series as staff at Council of Student Sustainability Leader. We met every week in the summer to talk about a waste section for the Second Generation Sustainability Plan that's coming out soon. HDS’s programming was also a support system in that I could take many courses throughout the Harvard campus. I was able to think in other formats, like landscape architecture, about how outside space is so important in shaping our life. After graduating from HDS, I'll be starting at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the Landscape Architecture program.
One of the arguments I put forward in my HDS thesis is that oftentimes people think that people in general don't care about waste. I really want to push back about that idea, just because you might not see a clear indication of someone doing big work on reducing waste or trying to separate waste correctly, this doesn't mean that person doesn't think about waste, or doesn't think about the well-being of people. People do care about things; it just manifests in different ways. I think the city does care. And the country does care.
Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto; photos by Denise Penizzotto
Editor’s Note: Sakiko is the longest running student teaching assistant for the Religion and Public Life program's Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) with HarvardX—self-paced courses that serve hundreds of thousands of learners across the globe. For the past six years, starting when she was a student at the Harvard Extension School and over the course of her time at HDS, Sakiko has been a leader in working on course content and responding to a hugely diverse set of participants over the years.
Teddy Hickman-Maynard, Associate Dean for Ministry Studies
“One of the things you realize when you start to do social justice work is that you don't get anywhere alone. Without community and partnership, you can't move the needle on any area of community empowerment, development, ant-discriminatory, or anti-oppressive work in order to make structural change that alleviates burdens on the marginalized.”
Teddy Hickman-Maynard has more than 20 years of ministry experience, serving in roles including senior pastor, youth pastor, minister to men, and minister of worship. In addition to his role at Harvard Divinity, he is associate minister at Bethel AME Church in Lynn, Massachusetts, where his spouse, the Rev. Bernadette Hickman-Maynard, is pastor.
Harvard’s Impact on My Life
I graduated in the class of 2000 from Harvard with a focus in Afro-American studies. That program poured a lot into me and helped me chart a path forward in terms of where I wanted to go with my life and my ministry. Harvard changed my life, and it has been a very important place to me.
I went on to Boston University School of Theology for my PhD and with my training in Practical Theology, I became co-director of the Center for Practical Theology and was hired as Assistant Professor for Black Church Studies. I also became Associate Dean for students and community life.
Ministry, Social Justice, and Community Building
In addition to my academic life, I am an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). I've been working in the AME church since 2000, when I graduated from Harvard. I was first a youth pastor, then a pastoral resident, then as a pastor.
A lot of our approach to ministry at AME is built around the centrality of social justice and living out our love for Christ by pursuing the liberation of all people. One of the things you realize when you start to do social justice work is that you don't get anywhere alone. Without community and partnership, you can't move the needle on any area of community empowerment, development, ant-discriminatory, or anti-oppressive work in order to make structural change that alleviates burdens on the marginalized.
One of the things that I've really enjoyed throughout my ministry is being a part of interfaith organizations and partnering with other faith traditions to come together and utilize all the resources that we have to address the big problems that plague our communities, particularly in the United States.
At each stop along the way, one of the things that's been a primary part of my ministry is figuring out where is the local interfaith organization, how to get plugged in and immediately begin building those relationships. You really start to understand when you get your feet on the ground and start to do the work of social justice that a lot of your time is spent building relationships. We couldn't do any of the community work we wanted to do if we didn't build loving, trusting, caring relationships with each other.
When you're doing interfaith work, you can't just say that we will only talk about those things which we agree. If we're going to really be in community, we must be able to show up as our full selves and still be able to interact. We had to create spaces where people didn't have to leave parts of themselves at home to be in this space. That was central to what it meant for me to be a Christian minister who understood God's love for the world and that my calling wasn't just to my people, but to the world. This is a part of my faith. It's a part of how I interpret my Christianity, in the ability to build those relationships with people who are not Christians.
Prepared for This Moment
In accepting my role as Associate Dean for Ministry Studies at HDS, I knew I wanted to focus all my attention on supporting the needs of the master of divinity degree students here at HDS, and I knew that would be a big job. I had a lot to learn quickly because we had lost a lot of intellectual, cultural, and relational capital when our Associate Dean, Dudley Rose, retired after a long tenure of 35 years of running this program, and our Assistant Dean for Ministry Studies, Emily Click, who had been with him for 15 years, retired as well.
My background has prepared me for this moment, and I see great possibility and great beauty in the model that HDS has for theological education. The multireligious model where it's a holistic and thorough multireligious pedagogical environment, where everyone's dealing with everyone all the time.
I take it as a privilege to be here. HDS is the kind of place that prepares the kind of leaders we need for this moment. I think we're trying something that is being tried in very few other places, but I do think it's not going to be long before a lot of divinity schools and seminaries are going to have to get their minds around multireligious theological education. We are the forerunners in that area. I think there's an opportunity to create models that then can be tried elsewhere.
The Future of Our Students
Our students are excited about the future. They come here because they want to do something different with what they've been given. They get fired up about the new and the next, especially at a place that's just bursting with creativity and possibility like HDS. Then they get to the end of their MDiv program, and their choices for work are still limited to the kinds of institutional spaces that they were dissatisfied with in the first place and working to change—whether that be in the religious institutional setting or in corporate America taking a job as a part of this system that you want to tear down.
Part of what I've been able to articulate to our students is that it's not an “either/or” situation, the religious leadership of the moment right now is one that has to be “both/and”—a recognition of the need to utilize, take advantage of, and sometimes lean upon the institutions that still exist. We keep saying they're dying, and yet there they are. They still have land. They still have buildings. Some of them still have endowments. These institutions don't serve us; they continue to marginalize and oppress. We want transformation and change, yet those are the places with the resources we need. So how are you going to be the creative leader who is able to lean on those resources and those institutions while still crafting the way forward?
I get excited about this because this is the opportunity to become the bridge. There you are as a leader who is able to take one world and make it meaningful for this next world that's emerging. That's how lasting change happens. In liminal moments like this, you are going to have your prophetic, progressive edges—the people who are beating the drum for things that are totally outside of the norm and pushing the boundaries of everything. There's room for those folks; they are the ones who make the space. They are the ones who push out the boundaries of what's possible, expanding our sense of probable.
These are the actions that break new ground and create new sorts of institutions that emerge from leaders who are able to catch the spirit of the new and who are able to creatively institutionalize it by using the gifts of the old thing. We need both.
Leaders of Today and Tomorrow
As an HDS student you are the person who can catch the spirit of the prophetic wave and still have your foot into the world that is right now so that you can creatively help us to move forward to the world that will be. There is room for this kind of conversation because it is a cultural context issue; it's not unique to any one religious tradition.
This is a new space. It's an epochal shift. It's like an every 500-year kind of thing. And what the world will look like 50, 60 years from now, the leaders who are going to create that world are walking these halls right now. They're in these classrooms right now. That wakes me up in the morning. That gets me excited to be here.
Critical Reading
The last class I taught was on dismantling white privilege, power, and supremacy. The one book that I see as important is, The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward Baptist. Baptist is an economic historian who delves into the economics of the slave autocracy in the United States.
We talk about the racial bias, racial discrimination, and racial harm, but the fundamental technology of slavery was how to maximize the commodification of oppressed bodies. That technology is still at the heart of American economy. The book argues there's a whole piece we never fully appreciate or talk about that is hindering our ability to properly diagnose how white supremacy and particularly anti-Black racism continues to function economically.
Another I would recommend is anything written by Saidiya Hartman. Hartman is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She takes a different look at the reality of slavery, equally firm on the idea that we haven't contended with slavery as much as we need to. Her approach to contending with it is not social-structural but somatic. It's aesthetic. It's trying to wrestle with the fullness of the kind of existential harm around slavery, the true devastation and absurdity of the violence.
I think both avenues need to be attended to at the same time. You have to have both a sophisticated social-structural analysis and recognize that white supremacy isn't just about systems and structures, it's also about creating a different kind of air that we're breathing.
You can change all the systems and structures you want, but if you have to clean the quality of the air because it's so steeped into our sense of being. Change it with art. Change it with theology. Change it with vision and change it with stories. That's the beauty of religious and theological education. When it's done right, you're prepared to do both.
Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto; top image from Boston University and Teddy Hickman-Maynard, second image by Denise Penizzotto.
Sravana Borkataky-Varma, Lecturer on Hindu Traditions
“Intention makes the whole difference. If you want to do something different, ask a different question. Explore a different path within your field or outside, and ask yourself, ‘What is my intention?’”
Sravana Borkataky-Varma is a historian, educator, and social entrepreneur. She studies Indian religions focusing on esoteric rituals and gender, particularly in Hinduism (Śākta Tantra). As a social entrepreneur, she invests in building communities with individuals from various faith backgrounds who believe in kindness, compassion, and fulfillment.
Developing My Clairvoyance in India
I come from a very middle-class background. In India, my dad was with the government service. He was the primary breadwinner. My mom was a homemaker. So, mine was the typical story of any middle-class Indian growing up, born in 1975.
Today, when I turn back and I look at my blessings, I think one of the blessings was my parents never shut down my—what I now understand as a portal—my clairvoyance. They never said, “Don't say these things because people will think weird about you.” At the same time, they did not highlight it either. So, I grew up with this believing it is normal.
You know, it is like you're born with a certain skin tone. That's normal. I appreciate the fact that my parents gave such a normative interpretation of what I would wake up and say or do at random. Until a very late age, almost late 20s, I did not realize that this clairvoyance was not happening to everybody. But none of this vocabulary was available to me until I studied religion.
The second thing which I feel very blessed about is because of that, I was never pushed to do or study anything in a particular format. In India back then, growing up, you either become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or took on a government job. That's the only way you could make a living. And there is no field of religious studies. Even today in India you cannot study comparative religion at an university. You can study philosophy and languages but not religion as studied in the United States.
China and the Corporate World
I went on with life. I wanted to become a nun for the longest period. I still believe I am one. It's just that I don't don the cloth. I do have lots of issues with the cloth. I find it challenging, problematic, particularly in the context of power and authority. But I have no issues with people who don the cloth. It's a personal choice. I haven't found the answer to how and why the cloth gets to signify my path, my allegiance to the path, my value systems, and what does that cloth signify when somebody is looking at you from the other side?
One thing led to the other and I decided to instead go on a corporate journey. I went to China with a business, having gotten my business degree. While I saw a lot of success in the corporate world—and I have no regrets whatsoever—I didn't like the human being I was becoming. The power of the corporate world was, or had, depleted a lot of compassion in me. If you're not happy, you can keep pursuing something outside of you, you can buy the fanciest bags and shoes, and jewelry, or homes. It's not like one versus the other, but ask what will make you happy. Seek that and the rest will follow.
While in China my interests in the academy, interest in teaching, interest in working with students, being around students, being a student myself again, was renewed. I think China brought that back. I realized this is the space that makes me happy. And it was my husband who said, why don't you go back to religion because that is where you were most happy.
My Journey
We moved to Houston after China where, fortuitously, Rice University is located. I thought I'd want to study Buddhism because that's what I was coming from. I had learned Tibetan, Pali, and Sanskrit, so I thought I'm going to study Buddhism in the northeast of India. At Rice, I started my Ph.D. coursework with Prof. Anne C. Klein and Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal. But at the end of two years of coursework, I realized what I wanted to do was kind of an auto-ethnography of my own journey, of my own tradition, of my own path, and I wanted to figure out what I was doing in life. It’s very unusual once you join a Ph.D. program to change everything. But that’s what I did. I changed advisor, I changed path, I changed everything.
I went on the path of Tantra, and now I am here at the Harvard Divinity School. Tantra is so misunderstood. If you're an initiate, you're sworn to secrecy. There are historic and spiritual reasons for the secrecy because not everyone is ready or would understand what you're saying and can take some of what you're saying and be in a much more dangerous situation. It's what I call responsible teaching. Even when we are in the classroom, we have to gauge what will we say, how will we say it, and at what point. Learning the tantric way is kind of a journey. So, one has to be much a hyper-tuned in person to say when someone is ready for what level of information.
I'm increasingly becoming comfortable saying that my job as a teacher, as a guru, is to bring my students relevant information. To provide different avenues and lenses that they can then explore. And it's the individual who gets to choose. It's the individual who gets to then say this is working for me or not working for me. This is a very different approach. In other words, I do not believe in a prescriptive method.
Finding Support at Harvard
You dream about Harvard. I call it the audacity of a dream. I'm borrowing it from Obama and not calling it “Audacity of Hope,” but the audacity of a dream. Harvard is a dream for many, especially when we come from the subcontinent, growing up you had only heard of Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, so never in a million years did I think I would be here.
And now at the Harvard Divinity School I have found the most supportive and collaborative colleagues, especially within the new initiative called Transcendence and Transformation. There have been many blessings. But the two people I thank almost everyday in my prayers are: A big support person to me has been Prof. Janet Gyatso, Buddhist Studies, and Prof. Charles Stang, Early Christian Thought. The support we have at HDS is phenomenal and it is not just from faculty, but also administration, students, and so forth.
Scholar, Practitioner, Scholar-practitioner
I've said this in my classroom so many times. Studying religion is difficult work, and there is a price to pay. If you look at it historically, anybody who has been any kind of a change-maker had to sacrifice a lot personally and professionally, and I think that sometimes frustrates me a little in my work.
Students at Harvard are eager to see the change. We feel the pain of the change not happening, but we must ask, are we willing to walk the path, to pay the price? What are we willing to do? And not many are willing to do the work. They simply expect the change to appear on a platter. Not happening!
Words of Experience
Intention makes the whole difference. If you want to do something different, ask a different question. Explore a different path within your field or outside, ask yourself, “What is my intention?”
My one word of advice is to tell Harvard students to take in the the present moment. When you wake up in the morning, in the mirror and just say "I AM HERE." "I am here." And that in my mind is the beginning of a wonderful life filled with joy, fulfillment, and courage to deal with life's curve balls.
Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto; top image courtesy of Sravana Borkataky-Varma, second image by Denise Penizzotto
“We need this work, especially today. We live these difficult and complicated lives that are full of too much pain. I'm so glad that Malcolm has left this legacy with us, and that's something I want to continue unearthing in my own work.”
Najha Zigbi-Johnson is the Director of Institutional Advancement at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Institute in NYC. She is currently an inaugural Community Fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, working on projects related to The Shabazz Center, national memory, and the built environment. While at HDS, she founded and led a course entitled "Freedom School: A Seminar on Theory and Praxis in Black Studies in the US" and co-published an adjoining publication during the 2019-20 academic year.
Beginnings and Quaker Schools
I'm a born and raised New Yorker. From K through eighth grade, I went to a super progressive private school called Manhattan Country School, founded off of the philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King. I learned about racial equity and the Civil Rights movement and what it means to be a Global Citizen from a very young age.
I went to a Quaker high school and college, though I didn't grow up religious. In high school, I began to understand Quaker beliefs, that the light of God is within everyone, that everyone has direct access to the divine or God, and that Quakers were essential to abolition. A lot of what I struggled with and which pushed me to continue to study religion, is that I found there was a deep level of complacency amongst the Quakers I was with, and Quaker institutions.
Quakers are largely white folks in this country who, in my experience, were struggling with what it meant to modernize their politics. There was a lot of, ‘well we helped free slaves,’ so our responsibility as stewards, towards really undoing white supremacy, and understanding our social location in this world is done. There was an inability to hold themselves accountable, and so I experienced a lot of racism that I wasn't used to growing up in the city.
At Guilford College I studied Afro-Cuban religion and Cuban heritage tourism and the ways in which the tourist economy reflects a post-revolutionary Cuba and the need to incorporate Afro-diasporic identity as part of this nation-building process, which is something that also happened in many ways in the United States. I did a lot of organizing in undergrad in North Carolina. I wrote my senior thesis and prepared to graduate the year that Trump was elected.
I was grappling with a lot of existential questions that a lot of us were grappling with. We were watching Blackness being reshaped in real time, watching what was happening in Ferguson, and watching all of these incredible organizations come to life, like Black Youth Project 100, Dream Defenders—these organizations that were founded in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin. They sit within a very powerful political lineage that can be traced to SNCC and the Black Panther Party. I saw this reemergence of a clear Black politic that was shaping our social movements, that was shaping who I was becoming and am continuing to become.
HDS and The Freedom School
I was an African-American Religious Studies concentrator at HDS. I studied womanist theology, African diasporic practices, and the ways in which Black women create new epistemologies and ways of being. That blew my mind. I felt worlds literally opening up at HDS. I took classes like “Black Women and Divinity” with Todne Thomas. I took classes outside of the Div school on African-American music and contemporary culture and wove these pieces together.
I quickly realized that though there were some interventionist spaces being led by folks like Professor Thomas and Professor West, but at large, Harvard didn't have classes that were rooted in Black radical thought. I wasn’t allowed to really explore and be honest around issues of whiteness and the expansiveness of Blackness or grapple with these questions around what a post-Ferguson America looks like. Part of my educational experience was creating my own intervention into spaces that didn't exist for me.
I got a lot of help, and what made HDS so beautiful was that I was able to find a cadre of elders and professors, people like Todne Thomas, Karlene Griffiths, and Kimberly Patton. These people were very much in support of allowing students to own our experiences and create space. It was because of women, really, and Black women mostly, who allowed me to make these spaces.
“Faith in the Fire, Religious Public Intellectuals,” led by Prof. West, was a seminar of 17 brilliant people talking about the organizing work that they were doing. We were exploring people like Pauli Murray and Cesar Chavez, and reading about public intellectuals who were reshaping how we think about our moral responsibility to the communities that we're a part of. But I felt that we were stagnant as a community and I wanted to figure out, how do we activate all of this brilliance? I wanted to reclaim some of this feeling of powerlessness that I was struggling with because of being in the superstructure that is Harvard. I wanted to regain a sense of agency over my experience. I wanted to switch the narrative for myself.
The Freedom School started out as a reading group and then I asked, can we get credit? Let’s apply for some funding so we can make sure all of the books are free so no one has to pay for books. Let’s open up this class to folks who are not a part of the University, because people should have access to this knowledge.
I was interested in creating a space rooted in historical Freedom Schools which were founded to allow folks in the deep South to really liberate themselves and understand what was happening in Jim Crow America and allow them to vote. Alongside Karlene, we created half a semester's worth of syllabus material and then the rest of us had to decide what we were going to study and how we're going to study. We had to teach it to each other.
The Call to The Shabazz Center
I had just graduated and it was right at the start of the pandemic. All of the protests were happening. I remember sitting with this sentiment of ‘what do we build when the ash and the dust settles?’ Everything was on fire in the country. How could I be a part of this process of re-visioning community, re-visioning our institutional capacity to hold scholarly work, to inform cultural and social movement work?
I was watching the “Who Killed Malcolm X?” documentary and I missed a call because I was so engrossed in the series. I called back the next day and it was a call asking, “Hey Najha, we're trying to restart The Shabazz Center. Would you be interested in leading this work with us?”
Malcolm was never taught to me. There weren't classes on Malcolm. But I had gotten into this weird, obsessive space thinking about him because of the organizing work that was happening, because of this documentary series, and because I knew I was going back to New York City where he did a lot of work. It felt like I had been pushed in this direction by the universe, by God, and by the ancestors. I remember constantly thinking, ‘Why the hell am I at Div school? What am I doing? What type of job am I going to have?’ I wasn’t fully convinced that I was totally doing the right thing. When that call came it felt like confirmation that I had been in the right places and listening to the right folks. That there was this very spiritual element that was guiding me.
What I've learned about this work and from his daughter, Ilyasah, is that it's less about predicting where Malcolm would have ended up. Surely his politics would have evolved because he was growing so much and he was only 39 when he was killed. I'm interested in the work that Malcolm was doing in the very last year and a half of his life. He went to Africa and saw the way that folks were rebuilding community and government structures. From The Organization of African Unity in 1964, he learned a framework for educating folks and restructuring a de-colonial government committed to liberation and sustainability. He was learning from women on the continent, learning from W.E.B. Du Bois's wife, and Maya Angelou. He was preparing women to take over The Organization of Afro-American Unity which is what he founded as his last secular project.
For Malcolm, religion was a liberationist tool. It was a tool that allowed him to place everyone's humanity. Everyone was equal. Malcolm understood everyone to be existing under God and he was committed to people being their fullest selves. What does it mean to be able to live in our full humanity? Black liberation theology says that God is on the side of the oppressed, and that God is not this thing in the sky, but a reflection of the limitless possibility of reality. Malcolm was committed to actualizing this limitless possibility of reality.
We need this work, especially today. We live these difficult and complicated lives that are full of too much pain. I'm so glad that Malcolm has left this legacy with us, and that's something I want to continue unearthing in my own work.
Interview conducted and edited by Madeline Bugeau-Heartt; courtesy photos
“I want to emphasize how important it is to depoliticize peace building and relationship building. I want to bring people from different walks of life together in this larger experience, because we tend to, as human beings—and this is very much present in all cultures—live in our own silos.”
Sultan is from the village of Hoti in the city of Mardan, Pakistan. His specialization is in political Islam, and he is currently conducting his field education placement at Fourth Presbyterian Church in South Boston under the direction of the Rev. Burns Stanfield, MDiv ’88.
Early Years
There is a small tradition in my family where it's understood that to have education you have to move to a different city. In many ways, I am the first—at least in my specific closed circle of family—hybrid educated guy. I moved out of my home when I was about 13-14 years old, and I went to a military school in Pakistan called the Karnal Sher Khan Cadet College in Sawabi, 35 minutes away from my home. So that was my first experience as this eighth grader moving on. That was 2011. I've been away since. In 2013, I cleared a test called the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program. It's funded by the U.S. government, and through that program I came to the U.S.
The first time I got to the U.S. was in 2013 as an exchange student. The culture is so different here. In Pakistan, you have this extended lens of the world, you always think in the sense of “we.” What are we going to do? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to—what's the "we" part? Because the sense of identity that I grew up with was always me, along with other people in this journey, not just me going on.
When I got to the U.S., the very major change was, what am I going to do? And that was like this whole perspective difference. It's always me. That was a very specific kind of perspective change because the whole outlook on life is, how do we see ourselves in relation to other people? And the parents are the first couple of people that you know, and then your siblings, and then grandma and grandpa, and a few people in that way.
Impactful Moments
My mother was very supportive of me going to the U.S. as an exchange student. She's a teacher. She's been teaching for 23 years. She understood the value.
Even though the religion was different—because I came from Islam, very orthodox, Sunni Islam, raised in a religious family—I was placed with a Christian-American family; that was my first time I met someone that was Christian. It was incredibly wonderful, and I'm very grateful for it.
This was in Washington, Iowa. I was a sophomore in Washington High School and had a wonderful time just adapting to this new culture. I believe my childhood years between 2006 and 13, and then the year in Iowa, were the two most impactful experiences in my life. In 2006 I lost my father, two of my uncles, and two of my cousins to a flood disaster. It was a major flood disaster in Mardan. And so, I was raised by my single mother in Pakistan. I grew up with that extraordinary lens of being the elder one. You have to set the example. You have to be the high-achieving one, because the two brothers behind you have to follow in your footsteps.
And when I got to the U.S., my mom, also in the U.S., pushed me to achieve more. Sometimes I'd sit down and I'd think about how nearly 95 percent of the people who have had a major impact on my life have all been women, from my mother to my teachers. I think that really opens a different way of experiencing life, because then you consider the myriad of other challenges that are existent out there, because now you don't have a father. Now the things that a father could do, especially in a culture like Pakistan, now you don't have access to that kind of social capital, maybe, to use more Americanized terms, or cultural capital in that way. And that carries an impact.
And so, when I came to the U.S., I enrolled in numerous programs. I was in choir. I was in band. I was in speech. I was in Future Farmers of America. I was in this multicultural club. I was in everything that I could literally get my hands on because it was such a new experience for me. You do not have choir and band in Pakistan. The concept just does not exist. So, when I was introduced to this new educational landscape, I'm thinking, there are 1,000 opportunities. And I'm ready to do all of them.
I went back to Pakistan in 2014, and the one thing I really realized is how much of a difference that exchange year made, because when I went back, I had found this new passion for advocacy in leadership and community service.
Advocacy, Understanding, Goals at HDS
The first really big experience of me holding a Bible was in trying to understand what theology is. When I really picked up the Bible and sat down, that's when it opened up on me that there are so many similarities—several similarities—within Christianity and Islam.
Fast forward to Pakistan, some of the projects I was working on were focused on interfaith harmony. I began to ask, what is possible if we could all sit together and be able to imagine a future that belongs to all of us? And that, for me was it—this advocacy arm of, why don't we sit down and advocate for not just a better life in terms of material life, but better ideas. I want to emphasize how important it is to depoliticize peace building and relationship building. I want to bring people from different walks of life together in this larger experience, because we tend to, as human beings—and this is very much present in all cultures—live in our own silos.
With HDS, I was looking for a radically diverse kind of perspective that's present in the educational experience. I'm a student of political Islam, and a huge portion of political Islam is powered by interactions of how Muslims are active and reactive in daily life, physically interacting with other people, their ideologies, their beliefs.
How does someone who disagrees with me on this specific thing, how can we then come together, sit down, and create still a mutually generative discourse that's respectful to me and to them? HDS provided me, and those in all traditions, a space to come together. This is the intersection of religion, interfaith harmony, and politics. It is a huge crossroad of where I believe, if we step into this world, there are so many more possibilities. I could have very much gone into a specifically Islamic university, but in that university, I would not have been able to sit across a Jew, and a Christian, and a Buddhist, and a Hindu, and an atheist at the same table.
I'm here because there's a life mission involved—there is this deep conviction of achieving something, or solving something, or exploring something. And when you bring that kind of genuine love or genuine commitment to something, it by default is a promise of a very valuable experience.
And that, for me, connects with the idea of moral imagination of what is possible. When we bring Islam into the conversation that it has been left out of, like female education for instance— nowhere in the Quran does it say that women are not to be educated—Islam can play such a powerful role in changing people's perspectives on very critical and sensitive issues.
I've been taking a class on religious literacy, and we had to choose a profession and an issue. I chose humanitarian action, and my issue is racial justice. I got my bachelor’s degree in international relations. So, I was really studying a lot of these intersections.
I think in the short term, I see myself very much exploring the intersection between political Islam and the promise of humanitarian development. And by humanitarian development, I mean the intersection of humanitarian assistance and international development, because I don't see how development can happen without humanitarian assistance. And I don't see how assistance can happen without the long-term arc of developing institutional capacity to go into development—international proper development at a country or national level. That really is what political Islam is at its heart, and that's what really has prompted me.
The answer is in the nuance, parsing those difficult things out. And I really, truly believe that has the potential to really revolutionize Muslim futures, between Muslims trying to create a spiritual movement that is very religious and that is also reconciling modernity, not westernization, but modern living, that you could be religious perfectly well, and as much as anyone else, sitting in an air-conditioned room in the middle of a corporate office or sitting on a mountain. And that transformation of thought is happening because of political Islam.
Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto; top image by Denise Penizzotto, second image courtesy of Sultan Ahmed Khan
Barakatullo Ashurov, HDS Lecturer on Eastern Christianity
“I grew up in a traditionally religious family and had a great grandmother that had seen two wars and three hungers, so our family and village community generally looked up to people like my great grandmother for wisdom. My family practiced Islam to the best of their knowledge and understanding. Relying on God's providence was central during the civil war, even though we didn’t always know if or why God was permitting this."
Linguist and historian Barakatullo Ashurov is Lecturer on Eastern Christianity at Harvard Divinity School and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions.
Early Years
I was born and raised in the Republic of Tajikistan, one of the former USSR states in Central Asia. Some of my best memories growing up are from the last few decades of the Soviet Union when everything was different. Our village school had outstanding faculty—some who were graduates from universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
My village is just on a foothill by a mountain, so twice a year we would go and hike that mountain. But I also have some negative memories associated with those mountains, especially during the civil war when some field commanders took refuge in mountain areas. From there, they would raid villages for food and take young men to fight for them as soldiers. So, the mountains became a refuge for both the soldiers and the local population.
I grew up in a traditionally religious family and had a great grandmother that had seen two wars and three hungers, so our family and village community generally looked up to people like my great grandmother for wisdom. My family practiced Islam to the best of their knowledge and understanding. Relying on God's providence was central during the civil war, even though we didn’t always know if or why God was permitting this.
For the Love of Learning
The people in my family were very intelligent but didn't know what to study. It had a lot to do with how the Soviet policy of education in Central Asia functioned. Central Asia was a breadbasket for the Soviet Union, and as such, it was important to teach as many people as possible within Central Asia vocational skills. This was done so that they would have laborers to work in industries deemed to be most important for the state. The pursuit of higher education and being part of the intelligentsia was not accessible to everyone.
Despite these barriers, I knew I loved learning, and the first thing I ever wanted to become was a teacher. Throughout the course of my educational journey from first grade to high school, I considered studying many different things—from medical school to international affairs. I even considered becoming a physicist, but the thought of spending my days working in a dimly lit lab in a basement was very scary for me.
Since the war had impoverished everyone, there was barely any money and going to university earlier on would have been a big burden for my family. Therefore, my choices had to be made from an affordability perspective. This resulted in me getting into the oriental studies department where merit-based scholarships were available. I then settled on becoming a philologist, which I still identify as.
My initial interest was to understand how languages were acquired. How do we learn language? What does knowing a language do to people? How and why is it important that people speak? I believe that language is directly connected with our being alive. Language is a natural phenomenon, something specific to humans, within which we see great mental creativity. It expresses things that first happen on neurological, cognitive, and emotional levels.
Language and Religion
If we're taking this paradigm, that language expresses, represents, and verbalizes the internal happenings of the human brain and heart, then in that regard, religion does a similar thing. The one difference is that religion is not just expressed through language, but through ritual as well.
When a religious ceremony is conducted, there are multiple occasions in many different religions wherein a certain part of ritual or ceremony is observed in silence. In a sense, ritual is that unvoiced aspect of the religious experience such that even if one did not understand the liturgical language, by observing it very closely, they can still understand it.
And why do we say, “mother tongue”? I think we say mother tongue because there is profound meaning in its capacity for regeneration. As mothers give birth to us, similarly language possesses this mothering nature. It gives birth. It generates. It comforts us. Over the course of my academic training, I have studied about 25 languages, and I can easily conversate and talk in six to seven languages. But there are always specific languages that I use to comfort myself.
For instance, I always take refuge in the comfort of Persian classical literature. Whenever I recite or read Persian poetry, I receive utmost comfort and inspiration. However, when I am looking to understand certain things in a more critical way, I use Russian and English primarily because I associate these languages with critical engagement in academic contexts. This is not to say that one cannot engage critically with the Persian language, but I suppose because that is my mother tongue, I see that as my comforting language.
I believe there is a very strong intrinsic connection between language and religion. And when they come together, we can have much deeper access to human cognition, behavior, and feelings. This idea of voicing religion is very interesting to me because the way that people verbalize their religions is important. There are still many religions today that don't have a written text. The power of memory and oral transmission of religious knowledge is very important in these communities. Religious acts are performed out of memory. The idea of ‘sacred body’ humans who contain not only the divine spirits but divine knowledge as well, and transmit it to the next generation, is most fascinating to me.
Feeling Fulfilled
The thing in my life that I'm most proud of is that I have decided that I don't belong to one place. I am very nomadic not just in terms of geographic travel, but also a nomad as an academic who works across many different disciplines. I work in linguistics, the study of religion, ethnography, and anthropology. This nomadic nature and mindset enable me to transcend different academic and geographical boundaries. I feel most fulfilled when I am working in an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary context, doing different things in different ways.
Interview conducted and edited by Suzannah Omonuk; courtesy photos
“I am here to gain my humanity back, so that I can go and serve humanity. It's time for me to turn my face to the divine and say, ‘What is it that you have for me? Who am I? Shine the light on me so I can really know who you created me to be.’”
The Rev. Erica Williams is a student in the inaugural Master of Religion and Public Life (MRPL) degree program at Harvard Divinity School. She is a National Social Justice Organizer for Repairers of the Breach and The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Rev. Erica is the Founding Pastor of Set it Off Ministries. Her life’s purpose is summed up in the social gospel passage of Luke 4:18-19.
Willie G. Morris
I have to honor my grandparents, who were the very first theologians I ever encountered. They didn't receive anything beyond an eighth-grade education, but they had PhDs in common sense. They were socialists but didn't know it. We were Baptists. My grandfather was the chairman of the deacon board at our church. My grandmother was also a deaconess and cooked for all the funerals and church events. They didn't have anything. They was poor. But whatever they had, they gave to the community.
When I was six, my grandfather died, and I went to stay with my grandmother. I was raised by her. When she died, I had just graduated from Howard University. The nursing home called the house, and I was awake. I heard my Momma say, OK, OK. I knew then. I ran outside— this was at 4:52 am—and looked up in the sky. The sky was clear. There was nothing. I saw an image of wings, like of an angel. I thought, “there she is. She all right.” I ended up going through a really rough period after that, but I always remembered, “Oh, I am unstoppable now because I have GG with me.” GG meant God and Granny.
At her funeral, people talked about how my grandmother would bring people into our home when they didn't have a place to stay. She was hands-down one of the best cooks ever. She made plates and would have me taking plates down the street to people. We didn’t have much, but that was her way of showing people that she cared. She taught me how to live that way.
But it came at a price, even for my grandmother. I found out that when she had my mother, she was in the hospital for about two and a half months dealing with depression. So that is a part of my work: How do we create a world where Black women and girls can thrive? We've been known to be the mules of society. We've been the ones who give and support others.
Oftentimes, we don’t have access to the resources that we need. I think of my grandmother, because she didn't have access to mental health care. She didn't have insurance. She suffered in silence a lot of times. In the last few years, I have battled with depression and anxiety myself and have fought to overcome that, but I have access to things that can help me. A lot of women, in particular Black women, don't have that.
The work I do now for social justice—in lifting the proletariat, in lifting the working class—I do because that's who my grandparents were. My grandmother was a domestic worker for almost 40 years. A few months before she died, the nursing home asked her, “What is your legacy?” She said, “That I created a family that I loved and supported and helped to push them to be the best that they could be.” When she transitioned, her casket read, Let the work that I've done speak for me. I was able to bear witness to the work that she did. In everything I do, I name her, because she was the foundation. Her name was Willie G. Morris.
Take Care of You
I'm on a journey, you know? This is the inaugural cohort of the MRPL program. We're building a plane while flying it. In that regard, and in my own life, I'm just having to—even though it's a struggle—figure out, what does this all look like for me?
I had to surrender a few weeks ago. I felt the pressure. I felt the weight of being at HDS. Why am I here? What have I signed up for? I thought, “OK, I’ve got to let this go, because it’s killing me.” I was waking up in the morning anxious. I wasn't sleeping well. I had to admit to myself and to the Spirit that I wasn't OK. I'm struggling right now because I'm in a transition. I'm away from my people. I'm the only Black person in my cohort. I'm in a strange land. But I'm going to enjoy this experience. Harvard does not define who I am. I genuinely try to show up in the world to be the best I can be. I don't get it right all the time. But at the core, my heart is pure. I genuinely love people. So I've deemed this year the year of "enjoying and exploring Erica." I'm here at Harvard to give birth to a new movement, and I'm also being reborn.
I was in a bad way in 2018, deep in depression and anxiety. I didn't know if I was coming or going. I was broken. I wouldn't go to therapy because I was like, “I don't need any help, I'm the preacher.” Finally, I was in a place where I couldn’t go no further. I was at a place where I felt I could take my life and I could be OK. I could be OK because I was tired. It was too heavy of a burden for me. I was in the midst of traveling all over the country, doing the Poor People's Campaign work, and I remember the Spirit said to me, “I didn't call you to be a humanitarian and not human. You're doing all this amazing stuff, but you're not well.” After that, I cut all of my hair off and I started my locs, my journey.
I am here to gain my humanity back, so that I can go and serve humanity. It's time for me to turn my face to the divine and say, “What is it that you have for me? Who am I? Shine the light on me so I can really know who you created me to be.” In Jeremiah 1:5 it says, Before I formed thee I knew thee. And I put thee in thy mother's womb, and I ordained thee to be a prophet unto the nations. That scripture was given to me when I was young. I know what I'm called to be, but yet and still, who am I? At 39, I'm still asking that question.
So take care of you. Take care of you. That is what Audre Lorde is talking about when she's saying self-preservation is the act of resistance. That's what capitalism and all these structures don't want you to do. They want you to be busy and frantic. I tell you the honest to goodness truth, that when I started stepping back and resting, I was actually more of a threat to the forces of darkness. Because I was clear. I had laser focus. I love boxing. Muhammad Ali is one of my greatest people. Cassius Clay. I study him, the way he was focused. He knew his opponent because he was focused on them. Boom, he’d give them one good hit! You can only do that when you are at your grounded center space, not when you are frantic, anxious, worried, or doing too many things.
The Work I’ve Been Called To Do
I admonish you to watch the movie Set it Off. It came out in 1996 and starred Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica Fox, and Kimberly Elise. The film highlights four Black women living in Los Angeles. They are impacted by police brutality, low wages, and sex trafficking—so many different issues and evils that we still see in society.
In 2013, I was preaching at an event and the Spirit came to me and said, “It's time to set it off.” I didn't know what that meant but I ended up leaving everything. I left my job as the director of the Boys and Girls Club, packed up my little Chevy Aveo and went to Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C. A few weeks after I graduated, I got a call to come work for the Rev. William Barber with Repairers of the Breach. I was their very first national organizer. That was the same year Trump was elected. We were in D.C. every week, protesting. We relaunched the Poor People's Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. started back in 1967. I often tell people, they didn't kill Dr. King because he had a dream. They killed him because he had a plan. That plan was to bring together poor Whites, Black, Brown, First Nation—people from all across different races—to challenge the economic plight in this nation. When we relaunched the campaign, we did an audit called “The Souls of Poor Folks, America from 1967 to Current.” We found that there are 140 million poor or low-income people in this country, the richest country in the world, and that we have the highest rate of child poverty in the world.
I have traveled this country. I've been to South Africa three times. I've been to Ghana. I've been to Kenya. I've been to Palestine twice. I've been to India, Brazil, and Cuba. I've seen extreme poverty where people literally live in boxes. In a world that God created, where everybody is created in the image of God, nobody should have to live without a roof over their head, clothing, or food. This is the work that I feel deeply called to do. I follow that brown-skinned Palestinian, Yeshua ben Yoseph, Jesus of Nazareth, who was poor, who was homeless. I follow the Christian text, but you look at every religion, and the common denominator is justice; that people have the human dignity they deserve.
Legacy I Hope to Leave
In the movie Set it Off, they kept saying that all they wanted was to be free. Free from the various situations and oppressions that they were living under. These women had a spirituality of sisterhood. They looked out for each other. They took care of each other. I'm always thinking, what would it have been like for these four Black women to live in a world where they had everything that they needed? What does it look like for Black women and girls to live in a world where they can survive and thrive? That's the world I'm seeking to create with the Set It Off movement.
The legacy I hope to leave is that I never gave up. That I am a vessel. My life is a testament that God is real. Whatever way that looks for you, I don't put a box around it. It could be God's spirit, however you identify it, but there is something greater and higher than us that loves us, that cares for us, even in the midst of the hard things. I am a testament of that. All I want to always say is, take care of you.
I'm doing my best. So Ase’. Ase’ means “so be it.”
Interview conducted and edited by Madeline Bugeau-Heartt; courtesy photos
“My job in the classroom is to bring in a wide variety of voices to give the students an understanding that religions are internally diverse, changing all the time, and embedded differently in the cultures in which they are practiced.”
John Camardella is a student in the inaugural Master of Religion and Public Life Program at Harvard Divinity School. He is an educator who teaches high school and graduate level courses using the cultural studies approach to religion. Over the next year, he will develop a comprehensive religious and cultural literacy program to train superintendents and administrators at the high school level.
Catholic Roots and a Turning Point in Bali
When my parents met in the early ’70s, my mother was a Dominican nun from Detroit, and my father a Xaverian brother from Brooklyn. After a few years of friendship, they decided to leave their orders, marry, and start a family in the Chicago area. I was raised in a very loving Italian Catholic household and attended some great public schools, but never had the educational opportunities to develop the knowledge, language, and skills needed to interact respectfully with the beautifully diverse world we all inhabit.
After college, I started teaching a variety of high school courses in the social studies department at Prospect High School in 2003 but had no formal training in religious studies when I began my career. In 2006, I attended an interfaith gathering on the Island of Bali called “The Quest for Global Healing,” co-hosted by the Archbishop of South Africa, Desmond Tutu. I was one of about 500 people from a wide variety of religious traditions and over 40 different countries. The experience changed everything I believed about education.
In speaking to my mother about experience, her response was, “John, God is not Catholic.” This might be the most profound statement of my personal faith journey. It allows me to honor who I am and how I was raised while simultaneously working to develop a course that offers students an opportunity to learn how others grapple with some of the most pressing existential questions and develop rich traditions around a variety of answers.
It got me thinking about the type of education I felt should be offered to students in public schools. After the two-week trip to Bali, I went to my administration and asked if I could write a curriculum for a religion and culture elective course. In the end, it was a long and arduous journey, but after three years, two graduate degrees, and multiple curriculum submissions, this course was finally approved in 2009.
The Traditions-Based Approach vs. the Cultural Studies Approach
Most contemporary educators have come to realize it is no longer sufficient to simply deliver content to students without challenging them to think about information in sophisticated and nuanced ways. Just knowing specific dates, dogmas, or religious rituals does not improve one's understanding of the world, nor will that rudimentary knowledge make students more inclined to engage with it.
Here in the United States, the handful of stand-alone religion courses in public schools use a textbook as a foundation, and when I started, I was no different. Educators are often wary of talking about religion in the classroom. The textbook, they perceive, is the safe path, a way to protect themselves from conflicts and deliver basic religion content to students. For years, my pedagogy emphasized names, dates, and doctrines from different religious traditions, and student success was tied directly to their performance on multiple-choice exams.
In 2016, Harvard Divinity School graduate Benjamin Marcus contacted me while working at the Religious Freedom Center in Washington D.C. Ben’s research focused on how best to address religion in public schools, and we quickly realized there was no approved set of guidelines specifically for high school teachers to build curriculum. So, Ben assembled a small team with HDS’s Dr. Diane Moore to produce a "Religious Studies" appendix to the C3 Framework published by the National Council for the Social Studies.
The C3 is a comprehensive guide for states to strengthen their social studies standards and assist local school districts, teachers, and curriculum writers in enhancing their social studies programs. The disciplines of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology all had their guidelines, and our work focused on making sure religion would also be taught in ways that are constitutionally sound and consistent with high academic standards. The National Council for Social Studies published our document in June 2017 to provide guidance to all 50 states on how to address religious studies in the classroom.
Perfecting the Pedagogy
During our collaboration on the C3 Project, Dr. Moore helped me come to terms with the civic consequences of religious illiteracy in ways that forced me to reconsider my firmest convictions as an educator. In previous years, I had worked diligently to master the content needed to teach an effective World Religion course. Still, I soon realized I was not doing enough to help students understand different religions in their complex and culturally embedded realities. As I dove more into Dr. Moore's scholarly work and thought critically about what our Prospect seniors needed most upon graduation, I decided to commit to rewriting all 40 weeks of our curriculum to follow the Cultural Studies Approach to studying religion. I took a hard look at previous lesson plans to measure how much I addressed three of the core premises of the Cultural Studies Method: that religions are internally diverse, culturally embedded, and change over time. As I began to apply this new lens, it became clear my lessons were doing the opposite and frequently reinforcing the assumption that religions are monolithic, universal, and static. The bottom line was I needed to change.
At the beginning of the school year, we help students “situate” themselves with an assignment we call “a worldview autobiography.” We encourage each person to dive into their own histories to honor the cultures they come from, and think critically on how their race, gender, ethnicity, and other aspects of their identities shape how they think about and experience the world. Once they have that foundational framework, we can then ask them to talk, listen, and engage respectfully with one another.
The cultural studies approach honors each individual and then allows them to see other examples of religion and culture as authentic, but not exclusive, expressions of religion. We make sure that in the process students can recognize the difference between a devotional expression of religion, where someone is making a religious assertion or speaking on behalf of a religion, and a non-devotional statement from someone like me as their public-school teacher who offers an academic analysis of religion. Another core premise of the cultural studies approach is recognizing that there is nothing inevitable about violence or peace. We help students remain mindful that religions have been a force for good throughout world history, but also a force that has done incredible harm and diminished human flourishing.
Harvard Divinity School
In late 2017, Dr. Diane Moore offered me an education fellowship at the Religious Literacy Project at HDS. It was challenging, but over the course of three years, I rewrote all 40 weeks of my curriculum, restructured all of our assessments, partnered with Eastern Illinois University to make our high school class dual credit, and developed and taught nine different graduate courses for high school teachers working on advanced degrees.
This year in the MRPL program, I am developing a program for superintendents and administrators to learn more about how religious and cultural issues can be addressed during teacher development sessions. I want to help them to better understand how religion intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, and power dynamics in a public-school classroom, and have a real interest in helping administrators in the same way that Dr. Moore and her team at HDS have helped me. I will not be an expert at the end of this MRPL program, but I already feel more confident in offering guidance to leaders who have to make really important decisions for their schools and their districts across the country.
Looking Forward
Learning about the complexities, sophistication, and nuances inherent in religion can be utterly transformational. I have discovered that many professional development programs in public schools avoid discussing religion altogether or present religion as a category separate from all other aspects of identity (gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.). These frameworks that silo identities for inclusion are problematic, and sadly, most public-school districts offer professional development that reinforces these exact methods. My current project aims to fix this deeply embedded and structural problem in teacher development programs by building a comprehensive curriculum in service to high school superintendents and upper-level administrators. The primary aim is to assist them in recognizing how religion is embedded in culture and intersects with all aspects of life. By increasing their own religious & cultural literacy, they can better serve their staff, students, and surrounding communities by improving their programming and support structures.
I will launch this program in October of 2022 with an hour-long lecture and interactive presentation at the annual conference of the Illinois Association of School Administrators. I plan to invite attendees to join me for a series of live sessions during the 2023 spring semester, where the program will offer district leaders the language and tools necessary to understand the power of religion and disrupt the essentialism of categories too often associated with professional development in public schools. I want to offer administrators an educational experience where they first situate themselves in their specific context and then work to deepen their knowledge surrounding the intersections of identity, with a particular focus on how religion plays a role in society and public schools. I hope to facilitate a convincing experience that will enable each leader to create an environment that encourages all staff members and students to participate fully in the school's culture without fear of being their whole and complex selves.
Interview by Emily Chaudhari; photos by Zach Miller in 2018
“I didn’t grow up religious, but from a young age I’ve found whatever divine presence is out there in the American West’s nature. There are so many crises facing those natural expanses, though, from existential crises prompted by climate change to deep societal divisions rendering them inaccessible and unprotected. I want to be able to help heal a few of those problems.”
Owen Yager, MTS ’23, is a first-year MTS student studying how the sacred interplays with movements and communities in and around the American West’s natural spaces.
Environmental Roots
I got to grow up in Boulder, Colorado, with a family that made sure to share the natural spaces around us. My dad had been on a trip with the National Outdoor Leadership School, spent some time as a wilderness guide and started a cross-cultural educational travel company that had a big focus on getting kids to value nature. When my sister and I got old enough to go out on adventures with him, he was sure to take us out. He first helped me put on skis when I was three years old and the next summer, when I was four, he took me on my first backpacking trip.
It was a one-night, one-and-a-half mile out and back hike. I had a little school bag with both of our underwear in it and he had a trekking pack that was more or less a refrigerator, carrying everything else that we needed for a night camping. We went up by a lake and, for the first time in my life, I got to see the way that water looks as the sun sets over the high alpine. Since that first adventure, I have found an all-encompassing joy in how still everything is in those sunset moments, with trout hitting a lake’s surface and sending out radiating rings over the water and a distant clatter of some dislodged rock mixing into the wind. As I grew older, my parents kept creating opportunities for my sister and I to get out into nature, and I kept finding that joy in natural spaces.
Later on, I started to work with those spaces. I rode horses in high school, which turned into work with a lamb ranch and a horseback guiding company. I spent this last year in Yerington, Nevada, a town of about 3,000 people, on a rangeland restoration AmeriCorps contract, running irrigation systems, planting native species, and removing invasive plants. In that work, I have found both deep purpose in a sense of taking care of nature in the West and some of the same joy that I’ve found in recreating in it.
I am still working on defining precisely what causes that joy and makes those spaces so special. A part of it is physical, I know. When my skin feels a mountain breeze, it is my skin and no one else’s that has that sensation; there is no wind-proxy in the form of a cameraman or recording studio. In that physicality, my being can be completely subsumed by space in a way that I have not been able to find anywhere else. There’s an unknowability to those natural spaces, too, in their incomprehensible age and the constant mystery of what insect might be hiding under a rock, what chute might be on the other side of a crag, or what the view might be if you stand just three feet over to your left. They are sublime and their sublimity inspires me, terrifies me, comforts me, and connects me to something greater than myself.
Finding Religion
The travel company that my dad ran had a focus on religion as a part of people’s experience. My community growing up was largely composed of the company’s instructors, meaning that I was always surrounded by people who were keenly aware of the sacred’s importance and of the varied ways that it can manifest. They taught me a bit about what the sacred meant to different people and how they accessed it through stories and practice, but my childhood passed without me getting deep investment in what religious meaning could look like.
That changed when I took my first formal religion class in the winter of my sophomore year at Carleton College. I still remember the course number: Religion 122, “Introduction to Islam.” I had already dabbled a bit with classes in history and art history, which I had enjoyed, and I walked into “Intro to Islam” thinking that it would be something fun to experiment with before I committed to the English major. I realized pretty quickly how flexible of a category “religion” is in the academy and how much fun I could have with defining a religious course of study that examined the things that I value. Two weeks into the course, I thought to myself: “I’m going to major in religion.” I declared that spring, with one course under my belt, and haven’t looked back.
During the rest of my undergrad, I tried to find ways to link the study of religion to the natural world, particularly in the West. In the class “Lived Religion in America,” I wrote a paper on how Edward Abbey’s texts could be thought of as religious. I worked with a professor looking at a group of students at our college that essentially created a religion, rooted in nature worship, as a form of religious protest in the ‘60s. My largest project was a thesis on El Capitan, the rock wall in Yosemite that Alex Honnold climbed without a rope, positioning it as sacred in an American social context by following a civil tradition of celebrating the sublime.
Doing More Than Being Happy Outside
When I graduated and moved out to Nevada in the summer of 2020, I started to think about the limitations of the work that I had already done. I felt that I had done a decent job of exploring why I thought that natural spaces were special, particularly through my thesis. While I was writing it, though, I had started to think about how little it did politically; it had an almost entirely poetic focus.
I have spent time around two community archetypes: white, suburban, liberal communities that have the resources to recreate outdoors and invest in conservation, and white, rural, conservative communities for whom land use is a much more backyard issue, with natural resource extraction and agriculture forming economic backbones.
I love these communities, and I have learned that they have a lot of problems, including their distrust of each other and each other’s values and their lack of inroads for people—especially those of marginalized identities—not already in them. Reflecting back on what I had not been able to do with my previous work, I realized how much more there was that I could do, drawing on my comfort with both of these blocs, to help work on both this distrust and this lack of accessibility.
Looking Forward
At HDS, I hope to be able to align myself with two critical conversations: how to find common ground between liberal and conservative environmental communities, and how to open social doors into and out of them and the spaces to which they hold access.
This fall, I am beginning to learn a bit about this: I am taking a class with David Holland and Catherine Brekus on narratives of American religion, where I am hoping to better acquaint myself with how nature and conceptions of the sublime have played into the comingling of American mainstream culture and American religious identities.
“Weather Reports,” taught by Diane Moore, is a class centered on a conversation series led by Terry Tempest Williams and focused on religio-sacred approaches to climate change, which should be fear-inducing and hope-inspiring and equip me to better engage in conversations around the natural environment using religious language and tools.
I have only been in Boston for a little while now, but the opportunities that have already presented themselves—these classes, the speakers that are coming to Harvard’s campus, the intellectual community that I get to be a part of—have made me so excited for the next two years and, more than that, for the way that the next two years will prepare me to go off and do good work. I can’t wait for all of it.
Submitted by Owen Yager; top photo by Jonathan Beasley, second photo courtesy of Owen Yager
