summer 2010 volume 6 number 2

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Commencement 2010: Reveling in Traditions Both Festive and Sacred

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“We learned something about our-selves, about our world and what it needs, and what we think we can offer,” he said. “You have changed, all of you. I know, because I was there changing with you. Or maybe, we were all changing together.”

Stephanie Paulsell, Houghton Profes-sor of the Practice of Ministry Studies, gave the faculty address on May 26 during the Multireligious Service of Thanksgiv-ing for the Class of 2010. She implored new graduates to take courage in life and in learning. “I hope the conversations you began here will challenge and sustain you for a very long time,” she said. “Even if there were times when you felt alone in your work, you weren’t.” An excerpt of her talk is on page 7.

In two short articles, located on page 11, new graduates Marcus Briggs-Cloud and Jasmine Beach-Ferrara discuss how their experiences at HDS have helped to shape their lives and their continuing work. These articles can be viewed in their entirety on the HDS News and Events web page. Visit www.hds.harvard.edu/news/article_archive to read their stories.

On Thursday, May 27, Harvard Divinity School honored 155 new graduates (86 MTS’s, 56 MDiv’s,

8 ThM’s, and 5 ThD’s) as part of the School’s Commencement ceremonies.

In his welcome remarks, Dean Wil-liam A. Graham addressed the graduating class, saying: “Many of you I have had the privilege either to have in the classroom or to have gotten to know through the contributions you have made to our HDS community and mission during your time here. I salute, congratulate, and, frankly, envy all of you for the great talents and possibilities that you carry with you as you leave this place of learning today.”

A collection of photos from the Multi-religious Service of Thanksgiving on May 26 and from the Diploma Awarding Cer-emony and Commencement Luncheon on May 27 can be found on pages 8 and 9.

In this summer Commencement issue of Harvard Divinity Today, Scott Dickison, MDiv ’10, eloquently recalls his HDS journey—one, as he puts it, of change and discovery that is shared by many HDS students.

From top: HDS graduates enter the Memorial Church to the jubilant sights and sounds of the Multireligious Service of Thanksgiving; recent graduates cheerfully pose during the class photo.

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Papyrologist and Assistant Professor of New Testament at HDS Giovanni Bazzana shares his thoughts on his first year teaching at the Divinity School.

One cannot deny that the first year as a professor at Harvard Divinity School is some-how a shocking experience, and this is all the more true for someone like me who had

to absorb these novelties together with the American way of life and the American culture. HDS, with its composite and diverse student body, presents a teacher with stimulat-

ing and interesting challenges: should I focus more on the students who are thinking about a future career in academia, or should I pay more attention to those who are pre-paring for the daunting task of ministry or service to fellow human beings in a number of different capacities?

I have been lucky because many answers to these questions have come to me almost by themselves—the very students about whom I was so concerned have shown me, every day, through their conversations in and outside the classroom, that diversity is never a problem; rather, it is frequently a constructive element when interlocutors are willing to listen to each other and willing, always, to question their own presuppositions.

Indeed, I look forward to the next academic year, because I think I have now assessed with more precision what contribution my teaching can offer to the overall activity of the School and what benefit my own research can derive from the interac-tion with the students. It is quite evident that Harvard offers a researcher unparalleled resources to pursue his or her work, day by day, with success and sometimes even plea-sure—if one shares my almost fetish-like love for huge libraries. I had many opportuni-ties during this year to observe that the lively student body of the School can contribute in remarkably positive ways. For instance, testing hypotheses and engaging in scholarly debates in the small setting of a seminary can be a very convenient way to refine, and occasionally even rethink, general points in any research plan.

I have to admit that my research has been somewhat slowed down during the last year by the need to devote most of my energies to teaching, but I cannot say that I have not developed some interesting ideas. In particular, I continue in my attempt to bring together New Testament studies and papyrology—two disciplines that, I maintain, have more in common than appears at first glance. Papyri are traditionally a privileged focus of scholarly interest because some of them have preserved the most ancient and puz-zlingly fragmentary copies of the New Testament writings. However, I have always been more interested in the other branch of papyrology that deals with the so-called docu-mentary papyri, a group that consists of a heterogeneous mixture of texts connected to the occurrences of everyday life (contracts, wills, private letters). One might wonder what these papyri have to do with the New Testament: in fact, the more I study them, the more I am convinced that the first Christian writings were deeply involved with even the humblest concerns of human beings in their everyday interactions and activi-ties. (The parables of Jesus are a compelling witness to the truth of this statement.) Reading the New Testament in its social context can only improve our understanding of how a divine revelation can become part of human life.

What’s Inside

a professor’s first year at hds 2

andover journal

News From Around the School 3

Faculty and Staff Notes 4

Recent Faculty Books 5

Commitment to Public Service 6

commencement 2010 7

alumni journal

Solidarity and Hope 11

Alumni News Highlights 12

Recent Graduate Profile 13

Class Notes and Obituaries 14

Recent Alumni Books 15

calendar 16

Harvard Divinity TodaySummer 2010 Volume 6 Number 2

Published three times a year by the Office of Communications at Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, for the alumni, faculty, staff, students, and friends of HDS. Letters to the editor are welcome at that address, as are requests to be added to the mailing list.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Office of Communications, Harvard Divinity Today, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

Copyright © 2010 President and Fellows of Harvard College

editor’s note: In order to reduce print costs as well as our impact on the environment, Harvard Divinity Today is mailed only to HDS alumni and affiliates, and to members of the Harvard community. If you are not a member of any of these groups but would like to receive a print copy, please write to alums@hds.harvard.edu. All interested readers may also enjoy Harvard Divinity Today online, at www.hds.harvard.edu/news.

a professor’s reflections one year in

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Theological Revue, the annual end-of-year “roast” of life at HDS, took place on Friday, May 7, in the Rockefeller Café. Here, Dean William Graham receives some help from Jocelyn Gardner, MDiv ’10, in singing, “It Ain’t Easy Being Dean”—his take on Kermit the Frog’s famous Sesame Street song, “Being Green.”

Theological Revue Welcomes Year-end ShenanigansNews From Around the School

Each spring, the Office of Ministry Studies at HDS hosts the Billings

Preaching Competition, under the Rob-ert Charles Billings Fund (established in 1904), to recognize preaching and “pulpit delivery” among Divinity School students. The competition is open to second- and third-year master of divinity candidates. The preaching finals this year took place during Noon Service on Wednesday, April 14, in Andover Chapel, and the first-place winners of the Billings Prize, non-ordained division, were Karen Bray, Taylor Lewis Guthrie, and Nathan Wil-lard (a three-way tie). The other finalists were Angela Herrera, Jasmine Johnson, Marcus McCullough, and Kenneth White. The winner in the newly formed ordained

John J. McDermott, Distinguished Pro-fessor of Philosophy and Humanities at

Texas A&M University, delivered the 2010 William James Lecture on Religious Expe-rience on May 6, 2010. McDermott works in the areas of classical American philoso-phy and philosophy of culture, literature, and medicine. He is the general editor of the critical edition of The Correspondence of William James, published by the Uni-versity of Virginia Press in 12 volumes. The title of his lecture was “A Jamesian Personscape: The Fringe as Messaging to the ‘Sick Soul’.”

“I’m pleased and privileged to present this lecture on behalf of the memory of Wil-liam James,” McDermott said. “That this takes place at Harvard University is quintes-sentially appropriate, for to speak the name William James is to speak Harvard.”

David Lamberth, Professor of Philoso-phy and Theology at HDS, responded to McDermott’s talk.

William James Lecture on Religious Experience

The William James Lecture was estab-lished in 1968 with a gift to Harvard Divinity School from the John Lindsley Fund endowing a lecture series in honor of William James. A scholar is to be invited each year to lecture with particular reference to James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.

View online at www.hds.harvard.edu/news.

Billings Preaching Prize

division was Scott Dickison, and the Mas-sachusetts Bible Society Award for the best reading of a scripture went to Molly Housh.

View online at www.hds.harvard.edu/news.

Harvard Theological Review, one of the oldest scholarly theological journals

in the United States, has provided a forum for scholars of religion and theology since its founding in 1908. Issued quarterly, it publishes compelling original research that contributes to the development of scholarly understanding and interpre-tation in a variety of fields. The most recent issues of HTR are available online, through Harvard’s library e-resources, at sfx.hul.harvard.edu/sfx_local/az/. Insert “Harvard Theological Review,” and then “Cambridge University Press Journals Complete,” and click on “PDF” for the complete text.

All of the articles in HTR from 1908 to 2004 are available online through JSTOR and ATLA (American Theological Library Association). Cambridge Univer-sity Press will soon offer all the articles from back issues online, and later this year, an online searchable index will be available on the HTR website. You will be able to type in the keyword “Essenes,” for

example, and all of the articles discussing this topic in the past 100 years of HTR will be listed for you—including authors, volumes, and page numbers. This online searchable index project was supported by a gift from the Carpenter Foundation.

Additionally, Harvard Divinity Today now has its own web presence, available online at the HDS News and Event page or by visiting www.hds.harvard.edu/news/HDT. Here you will find the most recent HDT content—including the full text of articles that have been excerpted in print—and have access to past issues. As of now, alumni class notes will appear only in the print edition. Harvard Divin-ity Bulletin, the School’s magazine that includes articles, reviews, and opinion pieces on religion and contemporary life, religion and the arts, religious history, and the study of religion, continues to appear in print and online at www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/. To request to be added to the Bulletin mailing list, please write to bulletin@hds.harvard.edu.

Not Just Fit For Print, HDS Publications Online, Tooh

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John J. McDermott in the Sperry Room.

Karen Bray delivers her sermon.

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theological commentarial writing. Cloo-ney, who previously received a Luce Fel-lowship in Comparative Religious Studies in 1989–90, will be working on the project “When God Is Absent: Toward a Theo-Dramatic Reading of Religious Diversity.”

Peoples: Toward a Peace in the Middle East,” which he had prepared in coopera-tion with seven other American scholars at the Istanbul Center for Foreign Policy. In April, he served as lecturer for a Harvard Alumni Travel Study Seminar in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. In March, Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, delivered the Tanner Lec-ture at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, titled “Faith and the ‘Patchwork Peo-ple’: America’s Religious Promise Comes of Age.” In April, she delivered the keynote lecture, “Beginning in India: Sacred Geog-raphy and the Pilgrim Journey,” at the Asia Society in New York in connection with its exhibit on Pilgrimage and Buddhist Arts. In May, she delivered the Commencement Address, titled “Faith and the Global Future,” at Berea College in Kentucky, where she was also awarded an honorary doctorate degree. Cheryl Giles, Peabody Professor of the Practice in Pastoral Care and Counseling, presented “The Language of Compassion: Building Cultural Compe-tency in Health Care Chaplaincy” at the International Conference on Religious Plu-ralism in Health Care Chaplaincy, hosted by Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germa-ny, June 10–12. Janet Gyatso, Hershey Pro-fessor of Buddhist Studies, led the seminar “The Dharma of Humans: Ethics and Experience in a Buddho-Scientific World” at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analy-sis this spring. She published “Spelling Mistakes, Philology, and Feminist Criti-cism: Women and Boys in Tibetan Medi-cine,” in Françoise Pommaret and Jean-Luc Achard, Tibetan Studies in Honor of Samten Karmey (Amnye Machen Insti-tute, 2009), and “Female Ordination in Buddhism: Looking into a Crystal Ball, Making a Future,” in Dignity and Discipline, edited by Thea Mohr (Wisdom Publica-tions, 2010). David Hempton, McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, published the book chapter “Prot-estant Migrations: Narratives of the Rise and Decline of Religion in the North Atlan-tic World c. 1650–1950,” in Secularisation in the Christian World, edited by Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape (Ashgate, 2010). He also gave the lecture “Comparative Sec-ularization in Europe and the United States: Some Fresh Directions,” as the opening address at a conference organized

Faculty and Staff Notes

François Bovon, Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion, spent a week in April at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Wash-ington, D.C., a center for Byzantine stud-ies, where he was a representative for the Committee on Medieval Studies. While at Dumbarton Oaks, he gave an informal talk on noncanonical stories of St. Stephen and St. Philip in Byzantine manuscripts and icons. In May, he gave two lectures at four South Korean universities: Pyungtack Uni-versity, Kwangshin University, Torch Trini-ty Graduate School of Theology, and Anyang University. He also participated in two conferences: at one, on the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts of the Apostles, he presented “The Ascension Stories in Luke-Acts”; and at the other, on early Christian literature, he gave the lecture “Useful Early Christian Apocrypha.” In early June, he spent a week working on Greek manuscripts at the Monastery of Saint Catherine (Sinai) in Egypt. His “Un chapitre de théologie johannique” was pub-lished in Studien zu Matthäus und Johannes. Festschrift für Jean Zumstein, edit-ed by Andreas Dettwiler and Uta Poplutz (Theologischer Verlag Ag, 2009). Davíd Carrasco, Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, conducted a three-day seminar, “Filosofia de las Religiones,” in mid-April, sponsored by the Cátedra Alfonso Reyes at the Universidad Tech-nológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexi-co. These lectures on the philosophy of religions were viewed by students through-out the 33-campus system in Mexico. He also delivered a public lecture, titled “Phi-losophy, Cosmovision, and Sacrifice in Mesoamerican Religions.” Harvey Cox, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, lec-tured at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on May 18 on Christian identity and religious pluralism and also presented the lecture “Religion in America Today” at the University of Rome. After his visit to Rome, he traveled to Istanbul where he held a public dialogue with the Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, before an audience of 500 people, on the topic, “Reli-gion, Modernity, and the Future.” He also presented the report “One Land for Two

Mark Jordan, Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity, was

voted Outstanding Teacher of the Year for 2009–10 by the HDS student body.

“When I arrived at HDS,” Jordan says, “I figured that I would have to translate my teaching into the local idiom. I would need to learn how topics were framed here, which methods were favored, and what the local canon of authoritative books comprised. I quickly realized that there was no single idiom. There was instead a racing polyphony of topics, methods, and canons. Any classroom at HDS can draw students from across the Schools and degree stages, from Harvard College juniors through senior profes-sional practitioners to our own doctoral students on the eves of their compre-hensive examination. Any classroom can contain a dozen religious traditions and as many academic fields. So teaching here brings the exhilaration of improvising in opposed styles with unpredictably many instruments. As I walk into a lecture or seminar, I can never tell which topics, methods, canons, and traditions of prac-tice will be at the center on that day—or

what dazzling pattern they will trace.

The other thing that has struck me is the eagerness at HDS not only to reflect on teaching, to assess it, but to invent ways for doing it differently—and better. When difficul-ties appear in a classroom, as there must if there is to be deep learning, I have found a broad willingness to work them through, to reinforce or reestablish the group’s sense of itself, in order to move on. In my experience, students and fac-ulty share this passion for teaching. One sure sign of that is the number of faculty members nominated for the award this year and the high participation of students in voting. While I’m delighted to receive the award this year, I am convinced that it should have gone just as well to a number of my colleagues.”

The Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada and

the Henry Luce Foundation have named Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at HDS, as one of six Henry Luce III Fellows in Theol-ogy for 2010–11. The Luce Fellows pro-gram was established in 1993 to identify leading scholars in theological studies and provide them with the necessary financial support and recognition to facilitate their work. The program, one of the premier fellowship programs for theological scholarship, recognizes the excellence and creativity in Clooney’s

Mark Jordan Is Outstanding Teacher of the Year

Francis X. Clooney Is Named Luce Fellow for 2010–11

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by Robert Putnam, named “The Social Change, Harvard-Manchester Initiative,” held at the University of Manchester, Eng-land, June 10. Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity, has served as president of the Northeastern Region of the Society of Bibli-cal Literature for 2009–10. She presented “Beyond ‘Varieties of Christianity’: Reading the Letter of Peter to Philip in the History of Ancient Christianity,” the presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature New England Regional Meeting, in Boston, April 16. David Lamberth, Professor of Phi-losophy and Theology, published his 2008 presidential address to the William James Society, “What to Make of James’s Genetic Theory of Truth?” in William James Studies. In November 2009, Harvard University Provost Steve Hyman appointed Lamberth as chair of the Harvard-wide Library Imple-mentation Work Group, which is charged with bringing significant reforms to the University library system as recommended in the provost’s Library Task Force Report of 2009. Jon Levenson, List Professor of Jewish Studies, participated in the “Akeda Conference: ‘The Binding of Isaac’ ” at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, April 13–15, where he gave the key-note address, titled “The Aqedah in Four Traditions,” responded to a paper by Ter-

ence Fretheim, and participated in a panel discussion. On April 19, he gave a lecture of the same title at the Hebrew Bible Work-shop at Harvard. On February 16, he pre-sented “Jews and Christians as Abrahamic Communities,” the Hay of Seaton Memori-al Lecture at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and, in accordance with the terms of the endowment, under the auspic-es of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, London, on February 17. He published the article “The Idea of Abraha-mic Religions: A Qualified Dissent,” in the Jewish Review of Books 1:1 (Spring 2010), and a book review of Scott W. Hahn, Kin-ship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises, in the Journal of Religion 90 (2010). Dan McK-anan, Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, was the featured speaker at the annual ministers retreat of the Southwest Unitari-an Universalist Conference in January. In April, he spoke at “What’s Enough? A Con-versation Between Harvard Business School and Harvard Divinity School” and at the “Finding Our Way” conference orga-nized by the HDS Office of Ministry Stud-ies. In June, he appeared on WORT radio in Madison, Wisconsin, speaking on his forthcoming book, Prophetic Encounters:

Recent Faculty BooksThe New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights From the Next Generationedited by Francis X. Clooney, S.J. (Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology) Continuum

This collection illuminates where (Christian and other) theologies are going today, how religious pluralism is theorized in light of past errors, and how the diversity of religions is becoming a solid topic for theological learning.

Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessionsby Mark D. Jordan (Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity), Virginia Burrus, and Karmen MacKendrick Fordham University Press

Augustine’s Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Three scholars who share a longstanding fasci-nation with sexuality and Christian discourse set out both to seduce and to be seduced by Augustine’s text.

Religion and the American Radical Tradition. Laura Nasrallah, Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, gave the Kraft-Hiatt Lecture at Brandeis University on April 29, titled “Revelation: From Rasta to Archaeological Ruins.” She also presented “Grief in Corinth: The Roman City and Paul’s Corinthian Corre-spondence” at Princeton University in Feb-ruary. Jonathan Schofer, Associate Professor of Comparative Ethics, organized a conference on comparative ethics at the Center for the Study of World Religions, March 29–30. On May 6, Charles Stang, Assistant Professor of Early Christian Thought, delivered “After the Afterlife: Evagrius of Pontus on the apokatastasis” in the three-day seminar “Imagining Other Worlds: Eschatology and Utopia in Ancient Greece and Rome,” at the Real Colegio Complutense in Cambridge, Massachu-setts, sponsored jointly by the Universidad Complutense, Madrid, and the Department of the Classics at Harvard. Donald K. Swearer, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies and director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, gave three lectures in April. He presented “Monks, Kings, and Commoners: Images of Buddhism in Thailand and Southeast Asia” at the University of Nebraska–Lin-coln; as part of the CSWR 50th Anniversa-ry Symposium, he gave the lecture “Towards a World Theology: Wilfred Cantwell Smith and the Center for the Study of World Religions”; and he partici-pated in the American Society for the Study of Religion Annual Meeting in Gran-ville, Ohio, where he gave the lecture “Bud-dhist Economics and Thailand’s Sufficiency Economy.” At the end of March, his article “The Temple on Mount Sutep and Pilgrimage in Northern Thai-land” was published in Pilgrimage and Bud-dhist Art, edited by Adriana Proser (Asia Society Museum/Yale University Press, 2010). Andrew Teeter, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, gave two lectures in Wisconsin during the first week of May: “Between Scripture and Its Rewrit-ing: Exegetical Strategies in the Scribal Transmission of Biblical Law in the Second Temple Period,” in the Department of Hebrew and Semitics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; and “The Scriptures

and Their Interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” a public lecture sponsored by the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religion, held at the Milwaukee Public Museum in conjunction with the exhibi-tion “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: Ancient Artifacts—Timeless Treasures.”

Cole Gustafson, MDiv ’08, who worked for two years as a faculty assistant in the Office of Academic Administration, left HDS in May to return to his mid-American roots—and to begin a doctoral program in American literature at the University of Missouri–Columbia. At Har-vard’s Commencement on May 27, Anissa Potvin, annual giving and alumni relations coordinator, received a master of liberal arts degree in management from Harvard Extension School and Elizabeth Sutton, program coordinator for the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at HDS, received a master’s in higher education (EdM) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. On Friday, April 23, several HDS students and staff participated in a staged reading of The Edge of Blue Light, a play written and directed by Angela Counts, assistant director of admissions and a Lorraine Hansberry Award-winning playwright. The humorous tale of women finding their way through the mystery of illness and mortality has been performed in festivals across the country.

From left, Jacqueline Brambila, MTS ’10, HDS student Logan Narikawa, and Maria Cristina Vlassidis, ThD candidate, rehearsing The Edge of Blue Light in the Rock Café.

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The third annual HDS Charity Ball was held on April 25 at the Harvard Faculty Club, with all proceeds benefiting the Haitian Multi-Service Center. And in May, the HDS Green Team, led by the efforts of staff member Kristin Gunst, organized a special collection of items needed for Haiti’s rainy season to be shipped to Part-ners in Health in Haiti for distribution. Donation boxes were located around cam-pus, and a local moving company, Gentle Giant, arrived at HDS on June 11 to pick up the donated items.

Public service at Harvard is not merely limited to those within the Boston area. The Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) has a public service task force that helps identify ways for graduates to volunteer around the world. There are thousands of Harvard alumni, students, faculty, and organizations involved in public service work, and the HAA’s new Public Service on the Map website con-nects Harvard community members to these people and places, which are locat-ed all over the world.

In April, the HAA held a Global Month of Service, sparking service events in North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Closer to campus, HDS alumna Gloria White-Hammond, MDiv ’97, spoke on May 19 at an event sponsored by the HAA, titled “Public Service: Activism in Action.” White-Ham-mond, co-pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston and executive director of My Sis-ter’s Keeper, spoke on the work she does with fellow alumna Liz Walker, MDiv ’95, in fighting for the emancipation of Suda-nese slaves.

During her Commence ment address on May 27, President Faust underscored the University’s mission to serve the common good and announced enhanced support for students seeking service opportunities.

“It is a fundamental purpose of the modern research university to develop tal-ent in service of a better world,” she said. “This commitment is at the heart of all we do and at the heart of what we cel ebrate today.”

Harvard Gazette reporter Cory Ireland contributed to this article. Read more about public service at Harvard at news.harvard.edu/gazette/.

join together in responding to this trag-edy, offering both our knowledge and our contributions to ease the suffering of the earthquake’s survivors.”

Heeding this call to action, members of the HDS community organized several opportunities for the com munity to par-ticipate in relief efforts.

Nationally touring songwriter and HDS student Tracy Howe per formed with other songwriters, including some Haitian musi-cians from the Boston community, in a night of music and in praise that benefited the work of Partners in Health in Haiti. The concert was held at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul, in Boston, and was supported by, among others, the HDS Office of Reli gious and Spiritual Life.

Jacob K. Olupona, Professor of African Religious Traditions at HDS, sponsored a Haitian Vodou memorial service on March 5 in Andover Chapel for those who died in the earthquake. This was a service of candlelight, prayer, and singing, and par ticipants were invited to wear white, bring a white candle for the altar, and, if appropriate, bring a picture for the altar of someone lost in the earthquake. Dona-tions went to support Partners in Health and their relief work in Haiti.

Shelter and Jane Doe Inc.: The Massa-chusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence.

Collection boxes were set up around campus in early February as members of the communi ty participated in the Univer-sity-wide Valen tine’s Day Cosmetics Drive. People were asked to donate beauty prod-ucts to homeless women living at the Cam-bridge Family Shelter. The women received free spa services the day they picked up the items, making for a festive Valentine’s Day.

Harvard’s participation in the Ameri-can Cancer Society’s Daffodil Days in February and March is a University-wide effort to raise funds to support the fight against cancer. All proceeds go to the American Cancer Society (ACS) toward prevention, early detection, advocacy, and patient services. Now in its 23rd year, Daf-fodil Days provides an opportunity for the Harvard community to purchase bouquets of daffodils, potted bulbs, and teddy bears. In 2009, Harvard was honored as the top Massachusetts participant by the Ameri-can Cancer Society.

After the Haitian earthquake on Janu-ary 12, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust released a statement saying, “I am confident that many of us at Harvard will

Harvard’s tradition of service dates to the seventeenth century. In 1636,

the “College at Newtowne” was founded to provide the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the ministers needed in what was perceived as a wilderness. Six of the nine members of Harvard’s first graduating class became ministers, at least part time. Three of the six also were physicians.

Public service remains a vital focus of the University, and likewise at HDS, where service is an important part of the culture. At any given time during the year, one is likely to walk into the main entryway of an HDS build ing and see a collection box or a flyer publicizing a volunteer opportunity.

The range of public service activi-ties this previous academic year at HDS involving faculty, students, staff, and alumni was indeed broad. In late Sep-tember through early October 2009, the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and student religious and spiritual organiza-tions at HDS invited the community to donate men’s clothing items to Haley House of Hospitality in Boston and to the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter.

In the fall and in the late winter, two community bake-offs were held to raise money for the Harvard Square Homeless

Community Action in Service of a Better World

At left, HDS staff member Kristin Gunst led a School-wide effort to collect much-needed items for Haiti. Right, Gloria White-Hammond, MDiv ’97, spoke at May event highlighting public service and sponsored by the Harvard Alumni Association.

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oars, as Dante himself did, every time he took up his pen and added another line to his divine comedy. Make wings out of whatever you have at hand: your pastoral gifts; your language skills; your ability to think theologically; your critical knowledge of history; your commitment to practice; your ability to hear poetry in ordinary human exchanges; your gift for helping us hear it, too. Make sails out of ritual theory and feminist theory and what you know of human suffering and row out into the open sea. We anticipate with joy all the ways you will bless this world and shape its future, through work that is both hid-den and visible, work that is marked less by the boundaries that define it and more by what St. Paul once called “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

courses in a religious tradition other than her own because learning about how oth-ers consecrate the world helps her find in her own practices ways of loving the world she hadn’t known were there.

How can such work be quantified, valued, or assessed? How can we be sure this work matters? As ministers, scholars, teachers of all kinds, chaplains, activists, and artists, some of your work will done in public, and its effects will be visible for all to see. We will read about you in the newspaper, and we will rejoice at the difference you are making in this world. But some of your work, no matter what your vocation, will be done in very great hiddenness. And sometimes it is the work that is most hidden that has the most profound consequences for human life in the present and what human life might become in a future far beyond our own.

Now, it can certainly be tempting to drown others in the sea of our anxiety when we are try-ing to push past bound-aries into new territory. Maybe you feel some sympathy with Dante, remembering those days when the differenc-es between us grated—theological differences, political differences, cul-tural differences. It’s not always easy, studying and living together. But you showed us over and over again that, when we hold our anxiety loosely, we flourish in each other’s presence.

I hope the conversa-tions you began here will challenge and sus-tain you for a very long time. Even if there were times when you felt alone in your work, you weren’t. You were turn-ing toward people you haven’t yet met.

So be fearless. Don’t wait for the wind, but make wings out of your

counselors, swathed entirely in flame. Dante is so drawn to the sight of him that he nearly falls off the bridge he is stand-ing on. Stay quiet, Virgil warns him. Let me speak to Ulysses, Virgil says, and I’ll ask him to tell you how he got here.

I offer this story, not as a cautionary tale about the dangers of following your desire for knowledge, but because the anxieties about creative, intellectual work that gave rise to it still trouble us today. Whenever we are urged to police the boundaries of disciplines, degrees, and vocations so as to protect the distinctiveness of each, I can hear the waves lapping over the spot where Ulysses’ boat once sailed—or when we are required to know the “relevance” and “use-fulness” of our intellectual work in advance.

What good is this work going to do for anyone? This is a question we know very well, a question we care about, as we ought. A great deal of your best work at HDS has been to articulate how the ques-tions and ideas about which you are pas-sionate matter for the life of the world.

We can’t always predict the life our work will have, or the difference it will make. The philologist struggling to deci-pher a cuneiform tablet may look, in one generation, like someone whose work is far removed from the needs of the pres-ent. But in another generation, that same scholar may be honored as the one who made it possible for us to read The Epic of Gilgamesh, and so come to understand the dilemmas of our shared humanity a little better. It is a leap of faith to dedicate ourselves to the slow, painstaking work of learning. It is a wager that nothing human beings have discovered, wondered at, created, loved, studied, translated, puzzled or prayed over is irrelevant to the life of the world.

An MTS student may complete two units of field education for no other reason than he thinks he might be a bet-ter teacher and scholar of religion if he spends some time working in a living religious community. An MDiv student may take more than the three required

The following is an excerpt of the faculty address, which Stephanie Paulsell, Houghton Professor of the Practice of Ministry Studies, delivered during the May 26 Multireligious Service of Thanksgiving for the Class of 2010.

What a great pleasure it is to greet all of you and to receive with you the offer-

ings of our graduates in music, in silence, and in words. A life spent in school is a privileged life, full of so many good things. We sit around tables with students like these, with our books and our lives open, and, when things are going well, our hearts and minds open, too. I do not take my good fortune for granted. This is a special class, this Class of 2010. They have breathed in what we had to offer and exhaled it transformed, having passed through their bodies, their histories, their questions, their hopes. Time and again, they showed us there is more to what we call “theological education” and “religious studies” and “learned ministry” than we had yet imagined. It means a great deal to me to be asked to speak to them on the eve of their Commencement.

When I thought about what offering I would like to set down next to the wis-dom our graduates have offered from the religious and philosophical traditions they cherish, I found myself returning, again and again, to a story from Dante’s Inferno. I want you to know that I tried to find a different direction for this talk, because a poem about hell does not seem very Com-mencement-friendly. But I kept being drawn back to Dante, and I hope he will help me do what I most want to do: honor the work of our graduates, in all the forms it has taken during their years here, and to remind them, as they prepare to leave us, how very much that work matters.

Dante’s poem, of course, is about wak-ing up one day to find oneself utterly lost and having to travel through every circle of hell before one can see the stars again. Way down in the eighth pouch of the eighth circle, Dante encounters the most famous traveler of all: the great Ulysses, run to ground among the fraudulent

The Painstaking Work of Learning

Stephanie Paulsell delivers the faculty address to the Class of 2010 in the Memorial Church on May 26.

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Clockwise from top left, Elizabeth Paxton, MDiv ’10, entering the Memorial Church; the HDS Commencement Choir sings “Gonna Build a Mountain”; view from the balcony during the Multireligious Service of Thanksgiving; Naomi Saks, MDiv ’10, gives a thumbs-up to HDS faculty, who lined the steps of Memorial Church to applaud the new graduates; Taylor Petrey, ThD ’10, offers a benediction from the tradition of Latter-day Saints; Emma Crossen, MDiv ’10, Jocelyn Gardner, MDiv ’10, Lindsey Levenson, MDiv ’10, and Scott Dickison, MDiv ’10, sing “Bring Morning Star Arising.”

Photographs by Justin Knight

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Zolisa Shokane, MTS ’10, receives her diploma; Matthew Mitchell, MTS ’10, with family; Nathan Willard, MDiv ’10, with his daughter; Austin Campbell, MTS ’10, poses in front of Andover Hall with his new diploma; Ju Hee Koh, MDiv ’10, Hannah An, MTS ’10, and Jee Hei Park, MDiv ’10; Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, MDiv ’10, gets a kiss after the ceremony; David Mozina, ThD ’10, with Professor Kimberley Patton; David Ceraquas, MTS ’10, at the Com-mencement Luncheon; left, HDS staff members assist Kieran Conroy, MDiv ’10, and Lauren Clark, MTS ’10; Jason Garrett, MDiv ’10, and Marcus McCullough, MDiv ’10, celebrate during the Diploma Awarding Ceremony; with the customary halo on her mortarboard, Molly Housh, MDiv ’10, processes into the Memorial Church.

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realities should be all too familiar. We have felt them in ourselves, in our

own experiences of failure, doubt, and pain, and we have experienced them with each other. But we have also encountered them at our field education sites around the city, at the prisons and homeless shelters we have visited or served, or on field trips or spon-sored travel to foreign lands. We have read about them in books, studied them in our classes, discussed them in section meetings or impromptu debates in the Rockefeller Café, or perhaps over a beer and some over-cooked but temptingly inexpensive chicken wings at the Queen’s Head.

And these encounters have bred creation. We have written about them in aca-

demic essays, pieces of inspired journal-ism, sermons, songs, poetry, short stories, or even novels. Indeed, in our time here, if we have made the most of it, the harsh realities that color our existence should be as strangely familiar as first-year MDiv-required class protests.

But so should their antitheses, their foils, and, we hope, even their remedies—those things that are every bit as present in our world, but that may not be as visible, whose stories are not always as easy to tell. Things like perspective, hope, inclusivity, knowledge, friendship, community, and yes, even at a place like Harvard, humility. We have encountered these, too, in ways and in people we never could have expect-ed in any “statement of purpose.”

As ministers or teachers or practitio-ners or students of matters of faith, of the-ology, of spiritual practice, of the human condition, of divinity and all that it means or does not mean, it is our duty—and we hope even our delight—to confront those realities that continue to challenge us as a society and as individuals, and to distribute freely all these many gifts we have been given by this place during these few years, but, more importantly, by one another. These are the things we came here to get, to do, and to be, even if we did not know it at the time.

To the Harvard Divinity School Class of 2010, even if they do not reflect where we thought we were going, may these gifts, these offerings to the world, be our final words, our concluding thoughts. For they are the road that we shared with each other, and have taken here, to the beginning.

here today that these questions do not have the same effect in the past tense.

But when I read back over those words of mine, I was struck most by my unabashed certainty—by the assurance in my written voice and the resoluteness of my argument. At the time, going to Har-vard Divinity School seemed like a per-fectly natural progression based on my life and work to that point—the most practical means to the inevitable end that awaited me upon graduation. The road ahead seemed a well-paved one, the conclusion foregone. I was going to be a college pro-fessor of religious ethics and a dedicated member of a nice church somewhere, per-haps even teaching Sunday school.

Well, I am leaving this place a Baptist minister on my way to Texas. So there’s that for you.

How many of us came here with sets of goals and expectations, only to have them put in question and eventually wrestled away from us? Or, even more likely, to have them rendered somehow less grand, less vital, less than what we thought them to be? But how many of us then discovered new ones, or, as it felt at the time, had them discover us? And for how many of us did these new goals and expectations far exceed the former ones?

These sorts of stories of change and discovery are all too common here. And that’s a good thing. It means we learned something about ourselves, about our world and what it needs, and what we think we can offer. You have changed, all of you. I know, because I was there changing with you. Or maybe, we were all changing together.

Many of us came to HDS because we felt it reflected something like the “real world”: people from around the world studying their own religions and the reli-gions of others, in the same classrooms and around the same tables. Well, friends, I do not know of too many places in the “real world” that have their own labyrinth. No, HDS is not like the real world, and it does not claim to be, but it is our hope that it has prepared us for such a place.

For even if we somehow managed to make it to HDS without experiencing firsthand the unfortunate realities of our human condition, if the School has done its job and we have done ours, then these

staff, alumni, family, friends, and my fel-low graduates, welcome to this day when the space between beginning and end, past and future, what has happened and what is still to come, at least for a few moments, seems to disappear.

As absurd and ill-informed as this sort of long-range educational planning may seem to many of us now, when I think back to the beginning—and I invite you to do the same, whether it was two years ago, three, or even more—I remember that it did not stop many of us, myself included, from trying. We arrived, sure of ourselves, of who we were, where we had been, what we stood for, and what we wanted to do next. A few of us even came here sure of what we believed.

Do you remember those days? If you are like me, they didn’t last too long. And I thank God for that.

During the writ-ing of this speech, in search of inspiration and probably giving in to a growing impulse toward nostalgia, I decided to subject myself to the pain and embarrassment of reading my entrance essay, or “statement of purpose,” for HDS. Have you, too, tried this? If you have not, it is probably for the best that you will now have to wait until after you have your diploma safely in hand, or you might have asked yourself again those all-too-familiar questions: “Am I really supposed to be here?” “Did the admissions committee make a mistake?” Good for those of us gathered

Scott Dickison, MDiv ’10, was the student speaker at the HDS Diploma Awarding Cer-emony on the afternoon of May 27, 2010.

In Professor Peter Gomes’s famous—or perhaps infamous—preaching class,

we were encouraged when constructing our sermons to write our last words, or concluding thoughts, first. The rationale, we were told, was that if we did not know where we were going, then any road was sure to take us there. But what may very well be sound advice for crafting a ser-mon, I am sorry to report, is quite impos-sible for crafting an education: perhaps especially at a divinity school, and perhaps even more so at a place like HDS.

Dean Graham, distinguished faculty,

Stories of Change and Discovery

Scott Dickison, MDiv ’10, addresses his fellow graduates during the Diploma Awarding Ceremony in the Memorial Church.

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When Kyle Dietrich, MTS ’09, cofound-ed the nonprofit organization Peace

in Focus in 2007 with his friend and busi-ness partner, Kate Fedosova, it was, he confesses, not the best time to start a non-profit. Neither he nor Fedosova had much money of their own to invest. They were working with a small fiscal year budget, and still are. They employ mostly part-time staff and volunteers, and they struggle with raising money. There is seemingly one challenge after another, yet, even in the face of so much adversity, Dietrich is driven to helping those facing crisis, espe-cially youth, to cope with the often trau-matic events unfolding before them.

“For me, doing the work I do is about purpose,” Dietrich says. “It’s bringing people closer together; it’s giving them a new way of looking at things.”

At its core, Peace in Focus uses pho-tography and grassroots media tools to train youth from underserved and post-conflict communities to be creative peace builders and leaders. After launching pro-grams in Boston and in Burundi, Africa, in 2008, the organization again expand-ed, moving into Liberia in 2009. Peace in Focus works by partnering with local

organizations—either in peace-building or in youth development—and helps to design a program curriculum with those groups. The programs, however, are meant to be locally run, so Peace in Focus supplies cameras and computers, pro-vides technical support, and assists local organizers and leaders in raising money to keep the programs going.

In March 2010, Dietrich, who also has a dual degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, arrived in Haiti for a job with Mercy Corps, a large relief and development organization working in about 40 countries. His role is to oversee and implement a series of psy-chosocial youth programs.

“A lot of this is looking at children and youth affected by the earthquake and examining how we can help within the context of a country that has very limited mental health resources,” he explained. “Social services are broken, so we are trying to find ways to provide important emotional and social support—not just providing the material needs of young people, but examining developmentally what they need after going through this.”

When people come into crisis—

whether it is conflict or natural disaster—their material needs are prioritized, Diet-rich says, but what is often neglected are emotional and social needs.

As a result, Mercy Corps and Dietrich are running a pro-gram called Comfort for Kids, in which they train caregivers working with young people how to better support youth facing crisis. They are also conducting a series of art therapy projects, sports-based psycho-social youth programs, and other life skills and vocational training.

Much of their work is focused on adults, because it maximizes the impact of their efforts.

“By training one religious leader, that person has the ability to reach out to thousands of people,” he says. “Having gone through divinity school at HDS, I have the ability to look at religion as a resource within this sort of crisis and to have it become an opportunity for reach-ing out to people and getting the right information to this big audience.”

For Dietrich, it is also critical to put young people in a position of leadership at a time when they are not simply ben-eficiaries of a program, but are treated and addressed as agents of change. It is important, he says, to engage them in a process of reimagination and creative thinking and problem-solving.

Peace in Focus works with primar-ily 11- to 16-year-olds and, according to Dietrich, the youth understand that the program is about peace and about social change, but they do not immediately understand how the two relate. So, with-in the program, young people go through a process where the leaders engage them in intensive workshops.

“For a two-week workshop, the first week is about them. It’s about their iden-tity; it’s about using this new tool as a way to reflect who they are,” says Dietrich. “They do a community mapping project, where they will go into the community and take pictures—both of things they

love and of things they want to change.” Through this project, youth begin to

understand the lines of tension in the community and to use photography as a visual resource to help them understand the social issues within their community.

“The biggest thing is to enable young people to see themselves as leaders,” he says. “They don’t have to be adults to change something, and they need to real-ize that there are many ways of sharpen-ing their voices.”

In the spring 2010 semester, photogra-phy from some of the youth participating in Peace in Focus was displayed in HDS’s Rockefeller Hall lounge. In February 2010, Peace in Focus held a celebration for a spring exhibition at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston, where a few hundred people showed up to view the photography of young people in Burundi, Boston, and Liberia.

“The pride that these young people had in seeing others interact with their work and asking questions was incred-ible,” says Dietrich.

With the work he is doing with Mercy Corps and with Peace in Focus, Dietrich is putting young people in positions where they are able to engage with problems directly, which he says creates a pattern change—one in which young people can be leaders in the present.

“You use the arts almost like a thera-peutic tool for them, to begin to under-stand who they are, but then you take it to the next level and use it as a tool for advocacy and messaging and shift the narrative away from one of division or unrest or distrust and toward one of soli-darity and hope.”

Toward Solidarity and Hope

By Jonathan Beasley

Peace in Focus cofounders Kyle Dietrich, MTS ’09, far right, and Kate Fedosova, far left, with youth leaders in Burundi in 2008.

Princess, age 14, near a seaside village during a Peace in Focus workshop in Monrovia, Liberia.

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academic affairs and the A. H. Shatford Pro-fessor of New Testament and Preaching.

From 1983 to 1987, she was an assistant profes-sor of New Tes-tament at Eden Theological Semi-nary, a United Church of Christ seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.

Her research focuses on the Gospel of John, the Bible and preaching, and the history of biblical interpretation. She has written, edited, or co-edited a number of books and articles, including, most recently, Theological Bible Commentary (Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) and Preaching the Revised Common Lection-ary: A Guide (Abingdon Press, 2007).

The Rev. Canon Scott Byron

Hayashi was elect-ed May 22 as the 11th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah, pending required consents from a majority of bishops with juris-diction and stand-

ing committees of the Episcopal Church. Hayashi, 56, canon to the ordinary in

the Diocese of Chicago since 2005, was elected on the second ballot out of a field of three nominees. Pending a successful consent process, Hayashi would succeed the Right Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish, 70, who was elected in 1996 and a year ago announced her decision to retire.

During nearly 25 years of ordained

Gail R. O’Day, a respected New Testa-ment scholar and senior associate

dean at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, has been named dean of the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. She will become dean and pro-fessor of New Testament and preaching on August 1, 2010.

A graduate of Brown University, O’Day earned a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1979 and then a doctorate in New Testa-ment from Emory. She is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.

O’Day joined the Candler School fac-ulty as an assistant professor of biblical preaching in 1987. She was most recently the senior associate dean of faculty and

Utah Diocese Elects Alumnus Scott Hayashi as Bishop

O’Day Named Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity

ministry, Hayashi has served inner-city, suburban, and rural congregations in California, Utah, and Washington. He was born in Tacoma, Washington, and received a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Washington in 1977. He holds a master of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School (1981), and a Certificate of Theology from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California (1984).

“It is clear from the history of the Episcopal Church in Utah that for 140 years Episcopalians have been bringing this message to the people of the Beehive State,” he said in statements posted on the Utah diocese’s website.

The consecration is expected to take place November 6, 2010. The bishop will be formally seated on November 7 at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Salt Lake City.

Cynthia Briggs Kittredge assumed the responsibilities of academic dean at

Seminary of the Southwest on June 1. The Ernest J. Villavaso, Jr. Professor of New Testament at the seminary, she holds three degrees from Harvard Divinity School: MDiv ’84, ThM ’89, and ThD ’96.

A priest in the Episcopal Church, Kittredge is canonically resident in the Diocese of Texas and serves on the staff at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in

Princeton legal philosopher and con-stitutional scholar Robert George,

MTS ’81, JD ’81, has been awarded the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, which recognizes outstanding achieve-ment in the field of human rights.

Marek Zubik, deputy ombudsman in the Office of the Commissioner for Civil Rights Protection and a law professor at the University of Warsaw, bestowed the medal in a ceremony May 4 at the Uni-

Alumna Receives New Post at Seminary of the Southwest

Robert George Honored With Human Rights Medal

versity of Warsaw, after which George delivered the 2010 Petrazycki Lecture in legal philosophy, titled, “Natural Law, God, and Human Dignity.”

At Princeton, George is the McCor-mick Professor of Jurisprudence, a professor of politics, and the director of the James Madison Program in Ameri-can Ideals and Insti-tutions. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Embryo: A Defense of Human

Life, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Reli-gion and Morality in Crisis, In Defense of Natural Law, and Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality.

He has served as a presidential appoin-tee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and as a member of the Presi-dent’s Council on Bioethics. He currently serves on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Austin. She also is a member of the steering group for Theological Education in the Anglican Commu-nion. Earlier this year, Kittredge was appointed dean of com-munity life at the seminary.

Robert George, MTS ’81, with Polish Deputy Ombudsman of the Office of the Commissioner for Civil Rights Protection Marek Zubik

Alumni News Highlights

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Whenever he introduces himself, Mar-cus Briggs-Cloud, MTS ’10, does

so in Maskoke, a melodic language now spoken by only a few thousand people. Language has been a key to the Florida native’s understanding of his cultural identity and of his ancestors’ fractured his-tory. Using his MTS degree, Briggs-Cloud hopes to preserve his native language and build a bridge of knowledge and support for the Maskoke Nation.

For his undergraduate education, the son of the Wind Clan people and grand-son of the Bird Clan people chose the University of Oklahoma, partly because of its indigenous studies program, but also to explore the genealogical and cultural con-nections to the descendants of his ances-tors who had been displaced by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

deeply held commitments and faith in public life. One hopes, of course, that transformative things will happen because people are acting from a place of love. But in the realpolitik of contemporary life, you also have to figure out what it means when we disagree, especially vehemently, with each other. Does that mean discours-es and relationships rupture, or do we find vocabularies and strategies that open up other possibilities? This is an issue that comes up constantly in my work around LGBT rights, where the tendency is for each side to approach the other with a mixture of condemnation and mockery.

The issue of how communities respond to crisis is related but also dis-tinct. I am interested in the methodol-ogy side of the question (literally, what protocols kick in when a crisis occurs), and in the spiritual side of the question (how people make meaning of crises and suffering and how they can be supported best through these times).

I have been able to look at this ques-tion through my coursework, including counseling classes at HDS and a class in

Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, who graduated from HDS on May 27 with a master of divin-ity degree, is a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and the director of The Progressive Project, a grassroots group that develops innovations in community organizing, focusing on LGBT rights and electoral politics. She is seeking ordi-nation in the United Church of Christ and will spend the summer completing a chaplaincy internship in Providence, Rhode Island. Below, Jasmine describes her experience at HDS and what’s next after graduation (hint: a lot).

Two themes—one of expressing values in public life and another of respond-

ing to crisis—have run through a lot of my coursework and field education. Regarding the former, what I mean is how people talk about and act upon their

‘Ministry Was the Missing Piece’

When the Past Is Present

By Colleen Walsh

“I wanted to see if the language and the ceremonial continuity was there from what was familiar to me, what we had maintained in Florida, even though we had been separated for 170 years.”

In Oklahoma, Briggs-Cloud also found something else, a young urban Indian population sadly out of touch with its heri-tage. “They don’t know where they come from,” he said. “None of them are speak-ers of their language, and they are mostly disconnected from their communities.”

He stayed at the University of Okla-homa after graduation, teaching Maskoke language and philosophy in the university’s anthropology department, counseling high school Indian youth, and working with organizations that support indigenous communities. His hope was to mobilize grassroots projects around community

engagement—but there were obstacles.“The irony is that my own people

would listen to an anthropologist from Harvard before they would listen to our own elders,” he explained. “The only thing for me to do was to get that credential, so I applied to only one school.”

HDS has allowed him to “really do what I wanted to do,” he said: “liberation theol-ogy, decolonization, gender theory—those kinds of areas that I am interested in.”

Building on his Harvard work, Briggs-Cloud developed a curriculum for the course he plans to teach back in Okla-homa at the College of the Muscogee Nation. It involves a critical analysis of theories on decolonization, gender, politics, and epistemology, as well as the theology and philosophy of the Maskoke people. Instrumental to the course will be studying language.

“The decolonization of the mind for indigenous peoples begins with language acquisition,” he said. “All of our world-views are encompassed in our respective languages.”

He now hopes to pursue a PhD closer

to home in Oklahoma, where he now resides. Life on the East Coast has taken him too far away from his community and his tribal duties, he said, which include leading ceremonial dances and songs.

“My ceremonial ground is there,” he said. “That’s where my priorities are.”

This excerpt is reprinted with permis-sion from the Harvard Gazette. Read the full article at news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/05/when-the-past-is-present.

disaster response at the Harvard School of Public Health. It has also come up in my field education, including a chaplaincy internship at Brigham and Women’s Hos-pital in Boston. From a pastoral perspec-tive, this is the work I am really drawn to.

Having the flexibility to take courses at Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard School of Public Health has been one of the high points of my academic experi-ence at HDS. The ministry I am drawn to involves collaboration across sectors, and it has been enormously helpful to spend time studying alongside people in these sectors.

I have been continually and wonderfully surprised by the extent to which HDS sup-ports students in crafting a course of study that focuses on the questions at the heart of our ministry—whether this comes in the form of cross-registering, independent study class, student-initiated field educa-tion, or the topic for the senior paper.

This summer, I’ll be doing a Clinical Pastoral Education unit at Hasbro Chil-dren’s Hospital in Providence. Through The Progressive Project, I’ll also be helping to organize a summer series I’m really excited

about called Back-yard Band/With that combines silent film and live music.

Starting in August, I’ll be able to focus on writing full-time, thanks to the National Endow-ment for the Arts fellowship. I’ll also be working part-time as a chaplain with Echoing Green, a founda-tion that provides fellowships to people launching social change initiatives. My wife and I will be moving back down to North Carolina, my home state, this fall and launching a LGBT rights campaign down there. In the coming year, I’ll also be con-tinuing to move forward with the ordina-tion process in the United Church of Christ. There will be a few moving pieces, but it all feels like part of my ministry.

Read the full interview at www.hds.harvard.edu/news/article_archive.

Marcus Briggs-Cloud

Jasmine Beach-Ferrara

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Dear Alumni and Friends,

Imagine a puzzle with more than 6,000 pieces or, more dramatically, a puzzle with 330,000 pieces. The puzzle pieces are all very different, yet they work together to form a whole.

HDS has more than 6,000 alumni, and the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) is more than 330,000 mem-bers strong. As the staff director of the alumni relations program at HDS, I have the pleasure of trying to connect as many alumni as possible with the School and the University. I plan to establish and nurture these connec-tions in three key ways:

• Supporting Leadership: In partnership with the HDS Alumni/ae Council, our elected alumni leaders, including Council president Ruth Purtilo (MTS ’75, PhD ’79), we hope to expand volunteer and leadership opportunities at HDS and in the HAA, as well as to nominate worthy candidates for alumni awards.

• Building the Network: Regardless of geographic location, alumni can be active members of our community, via local HDS gatherings in some cities across the country and via our popular online communities, including our Facebook fan page and alumni group on LinkedIn. Additionally, the numerous HAA Clubs and Shared Interest Groups offer myriad ways for HDS graduates to become involved with the larger Harvard alumni network.

• Encouraging Philanthropy: A primary means for our alumni to help today’s HDS students and faculty is through gifts to The HDS Fund. We wish to expand alumni participation in the Fund in the years ahead; alumni support ensures that our commitment to financial aid remains strong.

Please visit our online home at www.hds.harvard.edu/alumni and consider how you might like to get involved with HDS today. I look forward to meeting you soon.

Sincerely,

Michael E. Goetz Associate Director of Development, Alumni Relations and Annual Giving

A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-First Centuryby John A. Buehrens (MDiv ’73) and Rebecca Ann Parker Beacon Press

The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theologyby Forrest Church (MDiv ’74, PhD ’78) Beacon Press

Embracing the Call to Spiritual Depth: Gifts for Contemplative Livingby Tilden Edwards (BD ’61) Paulist Press

Shalom/Salaam/Peace: A Liberation Theology of Hope in Israel/Palestineby Constance A. Hammond (MDiv ’85) Equinox Publishing

Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haitiby Erica Caple James (MTS ’95) University of California Press

In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacredby Sam Keen (STB ’56, ThM ’58) Harmony Books/Random House

City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemalaby Kevin Lewis O’Neill (MTS ’02) University of California Press

Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animalsby Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce (MTS ’89) University of Chicago Press

The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theologyedited by Charles Taliaferro (MTS ’79 ) and Chad Meister Cambridge University Press

The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreauby Malcolm Clemens Young (MDiv ’94, ThD ’04) Mercer University Press

Recent Alumni Books

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Calendar

August 31

5 pm

Convocation

An Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt DefamiliarizePeter Machinist

HDS Campus Green

May 27

Commencement

September 1

First Day of Fall Term Classes

date

Time

Event DescriptionLocation

October 20

5:15 pm

Studying Our Religions in the Particular and Meaning Something by ItThe inaugural address by CSWR director Francis X.

Clooney, S.J.

Sperry Room, Andover Hall

date

Time

Event DescriptionLocation

For the most up-to-date information on all Harvard Divinity School events, please check the Public Events Calendar at www.hds.harvard.edu.

November 30

6–7 pm

Seasons of LightAndover Chapel

November 2–4

Diversity and Explorations ProgramHarvard Divinity School Campus

November 4

5:15 pm

Ingersoll Lecture

Memory Eternal: The Presence of the Dead in Christian PietyAl Raboteau

Sperry Room, Andover Hall

September 2

5:15–7 pm

God and the Study of ReligionsThe CSWR hosts a faculty panel discussion for the open-

ing week of classes.

Sperry Room, Andover Hall