Convocation for a Bicentennial

Harvard Divinity School begins a celebratory year.

Andover Hall at the Divinity School hosts part of the yearlong bicentennial exhibit <i>Faces of Divinity: Envisioning Inclusion for 200 Years.</i>
Andover Hall at the Divinity School hosts part of the yearlong bicentennial exhibit Faces of Divinity: Envisioning Inclusion for 200 Years.Courtesy of Harvard Divinity School

Seriously and joyfully, Harvard Divinity School (HDS) began the academic year, and celebration of its bicentennial year*, with images and words that looked back with candor and respect and simultaneously propagated enthusiasm for the school’s colorfully bannered mission to “Illuminate. Engage. Serve.”

Tuesday’s events, the first of a wide-ranging year’s worth, began with an afternoon panel discussion introducing Faces of Divinity: Envisioning Inclusion for 200 Years, a 21-station visual and audiovisual “exhibit of landmark themes in the history of HDS” on display within Andover, Divinity, and Rockefeller halls throughout the year. Ann Braude, director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and senior lecturer on American religious history, curated the exhibit, aided by doctoral candidates Christopher Allison, Eva Payne, and Thomas Whittaker; the goal, she has said, was showing how HDS “went from being a basically Unitarian school in 1816 to a multireligious school in the twenty-first century.” (Braude explored one major change at HDS, the admission of women, in “A Shift in the Created Order,” published in the May-June 2006 Harvard Magazine.)

At 5 p.m., a cheerful crowd gathered under a white tent behind Andover Hall for Convocation. Welcomes from dean of the faculty David N. Hempton and Harvard president Drew Faust preceded short readings from Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic texts. In their comments, both dean and president mixed levity with reflection. Hempton, looking ahead to bicentennial events, promised parties as well as outstanding lectures and conferences as “we remember our past, reflect on our role at Harvard and in the wider world today, and look to the opportunities and challenges of our third century.” Faust paused for a moment, in her short speech honoring the school’s evolution into a “community more diverse and dynamic than its founders could every have imagined,” to note: “I’m proud to wear robes that are meant to be those of an early divine of Harvard origin…I’m sure that shocks all those people in their graves.” (The speech incorporated portions of her tribute to the school in this magazine’s current issue.) 

HDS’s twelfth dean, George Rupp, who left Harvard in 1985 to become, successively, president of Rice, Columbia, and the International Rescue Committee, delivered the Convocation Address. Surveying “Challenges for a Third Century,” he began by recalling the

extended period, one that many of us experienced personally, when religion was widely construed in the academy to be a relic: a remnant of the past and therefore an exercise in nostalgia doomed to expire in the near future with the triumph of one variant or another of secular liberalism.

Today, he continued, 

fewer of our colleagues in this and other leading universities are so confident about the imminent demise of religious allegiance and action. Even when the impact of religion may be deemed to be less than positive, even perverse, its pervasive influence cannot be denied. It is therefore all the more apt that we consider carefully the mandate of the Harvard Divinity School for the years, decades, and centuries ahead.

Suiting the opening of the academic year, Rupp offered specific ways to generate energy for the school by focusing on “three core sets of strengths”:

first, the capacity to ground students of all ages in the core traditions of their own communities, including respectful comparisons to other traditions sympathetically understood; second, a commitment not only to the descriptive study of multiple traditions but also to normative appraisals based on comparative assessments of the impact religious convictions have on the broader society; and third, a concern to prepare leaders both for particular religious communities and also for engaging the dimensions of ethics and values in societies around the world and indeed in the emerging global community toward which we aspire.

Amid the bicentennial’s opportunity to celebrate the school’s impressive accomplishments to date, he declared himself confident of its “positive trajectory” in addressing the crucial challenges to come “in the next chapter of this remarkable story.”

Read the Divinity School’s coverage here.

*Harvard traces its origins in 1636, in part, to Puritan dread of leaving “an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust,” and the Hollis professorship of divinity, the oldest endowed professorial chair in North America, was established in 1721. But Harvard Divinity School itself was founded only in 1816, after theological disputes within and without the Harvard community prompted alumni and others to found the nation’s first nonsectarian theological school. A quotation from Dean David N. Hempton, hanging in Andover Hall, states: “Harvard Divinity School promotes a principled approach to religious knowledge and values, which requires the intellectual rigor and openness of quality academic work together with respect for difference and diversity of all kinds.”

Read more articles by Jean Martin

You might also like

American Jewish Life After October 7

Professors Derek Penslar and Noah Feldman reflect on a difficult year

Gary Ruvkun Shares Nobel Prize in Medicine

Harvard Medical School genetics professor honored  

Football: Harvard 28-New Hampshire 23

A solid bounce-back win against a rugged nonconference foe

Most popular

Gary Ruvkun Shares Nobel Prize in Medicine

Harvard Medical School genetics professor honored  

How to Reform Healthcare

104 Harvard thought leaders outline medicine’s unmet needs.

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

Historian Alexander Keyssar on why the unpopular institution has prevailed 

More to explore

Learning the Trees of North America

A monumental new guide to North American species

An Underknown Twentieth Century Realist Artist

Brief life of an American realist artist and critic: 1907-1975

Susan Farbstein on Human Rights Law

Human rights lawyer on law’s ability to promote justice—and shape public understanding