Faculty Book

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Jewish Identity with and without Zionism

February 15, 2024
Two new books—HDS Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, completed just before October 7, and Noah Feldman’s To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, written late enough to be updated—provide judicious, sober genealogies of the political and spiritual conflicts that have afflicted Jewish communities in light of their relationships to Israel. Taken together, they invite a more capacious understanding of Jewish lives and Jewish futures in the diaspora.
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Calvin and the Resignification of the World

January 24, 2024
"This book is worth reading for many reasons, but here is another: by sharing her honest curiosity, HDS Professor Michlle Sanchez invites us to attend more closely to the world and our work in it."
New York Times logo

What Can Literature Teach Us About Forgiveness?

August 24, 2023

In his recent book Forgiveness: An Alternate Account, HDS Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts quotes his colleague the theologian Mark Jordan on the Gospels: “They are contradictory stories studded with paradoxical aphorisms. Every theology that is not written as a life told four ways already departs from the most authoritative model of Christian writing." In other words, this multitude of vantage points, even contradictions, are not obstacles to be overcome in order to arrive at a single, distilled truth: There is wisdom in the accumulation and juxtaposition of biblical narratives.

Bay Area Reporter logo

Gotta Have Faith: LGBTQ-Inclusive Spirituality Books

August 1, 2023
Brandon Thomas Crowley, an African-American minister and a lecturer in Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School, provides an systematic approach for dismantling heteronormativity within African American congregations by first outlining a history of trans-and-homophobia in Black congregations.
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Festschrift for Francis X. Clooney, SJ

June 13, 2023

The Catholic Theological Society of America announced that the current president of the CTSA and HDS Professor Francis X. Clooney, SJ, will have a Festschrift published in his honor in late 2023. Co-editors Axel Takacs, ThD '19, and Joseph Kimmel, MDiv '16, have worked with 44 contributors over the past two years on an edited volume in Professor Clooney's honor. It will be published with Wiley-Blackwell and available at the American Academy of Religion annual gathering later in 2023.

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Must We Forgive?

January 12, 2023

When a crime is committed or moral injury occurs, we often respond in one of two ways: we condemn the offense and seek redress, or we declare our willingness to forgive and move on. But a reflexive willingness to pardon—though praised by the Christian tradition—can actually be a problem, argues Matthew Potts, MDiv '08, PhD '13, a professor and pastor at Harvard Divinity School, and author of the new book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.

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A Harvard Class Reimagines Forgiveness

December 13, 2022
A popular course taught by Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts at Harvard Divinity School explores the concept of forgiveness and asks when we're obligated to forgive, what forgiveness should look like, and what conditions should be attached to it.
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Philosophers Tackle a Timely Question: Can Forgiveness and Anger Coexist?

November 24, 2022
In Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts argues that we need a new framework for thinking about forgiveness. For scaffolding, he turns to novels by four writers: Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison. Each of his four chosen texts, he notes, begins and ends in grief.

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