Student Organizations

The 3rd chapter* of a human life has been characterized as a culmination of all that came before, and spiritually, the transition to it as “Falling Upwards.”

If you are approaching or are in the midst of this chapter, we invite you to join us in our new HDS student organization. Based on models of spiritual direction, dialogue, and deep listening, we will share our stories with each other and support each other in moving toward ever greater generativity and integrity, stepping into our new status as wiser elders, while making the most of the blessing of being at HDS preparing for this powerful next chapter.

*Erik and Joan Erikson were founders of lifespan models in social psychology; their theory, which was based on hundreds of case studies, is the foundation for most subsequent models. In their model, growth comes after a crisis or transition period, and in healthy adults development continues through the mid- and late- life crises of Generativity and Integrity, where those who do not become generative become self-absorbed and stagnated, and those who do not reach integrity instead reach despair. Generativity is the longest stage of life for adults, and getting longer; it generally begins in the decade between 45 and 55, though it can begin in the 30s, and increasingly lasts into the 70s and 80s. As such it is arguably the most significant stage for individual adults, comprising prime years, and is often when they can most impact society. In her book, Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot of Harvard Graduate School of Education names the years between 50 and 75 “The Third Chapter,” and advocates for this quarter-century being about “passion, risk, and adventure.” Those of us in or approaching our 3rd chapters as HDS students know whereof the Eriksons and Lawrence-Lightfoot speak—it’s no joke entering a population in which the average age is 28 when you’re almost twice that! Maybe that’s why the spiritual master Richard Rohr has described how, spiritually, the transition to the 3rd chapter may be the greatest transition of human life and feels like “Falling Upwards.”

The Episcopal/Anglican Fellowship serves Episcopal and Anglican students at HDS as a source of community and spiritual formation. We gather weekly for Eucharist in the Anglican tradition on Mondays at 11:30 am in Divinity Chapel where all are welcome.

The HDS Buddhist Community (HBC) is a nondenominational Buddhist group serving the Harvard and Cambridge communities, supporting engagement with Buddhist traditions through spiritual practice as well as academic study. We host weekly meditation gatherings, social functions, and other Buddhism-related Dharma-related events throughout the school year.

HDS Catholics seeks to provide spiritual support and fellowship for the Catholic community at HDS. We also seek to share in the full depth and breadth of interreligious dialogue and interfaith work with all of our fellow students and religious student organizations. Our activities vary based on the interests of our membership. Please come join us!

The goal of Comunidad HDS is to create a community and support network for Latinx students at HDS and to provide cultural enrichment for the larger HDS and Harvard community. We hope to be a source that reflects the celebration of Latinx traditions across Latin America and the diaspora and to bring these to the Harvard community.

The HDS Creative Writing Group sponsors student events related to creative writing focused on poetry, lyric essay, and short fiction. The group also edits and publishes Periphery, a journal of word and image, under the auspices of the CSWR.

This student denominational group meets to create community, develop and sustain relationships, build awareness and understanding, provide opportunities for worship and gathering, offer educational and vocational advocacy, and nurture a circle of connection and creativity for those who identify with the Disciples or United Church of Christ traditions or simply seek an open and welcoming group of students and peers.

HDS Expressions organizes student trips to museums and historic sites to learn more about expressions of faith, worship, and religious tradition in art and architecture. We gather afterward to reflect on what we have seen and learned and experienced. Join us!

HDS Full Immersion is a group for individuals that identify as Baptist and/or would like to learn more about our incredibly diverse denomination. We gather together to worship and praise our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to sharpen and strengthen one another, and to see to it that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We gather together to proclaim our faith and to defend the right for all to practice as they see fit.

The HDS Garden was born in spring 2009 of the collaborative efforts of EcoDiv, the Divinity School’s environmental student group, and the HDS Green Team, a committee of staff from multiple departments committed to decreasing the school’s ecological footprint.

Located on the grounds of the Harvard Divinity School between the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and the Center for the Study of World Religion, the fourteen beds that make up the HDS Garden are intended to foster sustainability as a way of life for the Divinity School community. Our gardeners grow organic vegetables and flowers for use at HDS events and a twice-monthly harvest for Faith Kitchen, a ministry of Faith Lutheran Church in Harvard Square.

The garden team is committed to improving the quality of life within the HDS community, providing healthy food, work opportunities in the outdoors, inspiration towards increased self- and community-sustainability, and a space where people can breathe, rejuvenate, revive. The garden is open to all members of the HDS community, and is a sacred space where anyone can come, pick up a tool, and work with nature to grow together.

The HDS Graduate Christian Fellowship is a Christ-centered community seeking to reflect the universal body of Christ. We represent the broader evangelical tradition with many different denominations and cultures but are united by faith in the triune God, trust in the Bible, and our love for our Savior, Jesus Christ.

We meet weekly to engage in fellowship, study Scripture, encourage one another, and pray together. We also participate in Harvard-wide Graduate Christian Fellowship events.

The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School is a peer-reviewed, student-led journal of religious studies, theology, and ministry. It highlights exemplary work produced by graduate students across a variety of disciplines, and complements these essays with reflections on academia, the study of religion, and the challenges of research. It is at once a forum for rigorous and compelling scholarship and a lens through which to examine and engage the modern university.

The mission of the Harambee at Harvard Divinity is to provide a support network for the Black community at Harvard and to provide cultural enrichment for the campus and the community at large. The organization's objectives are to provide cultural enlightenment for the Harvard Divinity community and greater Harvard community through various events reflecting the struggles, joys, and celebration of Black communities reflected in the diversity of blacks in the Harambee community. We also seek to enhance networking at Harvard and Boston through social activities and general body meetings.

The Harry Potter and the Sacred Text group will meet weekly to discuss the Harry Potter series as if it were sacred. To us, this means 1) the more time we spend with the text, the more gifts it reveals to us, 2) the text itself is not sacred, but by using rigorous spiritual practices, we can grow to treat is as if it were sacred and 3) we meet together to discuss the text in community.

The Jewish Student Association at HDS is a community for students to explore the fullness of Jewish identity. It is a place to learn about and live into our Judaism—in as many ways (and probably more!) as there are people. We invite you to participate in and create these experiences with us.

We get together bi-weekly for discussions and presentations on ideas, themes and thinkers of interest to the group. Topics so far have spanned philosophy, theology and aesthetics. Our being colleagues comes second to our being a group of friends—the atmosphere is fun and relaxed, but in contrast to a typical seminar, invites a more convergent, "think-tank" style of engagement. The group is small but boasts a motley crew of characters. At times we make use of classrooms, at other times we opt for more informal outings.

We are a group of current HDS students committed to overcoming the stigma associated with being low-income, and providing practical resources and support services for low-income students at HDS.

HDS Lutherans seek to grow in understanding both the depth and breadth of Lutheran identity, and to creatively share such understanding with others while treasuring the plural nature of this place. We orient our time together around worship, community, and learning. All are welcome, and we delight in the presence of ecumenical and interfaith friends. We gather weekly, alternating between worship at HDS and theological conversation about issues that matter at a local pub. In the spring, we attend the "Lutherans in Diaspora" conference with Lutheran divinity students from Yale, Union, and Princeton. We are grateful for the leaders and members of University Lutheran Church, Faith Lutheran Church, and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church who provide consistent support for our members.

The purpose of United Methodist Covenant Group is to gather in the Wesleyan tradition of weekly covenant group meetings, as well as providing support and fellowship through other activities.

To provide a community for HDS members who identify as Muslim; to engage the HDS, Harvard, and wider community in social justice, community peace building, and access to a welcoming space.

For pagans and pagan-curious individuals to meet, socialize, exchange views and information, and organize and perform rituals.

This group provides HDS Presbyterians, and those interested in Presbyterianism, a chance to worship, reflect, and socialize with one another.

HDS Prison Education Project (HPEP) partners with Partakers and Boston University's College Behind Bars Program to provide academic mentoring for students pursuing a college degree while incarcerated at MCI Norfolk.

To provide a safe space at HDS for queer folks and gender non-conforming individuals to gather together in fellowship,community, dialogue, and celebration.

The Racial Justice and Healing Initiative seeks to advance racial justice and healing by means of cross-disciplinary dialogue, scholarship, and training designed to address personal and systemic racism through strategies rooted in love. We strive to equip students, scholars, and practitioners of religion to lead racial justice and healing efforts within HDS, Harvard University, Greater Boston, and throughout the world, in order to eradicate racism.

The purpose of this group is to provide a community for the traditionally unaffiliated, the non-religious, the spiritual but not religious, and those who would like to learn about this community, with the goal of coming together to share evolving journeys, practices, world views, and fundamental questions.

The HDS Responsible Organization Initiative (HDS ROI) empowers students to advance responsible practice in businesses and organizations. HDS ROI provides a forum for individuals of all backgrounds to constructively engage the fields of business, entrepreneurship, leadership, and management in their scholarship, professional work, and community organizing. Our goal is to equip students and faculty at HDS and across the Harvard community with the training and peer support necessary to lead positive organizational change. 

The HDS Servicemembers & Veterans Association is a support resource for current and former servicemembers and their families and a connection to the larger military community at Harvard. Its particular focuses are:

• The unique spiritual needs of servicemembers, veterans, and their families; and
• Supporting pluralistic, spiritually diverse chaplaincy in the Department of Defense and Veterans Administration.

To promote the flourishing of all people, HDS Socialists undertake the collaborative labor of reimagining our social, political, and economic orders with the ultimate goal of a fully shared stake in each. We seek the maximum expression of the dignity of every life in the structural arrangements of society, rejecting the idea that present systems are inevitable. We advocate the radical transformation of civic space and discourse toward a democratic, interdependent, and mutually responsive future. This calls on us to enlist our liberationist religious and spiritual traditions and hold our communities accountable to the furthest expressions of human worth. We coordinate and stand in solidarity with organizations representing people whom capitalism most imperils. With them as our moral compass and guide, we organize, educate, agitate, disrupt, build, and heal.

The HDS Student Association, formerly SAEC, contributes the voice of students to the administrative and policy-making recommendations of the School. Through the work of the elected student officers and with the approval of the Dean, student representatives are assigned to HDS committees. The HDS Student Association provides opportunities for conversation among students, faculty, and staff through roundtable discussions and town hall meetings.

The Student Symposium for Decolonial Scholarship at Harvard Divinity School (SSDS @ HDS) is a critical space dedicated to the writers, artists, poets, and theorists of color whose works have inspired cultures of revolution and social reform. At its weekly meetings, SSDS engages texts of diverse media forms in order to explore and appreciate the expressed realities and pronounced truths of thinkers who are representative of communities of color and other oppressed minority identities. SSDS aims to assert the seat of scholars of color at the table of general academic discourse. In its broader scope, SSDS seeks to facilitate a culture of accountability on Harvard campus, whereby all students are expected to familiarize themselves with otherwise marginal, decolonial scholarship.

HDS Students Uniting Spirituality and Health (SUSH) seeks to create a space for Harvard students of all disciplines to learn and develop the skills, vocabulary, and confidence to contribute to, and advocate for, a broader definition of "care" - relating to our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves. SUSH is interested in the unique perspectives that faith, spiritual, and moral voices can bring to the healthcare conversation while building collaboration between academics, researchers, and practitioners. Through events, peer support, training, faculty mentoring, and co-facilitated research, we hope to expand the healthcare-centered progress achieved at Harvard University and beyond.

We are a reading group with a lecture series led by graduate students from Harvard Divinity School. Our meetings explore the constellation of esoteric themes, which are manifest in multiple religious, scientific and philosophic traditions. We seek to facilitate religious pluralism by encouraging a dialogue with a multiplicity of eclectic, and diverse views of the world. All are welcome to our meetings. We look forward to learning from you!

The HUUMS Covenant (ratified by the membership on December 6, 2013) reads: “We, the members of HUUMS, covenant to work together to create a more loving and just world around us. Grounded in the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism, we covenant to welcome difference among each other, work patiently through challenges that face us, support each other in heartache, share in each other’s joy, and comfort each other in ambiguity. May we strive to extend these hallmarks of our membership to the larger HDS community and the world at large. Let our faith be expressed through our actions as well as our words.”

As a student group, HUUMS engages in regular weekly, student-led worship services, organizes community service projects, hosts social events and retreats, and gives historical UU walking tours to coming of age groups visiting the Boston area. We are an active and vibrant student organization, and we welcome everyone who is interested to contact us to learn more!

To create a safe space in which self-identifying womxn of color can network and cultivate a spiritual community. Activities will include but shall not be limited to: monthly meetings, creative excursions, film screenings, and gatherings with women of color faculty.

A think tank of spiritually and visionary-minded artists, writers, tech creatives, activists, intellectuals, and scientists from all Harvard schools, MIT and the Boston arts community who create work and conversations which address the contemporary situation.