We’ve made it! Summer is finally here. As we leave the hectic and hurried pace of the most recent academic year behind, we look forward to slower and longer days, warmer weather, and, of course, summer reading lists!
Below, members of the HDS community shared their books to read this summer—for work and for pleasure.
Mary Kiesling, associate director of career services
I have three books on my reading list this summer. Two are connected to summer travel plans and one is just for fun.
First on the list is Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sarah Moss. It is a non-fiction account of the experiences of a British professor who moves her family to Iceland for a year. I will be in Iceland for the summer solstice and thought this would be a good primer.
My next summer trip is to Minnesota in July. The friend I am visiting said she read The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson and cried and cried. It is set in Minnesota and centers around several generations of Dakhóta women from 1862 to 2002. These women have carefully preserved and passed down seeds, which have endured despite the devastating loss of their culture and traditions through violence.
The third book is Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. It is the story of a Chinese American family living in a small town in Ohio in the 1970s and how they navigate grief and relationships. I am trying hard to read more books and spend less time streaming, and good stories are key!
Maria Dueñas Lopez, MTS candidate, Harvard Divinity School Student Association Social Justice Chair
This summer I am reading Class, Politics, and Popular Religion in Mexico and Central America. This book analyzes how religious communities influence political and economic institutions in Mexico and Central America. It argues that popular religion remains influential as a mobilizing force for grassroots movements and realizing political change.
I am reading this book as I spend my summer working with Aúna in Mexico City. Aúna is an organization that supports women running for office through community organizing efforts across Mexico. I’m excited to read about lessons from previous movements so I can apply them to my work in real time. My objective is to inform candidates of the importance of religious literacy for their campaigns and ensure effective representation. Shout out to the Religion in Public Life Program for making this summer opportunity possible!
Terrence L. Johnson, MDiv ’00, Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies
My summer reading is always dictated by the demands of being a husband and father. And while it’s difficult to navigate family life and professional commitments, even during the summer, I would not change my life for anything. With that said, my summer reading list is always overly ambitious but informed by a desire to read novels and books outside my field.
Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book is at the top of my list. The novel pieces together three narrative plots to paint a picture of the multifaceted responses to life’s trials, triumphs, and joys. I am anxious to learn from Mott’s storytelling techniques.
Farah Jasmine Griffin’s In Search of a Beautiful Freedom is a collection of essays by a remarkable scholar and talented essayist. She adds clarity to how art and literature convey untold and sometimes ignored beauty in modern and contemporary African American writings, music, film, and artwork. Her writing is subtle, poignant, and always clear—what I yearn to accomplish in my own work.
I am always looking for ways to use history to inform my own teaching and scholarship in ethics and religion. Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake will do that and much more. The book explores the story of an enslaved woman named Rose who etches her family’s history onto a cotton bag that she would give to her daughter Ashley on the eve of her daughter’s sale to another plantation. I look forward to studying how Miles expands our sense of the archive as she weaves together this fascinating story of a woman’s desire to pass along her history and love during a horrific period in the United States.
A few other books on my list include: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, (a story about immigration and family); Elizabeth Alexander’s The Trayvon Generation (an essay on race, violence, the sacred, and hope); Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (explores existence within Black life); Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Reconsidering Reparations (offers new methodological approaches to understanding debates on reparations); and Vincent Wimbush’s Black Flesh Matters: Essays on Runagate Interpretation (a compilation of essays on hermeneutics, Christianity, race, and scripture).
The Rev. J Sylvan, MDiv ’20, incoming senior minister at the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City, creator of Beloved King: A Queer Bible Musical
This summer I plan to read The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America by Paul B. Moyer and Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend by Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr. Both are biographies of the Public Universal Friend, a latter-Great Awakening American religious leader who, according to them, died from a fever and was reborn as a genderless messenger of God. I'm interested to read the two accounts together, as Pioneer Prophetess was written in the 1960s, and firmly genders the PUF as female (in case you couldn't tell from the book's title), whereas The Public Universal Friend examines the life of the Universal Friend from a more modern lens that explores gender identity.
The PUF not only fascinates me as a nonbinary minister myself, but also because of my growing curiosity around both Great Awakening-era and nineteenth-century American charismatic prophets. As a Unitarian Universalist, I want to compare the PUF's life, mission, and message to Universalist leaders like Hosea Ballou and John Murray, and as someone who's about to head up a church in Salt Lake City, I can't help but see some parallels in the PUF's apocalyptic theology and that of Joseph Smith. If their story moves me, I might write a short theater piece about the PUF. Who can say?
—by Michael Naughton