How a chemical engineer found her way to the study of religion and catastrophe
Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, found her way to Harvard Divinity School through, what she calls, an “unusual path.” Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she grew up wanting to be a chemical engineer—a goal she realized after graduating from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. “I liked the work, but there was another side of me that was more interested in the humanities,” she reflects. “I’ve always loved literature and the deep theological conversations I had with my mother, with my family, and I took those for granted.”
While working as a chemical engineer, Rivera volunteered her time to edit a church newsletter that published theological articles. She remembers that she had a lot of questions for the pastor. He casually suggested that she take a class at the local seminary, which sparked even deeper inquiry. “That’s when I moved to the [mainland] U.S. and began my graduate program in theological and religious studies at Drew University,” Rivera shares. “My career shift wasn’t so much a decision to leave engineering as much as a decision to pursue this line of questioning, if you will.”
As a faculty member at HDS, Rivera works at the intersections between the philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race, and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean postcolonial thought. Her current research explores how people and the planet have been affected by colonization, how the destruction of communities and ecosystems are connected, and what religion teaches us regarding modes of thinking about relating to the earth.
Connections Between Coloniality, Catastrophe, and Climate Change
“I’ve always been interested in the intersection of religion and colonialism, the ways in which the legacies of colonialism have shaped and continue to shape how we understand the world, how we approach the world, and also how the world is structured—the long life of structural injustices and social hierarchies that were instituted through colonialism that remain to this day,” says Rivera.
Citing a striking example of coloniality’s pervasive connections to climate change, Rivera explains what happened when colonists from Spain invaded Puerto Rico beginning in the sixteenth century: “How can we even understand colonialism without understanding the forced processes of extraction, of natural resources and of people, that caused devastation to the ecosystem and local communities that continue to this day?” she asks. “For example, when Spain colonized Puerto Rico and enslaved Indigenous and African peoples to extract gold, the local communities were forbidden from fishing. Colonizers then imported fish from Spain, which destroyed local fishing practices.”
This misuse of natural resources and delusion of supremacy has caused centuries of harm—harm that cannot be addressed with the same misguided thinking. Rivera emphasizes that one key lesson from the past is to listen to the communities closest to ecological issues who know the land and their ecosystems at a local level. “The ‘logic of the one’ often gets humans in trouble,” she observes. “Reimagining our approach means thinking about our response to the climate crisis as a tapestry, not a one-size-fits-all fix; we need multiple, adaptable solutions that focus not just on humans, but also on the natural world.”
“Reimagining our approach means thinking about our response to the climate crisis as a tapestry, not a one-size-fits-all fix; we need multiple, adaptable solutions that focus not just on humans, but also on the natural world.”
Understanding Lessons from the Past to Reimagine the Future
Rivera’s areas of study proved to be particularly salient when she was elected to be president of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the largest scholarly society dedicated to the academic study of religion. With more than 8,000 members around the world, the AAR’s mission is to foster excellence in the academic study of religion and enhance the public understanding of religion.
“I’ve been part of the American Academy of Religion since I was a graduate student, and I’ve served in many different capacities,” she notes. “I was elected in 2019 and was in the presidential line with our incoming dean, Marla Frederick, who led the academy before me. The presidential line is a three-year term; we begin as vice president, then move into the president-elect role, and then serve as president. I concluded my service in 2022 after spending the term exploring the theme ‘Religion and Catastrophe’ with colleagues from a range of different perspectives and areas of expertise.”
Rivera has connected her leadership with the AAR back to her work at HDS. She has developed new courses to explore the relationship between coloniality, race, and ecology through the lens of catastrophe. Additionally, she organized the Colloquium on Coloniality, Race, and the Study of Religion hosted by the School in the spring of 2023. Growing student interest in the many intersections of religious studies and public life illustrates why this work needs continued expansion and support. The next generation of scholars is committed to understanding “how we got here and what needs to be done differently to build a less harmful, more justice-oriented future for all.”
When asked about why these topics are important to study through the lens of religion, Rivera observes: “I think there’s a willingness to ask questions about the foundation of our values at HDS. Take climate change, or ecology more broadly, for example. I find the climate language problematic; a lot of the discussion about climate requires that we rethink very foundational categories. We need to rethink what it means to be a human. We’re challenged to rethink our relationship to time, our relationship to place, our relationship to each other. What’s the significance of place in a moment where we see the very ground being eroded?” For Rivera, Harvard Divinity School has the capacity and the community to ask those deep questions that go to the core of our being—and to ask them in a context that is committed to a diverse collective.
In Poetics of the Flesh Mayra Rivera offers poetic reflections on how we understand our carnal relationship to the world, at once spiritual, organic, and social. She connects conversations about corporeality in theology, political theory, and continental philosophy to show the relationship between the ways ancient Christian thinkers and modern Western philosophers conceive of the “body” and “flesh.” By painting a complex picture of bodies, and by developing an account of how the social materializes in flesh, Rivera provides a new way to understand gender and race.
What is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe?
Excerpts from Professor Rivera’s 2022 Presidential Address to the Academy of American Religion. (Listen to the full address.)
We know the seasons are changing. Longer summers and springs in February. We seem to have hundred-year storms every five years. There are slow-moving food shortages, water toxicity, and species extinctions, as well as swift hurricanes, floods, and wildfires....We have heard so many of these lists that we may miss the peculiarity of this way of telling time as a procession of catastrophes. Near us and far, they are piling up so fast that it is difficult to hold on to their uniqueness, to honor their impact on specific communities, landscapes and ways of being, to read their marks in religious practices and the people who study them.
I take these statements seriously as expressions of breaks in the experience of time. Those of us observing the effects of climate change from a relative distance still sense the strangeness of time. “This is an unprecedented event.” We hear it so often that the meaning of the statement erodes.
Still, against all odds, communities continue to recreate links between nature and culture....These voices past and present call us to active listening, and I hope they prompt us all to support works that seek to amplify the voices muffled by our grand discourses. It is tempting to rush past the long histories of catastrophe to focus on present threats. But we need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. A world of our many worlds.
—by Amie Montemurro