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Zen Mind, Vegetal Mind

April 3, 2024
"As a Zen Buddhist, I regard these questions not simply as theoretical issues to be determined by doctrine but as lived inquiries illuminated through practice. I have long felt a profound kinship with plants, one that first called me to a decade-long career in environmental policy and, most recently, into graduate work at Harvard Divinity School," writes MDiv candidate Rachael Petersen.
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The Great Salt Lake is drying up. Can it be saved?

January 23, 2024
"When you look at the state of saline lakes around the world the percentage of what lakes have survived is zero, zero. So, we have a monumental task before us," said Terry Tempest Williams, HDS writer-in-residence.
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The Observer: What would you be willing to sacrifice?

November 15, 2023
Workshop leader, York, Maine, resident Madeline Bugeau-Heartt, a graduate student at the Harvard Divinity School, has a knack for asking questions that encourage people to reflect. She also has skills that foster people’s sharing of their insights with one another.
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Her Antidote for 'Climate Grief' and a Shrinking Great Salt Lake? Don't Look Away

October 8, 2023
"What used to be considered a narrow lens environmental focus is now being seen as a broader lens, where all of our identities are being held. And therefore, it concerns all of us. I actually feel encouraged by religious engagement. Whether it's Muslim, whether it's Christian churches, whether it's pagans, whether it's Buddhists. We're seeing engagement all around in an interdenominational embrace of concern," said HDS Writer-in-Residence Terry Tempest Williams.
Emergence magazine logo

Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet

June 8, 2023
David Abram, Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at the Center for the Study of World Religions, conjures the impossible movements of Alaskan salmon, sandhill cranes, and monarch butterflies on their annual migrations, marveling at the reciprocal interactions that guide these creatures across the wider body of the Earth.
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Turning Debris into Haute Couture

May 2, 2023
Gosia Sklodowska, associate director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, modeled a skirt of plastic and bubble wrap during the "Marine Debris Fashion Show" at Harvard's 2023 Arts First Festival. Her outfit was created by HDS student Ellen Vaillancourt, who collected materials beachcombing in Revere and Winthrop.
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Turning Climate Crisis Stories into Narrative of the Future, Changed but Still Beautiful

April 17, 2023
“We don’t know how to get there, but we know to take the next step and the next step,”  writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said during HDS's Climate Justice Week, quoting E.L. Doctorow’s description of writing as an apt analogy: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Anna Del Castillo, MDiv ’21, climate researcher at HDS's Religion and Public Life/ Courtesy photo

With Climate Justice Week, Anna Del Castillo, MDiv ’21, Brings Hope Into Grief

April 4, 2023

“I remember after a busy day of DivEx programming, I sat on the steps of Swartz Hall, feeling the sun on skin and just hearing this whisper from the Divine saying, ‘You belong here; here is a place that you will grow and get to know me better.’ And so I was just like, ‘Okay. I’m applying to Harvard Divinity School. This will be a place that will further my aspirations to do healing justice work.'”

As the daughter of a United Methodist preacher and Peruvian-Bolivian immigrant, Anna Del Castillo, MDiv ’21, grew up in a cultural fusion in Mississippi. Her spiritually rich upbringing, she says, set her trajectory toward continued change and activism.... Read more about With Climate Justice Week, Anna Del Castillo, MDiv ’21, Brings Hope Into Grief

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I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake

March 25, 2023
"I have known Great Salt Lake in flood and now in drought, between her highest level, at 4,211.8 feet in 1987, and her lowest, at 4,188.5 feet in 2022. Maps and newspapers call her the Great Salt Lake, but to me, she’s Great Salt Lake," writes Terry Tempest Wililams, HDS writer in residence.

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