Politics and Religion

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Martin Luther King Jr. Remembered as Twelfth Baptist Church Honors Wu with MLK Legacy Award

January 9, 2022

The Rev. Willie Bodrick II, MDiv '14, senior pastor at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, stood at the pulpit Sunday and recalled the first time he met Michelle Wu a decade ago. The two were graduate students at Harvard—Wu in law school and Bodrick at the divinity school—when they took a class with renowned Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree. One day after class, Ogletree introduced Bodrick to Wu, telling them, “You all should get to know each other.”

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Q&A: You Know We’re at War, Right?

January 6, 2022
"Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionists of old, couldn’t vote their way to freedom. They had to do a lot more than that. That’s what I’m saying: We’ve got to do a lot more than that," says Cornell William Brooks, HDS Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership.
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The Uproar Over the 'Ultimate American Bible'

September 16, 2021
“Putting the Bible or placing American history within the Bible, or suggesting the U.S. is a source of revelation, is seen by many evangelicals as a kind of heresy,” said HDS Professor Catherine Brekus.
Pastor, professor, and policy influencer Quardricos Driskell, MTS '08

What Black History Month in 2021 Means for a Rising Spiritual and Ethical Movement

February 12, 2021

In February of 1926, Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-education historian, had a very specific goal in mind when he established what was then called Negro History Week. He hoped, as time went along, that Black history would be recognized as so entrenched in American history that calendars wouldn’t indicate when society should celebrate Black history.

Flash forward to 1970, when Black History Month as we know it today was first celebrated at Kent State University, then 16 years later, in 1986, when the U.S. Congress officially recognized Black History Month as the law of the land,...

Read more about What Black History Month in 2021 Means for a Rising Spiritual and Ethical Movement
Cornell William Brooks is Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership at HDS.

Public Policy, Prophetic Vision

November 9, 2020

Brooks teaches students to bring sacred and secular together in service of social justice

When Cornell William Brooks saw the video of George Floyd, the African American man killed last May by a Minneapolis police officer, it immediately brought to mind another terrifying image: the photo of the disfigured corpse of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American lynched in Mississippi in 1955.... Read more about Public Policy, Prophetic Vision

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Video: Religion and the 2020 Election: A Conversation with James Kloppenberg and E.J. Dionne

October 30, 2020

View a conversation on religion and the 2020 election with James Kloppenberg, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard, and E.J. Dionne, Visiting Professor in Religion and Political Culture at HDS. This event was moderated by Catherine Brekus, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at HDS, and was sponsored by the Council on the Study of Religion, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and Harvard Divinity School.... Read more about Video: Religion and the 2020 Election: A Conversation with James Kloppenberg and E.J. Dionne

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