About the CSWR
The mission of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School is:
- to advance interdisciplinary, international, and interreligious exchange, learning, and research on the world's religions;
- to bring together the rich intellectual resources of faculty and students at Harvard Divinity School and at other Schools and departments of Harvard University with an international scholarly network to explore issues of religion in today's complex, globalizing, and changing world; and
- to build a deeper and broader understanding of the histories and contemporary patterns of the world's religious communities by hosting scholars and practitioners at the CSWR as residents and program participants.
The study of the world's major religious and spiritual traditions at Harvard, especially at the Divinity School, has been guided by the CSWR since it opened its doors in the fall of 1960, funded initially by a group of anonymous donors in 1957. Over 600 graduate students, CSWR fellows, and visiting professors representing the world's major religious traditions have been affiliated with the Center, many of them as residents.
The goals set forth in the first of several gifts—the appointment of a professor of world religions, the creation of graduate and undergraduate programs in the study of religion, the support of research and publications, fellowships for study and travel, and communication among peoples of different faiths—have been realized far beyond the expectations of the donors. Recent appointments in world religions at the Divinity School have greatly enlarged the faculty who specialize in the religions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, six of whom have offices at the CSWR. Through its faculty grants program, the CSWR supports a broad range of research by Harvard religion faculty: the role of madrassahs as interpretive authorities in Pakistan; case studies for teaching pluralism; medical ethics and multicultural pastoral care; Ifa divination in West Africa and the African diaspora; and religious leadership in Central European democracies. The CSWR also brings an international visiting scholar to the Divinity School to co-teach and conduct research with a member of the faculty.
The CSWR sponsors a rich fare of diverse educative programs, much of which is centered around a yearly programming theme. The organizing theme for the 2008-09 academic year was "Moral Worlds and Religious Subjectivities." The series was designed to inform the field of comparative religious ethics here at the Harvard Divinity School and in the broader academy, by exploring the possibilities for incorporating the insights of anthropology and the study of the world's religions into broader discourses of ethics. The program focus for 2009-10 will be Ecologies of Human Flourishing.
Over the years the CSWR has created a wide network of affiliations through its links with the Divinity School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard's professional schools, and institutes and universities in the United States and abroad. For example, in June 2007, the CSWR was one of several sponsors of the international conference, Religion and Culture, held at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The CSWR also creates such connections through the Greeley International Internship, a program by which an HDS student works abroad with an organization focused on interreligious understanding.
In light of the increasing prominence of religion in conflicts globally, the CSWR's mission of promoting a broad, sympathetic understanding of the world's religions in cooperation with individuals and institutions in the United States and internationally has assumed a special and compelling urgency.
