# Faculty Focus: Monica Sanford on Multireligious Ministry for the Twenty-first Century March 06, 2023 ![Monica Sanford](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/hds2/files/ff-sanford-news-600x400.png?itok=G3YcFV-d) Monica Sanford is Assistant Dean for Multireligious Ministry and Lecturer in Ministry Studies at HDS. *Professor Monica Sanford talks about the evolution and importance of multireligious ministry and setting students up for success.* **Jonathan Beasley**: Hello and welcome to *Faculty Focus*, a special podcast series from Harvard Divinity School, where we speak with HDS professors about their courses and research interests. I’m Jonathan Beasley. Today’s guest is [Monica Sanford](https://hds.harvard.edu/people/monica-sanford), who is Assistant Dean for Multireligious Ministry and Lecturer in Ministry Studies at HDS. Professor Sanford joined Harvard Divinity School in 2021 and is one of the first fully-trained Buddhist practical theologians in the United States. She is also an ordained Buddhist lay minister in a Chan lineage, and she trained as a Buddhist chaplain. Thanks for listening and joining us today. Let’s jump right into the interview. Harvard Divinity School · Faculty Focus: Monica Sanford on Multireligious Ministry for the Twenty-first Century **Jonathan Beasley:** Professor Sanford, thanks for joining me. So, how has the spring semester started for you? How are things going? **Monica Sanford**: This semester is going really, really well. I'm teaching my first class on Buddhism, which is my own religious tradition and also the religious tradition I study the most rigorously, and it's lovely. The students are so engaged. I feel like I'm teaching directly into my wheelhouse, which has never been the case before. So, it's just really exciting. I prepare more for classes that I teach than I ever prepared for classes that I took, and I'm really engaged with all of the things that I'm reading. I'm like, oh, I need to a little bit more about this concept just in case someone asks. And then I can go down that rabbit hole for hours just because I'm interested. So that's been lovely. **Jonathan Beasley:** Yeah, that's great. I wanted to ask, what is a day in the life of the Assistant Dean for Multireligious Ministry look like? I'll just start with that. **Monica Sanford:** Very random. It looks very random. So I do get to teach a class every semester, which is lovely and keeps me really heart centered and close to the students, which is important. At the same time, I have my own research, scholarly research. I research Buddhist chaplains in all of the sectors where they work. I research topics related to higher education chaplaincy because I was a college chaplain for many years. And that crosses all of the religious traditions that are involved in higher education chaplaincy. So those two areas tend to be where I focus my research. So I get to do that work on a day-in, day-out basis. It's probably not as intensive as your average faculty person gets to devote to research. But just the fact that I get to do it at all is amazing. And then I do a lot of administrative tasks. So, I help lead and organize the Buddhist Ministry Initiative. I work with development to help create similar levels of support for Muslim students, for Hindu students, for pagan, SBNR students, the Nones, the no religious tradition students who are here. They are attending the Divinity School. But they don't have the same ecosystem of support that our traditionally served student populations do. So, when you think of the history of the Divinity School, who did we train? Well, Christian ministers for a very long time and then Unitarian Universalist ministers. And then other people started to just kind of show up because it was a nonsectarian divinity school, and they were allowed to attend. But the ecosystem of support is not the same. If you go and look at the pastoral theology section of our library, it's massive. They're all Christian texts, which is wonderful and lovely and great. When you look for similar texts for non-Christians, you'll find some Jewish work. That's wonderful and very helpful. But you'll find exactly four books for Buddhists, two books for Hindus, one book for Muslims, nothing for our SBNRs and Nones. So, there's a whole ecosystem there that needs to be built, everything from academic literature to faculty, visiting scholars, to field education sites to study grant placements, all of that academic and professional ecosystem that exists for our Christian students, and for our UU students, and to a good extent for our Jewish students, really doesn't exist for our students in other categories, other traditions, or no religious tradition at all. So, I'm here to think of creative ways to start redressing that and making sure that those students have the tools necessary for their success, both academically and vocationally, when they get out there in the world. **Jonathan Beasley:** That's really interesting. And you point to this issue that has been around for a while, this problem. And now that you're working to solve that issue, are you working directly with … are you having conversations with students about the kinds of tools, about the kinds of resources that would be helpful? And what do those conversations look like? And what are some of those tools? **Monica Sanford:** Yeah, so Dean Hickman-Maynard and I sat down with a student just last week who is of no particular religious tradition but very interested in doing work in this area, especially around social justice and gender-based concerns. And we talked that student through how do they select courses that feed into what they want to do with their vocation that also meet distribution requirements, like what is scriptural interpretation when you have no religious tradition and, therefore, no scriptures? Well, one of my classes teaches directly to that. But there are also other options, both at the Divinity School and at Harvard at large, that can teach into that gap. But you have to learn how to look for it differently, how to language it differently, how to describe what you're going for in ways that are maybe not the same as some of your classmates. So it's entirely possible. You just have to give it a little more thought and walk through it in a different way. So we do help students figure those things out on an individualized basis, right? **Jonathan Beasley:** So that kind of mentoring, if you will, that kind of even collaborating, the collaborative work, that's a big part of just what you're working on on a daily basis. **Monica Sanford:** Yeah. It's really important just to communicate to students that it's possible. I mean, a lot of them think, well, I'm not religious. I can't go to Divinity School. Well, that's not true, at least not anymore. That's not true. Or I don't have scriptures. So how am I going to fulfill this scriptural interpretation requirement? Well, let's get creative. I mean, what else do we-- what other kinds of texts or art forms do we interpret to make meaning in our lives? It's a huge range of things that we can do if we just think about it a little bit differently. **Jonathan Beasley:** A little bit more creatively. That's super interesting. So, I want to go back to the course that you had mentioned, which is this semester, I think, that you're teaching. Is it the “Spiritual Formations on the Buddhist Path”? So in the course description I was reading, it says, "Students will be introduced to religious and secular theories of spiritual formation, human development, and moral growth." So that seems kind of—it seems both very specific and also very broad. So, can you just take me into what is the heart of the course and who are the students who are taking that course? **Monica Sanford**: So the heart of the course is the Buddhist path. So, in Buddhism, there's this idea of path or marga or magga if you're speaking in Pali, that there's a whole genre of literature from the Buddhist scriptures and commentaries that describe what the path is. So we're looking at examples from those scriptures and commentaries that describe what the path is. And it's usually some kind of a staged progression, although there are certain anti-path path literature that's like sudden enlightenment. So we're going to look at those, too. And then we're also looking at more modern commentaries, like almost memoir or autobiographical works, where people are sharing how they've lived this in the modern day. So here we've got this week, for example, we are reading one chapter of the *Visuddhimagga*. The *Visuddhimagga* is this massive book. Think like an old-fashioned dictionary. And that's how big the *Visuddhimagga* is. We're reading one chapter from the *Visuddhimagga*, which is "The Path to Purification" by Buddhaghosa, who was a commentator who was writing in, I think, about the third century CE in Pali, in Sri Lanka. And this chapter is on the stages of the path. And they're all laid out very technically. And we're reading a chapter from Cheryl Giles and Pamela Ayo Yetunde's edited volume, *Black and Buddhist*. It's the chapter by Ruth King, "Wholeness is No Trifling Matter," where she talks about her personal path, both before becoming Buddhist and after starting to practice with the insight lineage and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. And it's amazing how these two things that are seemingly so distant in time, in place, in language, in culture, the students are finding amazing connection points between them. So that's the heart of what we're looking at, is path. **Jonathan Beasley:** Professor Sanford, I wanted to ask you, who are the students who are taking your classes? Are they interested in Buddhism as an academic field of study? Are they MDiv students who are looking to go into Buddhist ministry specifically? Can you just talk a little bit about who your students are and what they’re interested in? **Monica Sanford:** It's really a catchall. We've got some divinity students who are self-identified as Buddhist and seeking to become chaplains or some kind of Buddhist ministry or spiritual caregivers. We have some MTS students who are clearly more academically minded, some of whom are also self-identified Buddhists and some of whom are not, who are just interested in the topic. Either they're interested in what is spiritual formation to start with, but also what is Buddhism and Buddhist spiritual formation in addition to that? We've got some auditors who are not Buddhist, who are just interested in the topic. We've got some folks from the graduate, the other graduate schools who are not Divinity School students at all but are interested in it either for personal, professional, or both those reasons. So it's a really interesting collection of different backgrounds and reasons for their interest. But we have a strong discussion component during the classes. And they're all interacting very nicely. **Jonathan Beasley:** Wow. Yeah, that class sounds fascinating. And it also leads me to your other fascinating class that I want to talk about. So you also teach “History of Nonreligious Movements in the U.S.,” which you let me know that your students had recommended changing the name. And you agreed, I think. **Monica Sanford:** Oh, I'm definitely going to change the name. They came up with such a better name for it. **Jonathan Beasley:** OK, of the class to American Heretics, which is a great name. So, first of all, why the change? And then we'll just start with there. And then I'll get to my follow-up. So why the change on that? **Monica Sanford:** Well, because in the second time I taught the class, learning from the first time I taught the class, we looked more at what we could consider primary texts. So what are the figures that we're looking at writing about these topics themselves directly? So we're looking at Thomas Paine, *Age of Reason*. We're looking at the edits that Thomas Jefferson made to his Bible. He actually went in with scissors and cut it up and repasted it together. And then he didn't write a commentary for it, but he explains what he's doing in letters to people that he trusted during his lifetime. And, of course, none of this came out while he was still alive because it was very controversial at the time. So we have some of that understanding of the choices that he made when he re-edited his Bible. We're reading people like Ingersoll, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who made the *Women's Bible*, where they actually did—she and a whole team of women went in and wrote a commentary on the sections of the Bible that deal with women, really calling out a lot of what they saw as misogyny and sexism and poor interpretations. So they'd completely reinterpreted the story of Eve to be much more empowering than a lot of their male commentators of the same period. We read Frederick Douglass, who's pointing directly at why are the churches not doing more for the cause of abolition. And, I mean, he's naming names. He's really pointing to it. We look a little bit at W.E.B. Du Bois. So we're reading many more of the primary texts. And we read some of those primary texts also in relation to some secondary commentaries. We read a lot of Supreme Court cases, not because I'm a lawyer or we're trying to interpret the law, but just as this is where the nation was when this happened. This is why this court case happened. This is the reaction to the court case. This is some of the rhetoric around that reaction. That reaction mobilized this full countermovement that resulted in subsequent cases. So just looking at that, it seemed more natural to say, well, it's not really the history of movements because the movements are all scattered and disorganized, right? These are not organized religions. They're exactly the opposite of organized religions in most cases, with the exception of a few groups, like humanists or they get together and get organized. But for the most part, it's an intellectual history that a lot of people don't know is there because a lot of our intellectual history is passed down through our institutions. And these folks are anti-institutional. So, it's this long-running strand of American intellectual history that you can only really find if you go and you read the direct work of those figures. And sometimes there's not a lot of follow-on from that because they've been neglected or sometimes actively suppressed. Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton's family, she wrote an autobiography within her life. And when her family reissued it after her death, they took out the chapters about religion, because they didn't want that to tarnish the family's image. So, sometimes they're not just actively suppressed by the culture or the community, but by their own closest loved ones because of the stigma attached. **Jonathan Beasley:** Let’s take very short break before we rejoin Monica Sanford for the second half of our conversation. If you enjoy what you’re hearing, I encourage you to subscribe to Harvard Divinity School wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re interested in learning more about Professor Sanford and her work, or you want to know more about HDS, our faculty, students, and degree programs, check us out on our website or follow us on social media @HarvardDivinity. Now, let’s get back to my conversation with Monica Sanford. **Jonathan Beasley:** I wanted to ask—this is maybe a question that is not able to be answered in the 10 minutes or so that we have left here. You've already given an example, many examples of what does multireligious ministry look like here at HDS. So maybe I'll just rephrase that and say, why is HDS a good place for those looking to do multireligious studies? **Monica Sanford:** Yeah, well, I think it's because we're trying to do it in a way that is intentional in the interactions that students will have while they're here. I'm a Buddhist chaplain, and I went to a Buddhist school, and I trained with other Buddhist chaplains, right? But most of the work that chaplains do, even Buddhist ones, is not actually with Buddhists, right? Most of the work that Buddhist chaplains do in health care and corrections or wherever they work is actually with Christians or with nones, N-O-N-E-S. Buddhism is a fairly small religion in the U.S. So that's just math. So if you want to learn how to interact with those folks, it can be very helpful to be at a multireligious place. If you feel like you would need to deepen your own rootedness in Buddhism before you stepped into that, then going to a Buddhist school is perfect, right? So, there are pros and cons to both approaches. But I think the multireligious approach is a mirror of the plurality of the world in which our graduates are going to work. Right, I mean, even if they do go into religious spaces, even if they do go to become a Christian chaplain at a Christian church, right, that church is in a neighborhood that's full of all sorts of different people and needs to collaborate with interfaith initiatives and community-based initiatives and all sorts of different interactions there. So our graduates hopefully, hopefully—this is the plan—will get some experience of that in their education here and a broader picture of what religious pluralism in the world looks like. **Jonathan Beasley:** Yeah. I could spend another hour just talking to you about the work you're doing and the vision you have for multireligious ministry here at HDS. But I'm not going to. I do have two other questions that I would be remiss not talking about, and the first is on the Buddhist Ministry Initiative here at HDS, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. So for those who don't know, can you just talk a little bit about what the BMI is? And then I'll ask you a follow-up question to that. **Monica Sanford:** So the Buddhist Ministry Initiative is really the confluence of the effort of two groups. One of those groups I think of as the internal group. So that is our wonderful faculty who've been here for much longer than 10 years. I mean, we're talking about Janet Gyatso, Charlie Hallisey, Cheryl Giles, Chris Berlin. They've been here for quite a long time and working to support Buddhist students from the inside, doing the things that they do really, really well. But the other aspect that made it into a formal initiative was the outside funding we got from our donor, which is the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation and a few other smaller anonymous donors who are also helping out. That enabled us to put some supports in place to start building that ecosystem that can help our Buddhist students be successful because without those supports, that ecosystem just doesn't exist. So it includes things like funding for field education in Buddhist placement sites. It includes summer and winter study grants for students who want to go and study things that they just couldn't here at Harvard. Maybe they want to go to Taiwan and go on a one-month-long Buddhist monastic retreat. That's an option, right? Maybe we need a visiting professor, a visiting practitioner scholar who is a Buddhist leader who also has a rigorous academic background who can bridge those two worlds for our students in ways that are really relevant to the kind of work they want to do in the world. So we would have funding for that. We'd have funding for conferences, for lectures, for cocurricular things. The Harvard Buddhist community is doing their annual retreat over spring break. They're going up to a Buddhist Center in New Hampshire. It's a fully student-led, student-organized retreat. And we can support that because of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, right, building that ecosystem slowly, piece by piece. So I'm very fortunate. I benefited from being a member of the Buddhist Ministry Working Group, which is a collection of educators that convenes as part of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, before I joined Harvard as an assistant dean. So that's how I got connected with everyone here. And I benefited from that. And now it's my job to make sure that other people can continue to benefit from this initiative, both students and educators of other Buddhist ministry students at other institutions. **Jonathan Beasley:** Yeah, it's such a wonderful initiative by the School. I want to end by talking about your 2021 publication. You seem to be the first of many in your field and being a Buddhist lay chaplain, and especially your work within higher ed and in academia. But I wanted to talk about the book that, I apologize, I will butcher the title, *Kalyanamitra: A Buddhist Model for Spiritual Care*, which is the first textbook for Buddhist chaplains. That is so cool. Why did you take on that project? How did that work? **Monica Sanford:** Because I didn't have any textbooks. It's a really simple answer. I started my MDiv in Buddhist chaplaincy at a Buddhist school in 2010. There was not a single book by or for Buddhist chaplains. There were two journal articles. That's it. That's the extent of the literature on Buddhist chaplaincy at the time I started. While I was there, Cheryl Giles and Willa Miller published their anthology, The Arts of Contemplative Care. That came out in 2012. There was another book called Benefit Beings that came out in 2012. There was another anthology that came out a few years later called *1,000 Hands: A Guidebook for Caring for Your Buddhist Community*, which has some kind of chaplaincy stuff in there but also some community-based stuff in there. And I really felt very strongly that we needed to rectify this, that Buddhism has something important to give to this professional field. And because I love people and I love research equally, which is not always the case in a chaplain—chaplains love people. And that's good. But not all chaplains love research. But I do. So it's like, OK, OK, I can go and do this. So I hunted around for a doctoral program that would let me do that. And I went to a lot of the major Buddhist studies programs, the most recognized Buddhist programs in the country. And they said, we don't do that. You could get a regular Buddhist studies degree and study texts. And then later, when you get tenure, as though that's an easy thing, you can do your study on chaplains. And I said, no, this is needed now. So I actually ended up at Claremont School of Theology, which is an originally Methodist seminary that has been going more inter-religious and ecumenical in the same way that Harvard has. We're not the only ones doing this multireligious thing. And they said, sure. Sure, you can study Buddhist chaplains. We a lot about chaplaincy. And we'll figure out the Buddhism part. And I worked under a wonderful advisor to do my doctoral dissertation, which was a study of Buddhist chaplains. And from that grew the seeds of *Kalyanamitra*, which is actually the first volume in what will be a three-volume series. So the second volume should come out this summer. And the third volume should follow shortly thereafter that. **Jonathan Beasley:** So you're still thick in the research and the work for those two volumes? **Monica Sanford:** Still thick in it and working with coauthors on these volumes because there are some specialized topics that I wanted to make sure got the coverage that they deserve, so, for example, psychological issues and how to triage for mental health concerns. I mean, that's something I've been trained to do. But we wanted to find someone who had a dual credential as a chaplain and a mental health clinician who could help write that chapter. So we've got a wonderful coauthor, actually also from Canada, because we want this book to be accessible to all our Canadian friends who have similar work settings with different licensure requirements. So we want to make sure we cover some of those things. **Jonathan Beasley:** How wonderful that you saw a gap. You saw this need that was there, and you just decided to just do it. You just went and just did it yourself. **Monica Sanford:** Well, I'm not afraid of the blank page. My original training was in architecture. So in that, you start from nothing and you design a whole building, a world, a structure, a system. You have to think of all of the people that it's going to impact and the ecosystems and the land and the water and the weather. So I'm not afraid of starting from a blank page. **Jonathan Beasley**: And I think we're all grateful that you're not. Monica, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. **Jonathan Beasley:** My thanks to Professor Sanford for giving us an inside look at her teaching, research interests, and her role as Assistant Dean for Multireligious Ministry. This was the fifth episode in our first season of Faculty Focus. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to listen to my interviews with some of our other great HDS professors and teachers, Charles Stang, Teddy Hickman-Maynard, Mayra Rivera, and Francis Clooney. Please subscribe to Harvard Divinity School if you haven’t already so that you never miss a future episode. And visit us on our website or follow us on social media if you’re interested in learning more about HDS, our faculty, and the student experience. Until next time… See also:- [ Faculty and Research ](/discover-stories-about/faculty-and-research) - [ Buddhism ](/featured-topics/buddhism) - [ Faculty Focus ](/topic-tags/faculty-focus)