A Time of Discovery and Growth: HDS Community Members Share Summer Activities

From traveling to places near and far, delving into archival research, learning how to rock climb, or interviewing Thai monastics, Harvard Divinity School students, faculty, and staff made the most of their summer breaks.

Below, HDS student and Office of Communications social media assistant Maddison Tenney shares her own summer experiences as well as those of other members of the HDS community.

Maddison Tenney, MTS '25

As an MTS candidate, I knew I might have only one summer on the East Coast. I was excited to explore Boston and Cambridge in a new way. I’ve always loved the opportunities for exploration that the summer brings, and I wanted to appreciate all the offerings of my new city.

What I didn’t expect to love so much—even amidst humidity that this desert girl wasn’t prepared for—was watching my peers and colleagues travel across the country, and across the world, on their summer internships, studying abroad, and on family adventures.

I took a few trips back to the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, California, and my rural hometown near Great Salt Lake. What surprised me the most, however, was how much I came to love Boston and all it has given me the first year of living here.

I had expected to fall in love with Cambridge, but I hadn’t realized how much this hot, sweaty summer would turn this place into somewhere I have come to call home. Maybe it was the ritual of watering my container garden and spending the night watching the sunset over Allston. Or maybe I felt it somewhere between Nahant Beach and late-night trips to McDonald's after my ceramics class.

In traveling and resting, familiarity and sense of belonging grew. In the words of Megan Thee Stallion, I was able to have my “Hot Girl Summer” and be unapologetically me. The more I got out of my apartment to go to the HDS summer soccer series and the ritualistic Thai dinner afterward, or learn how to rock climb with a dear friend, I found that this summer meant more than just an opportunity to live on a new coast: I found an offering to expand my heart and my beliefs about what belonging means.

I used to believe that how long you lived in a place determined its ownership of you, but after this summer, it is how much time we spend loving a place that matters in where we call home.

From my 1910 apartment, I loved watching where my friends found home on their Instagram stories, in text messages, and late-night voice memos, to hearing about their experiences over email. From Idaho to Thailand, I hope we can take our summer experiences with us as we diversify and strengthen our HDS community.

I reached out to some of those friends and asked if they would be willing to share some of their summer activities with me and the HDS Office of Communications. I hope you find their summer experiences, below, as interesting and inspiring as I do.

Shakya Vibhor Maurya, MDiv '26

My time in Thailand was a profound journey of self-discovery and growth. Immersed in the country’s rich and royal cultural heritage, I found myself captivated by the extraordinary Thai architecture, particularly the Buddhist monasteries.

During my stay, I conducted interviews with male and female monastics, engaged with a foreign diplomat, and participated in discussions with laypeople, alongside site visits to over 30 monasteries in Bangkok, Nakhon Pathom, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, and Lamphun. My background as a former Buddhist monk facilitates my comprehension and communication with the monastics.

Overall, this experience allowed me significant exposure to Thai religious practices and the Thai Divinity. The research was funded by the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Buddhist Ministry Initiative.

This research significantly influenced my summer reading selections, particularly as I am concurrently developing a new unit on sexuality in Buddhism for the HarvardX course "Buddhism Through Its Scriptures."

The books, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Buddhism and The Queer Dharma serve as foundational texts for this new unit. Additionally, my involvement with the LGBTQ+ community drives me to examine the queer aspects of religious traditions, thus integrating my personal identity with my academic work.

Gordon Hardy, Director of Communications

Every other year we take a bike touring trip with my wife's family. This year we biked through Slovenia and Croatia. Slovenia is beautiful, an alpine country famous for beekeeping and farming. (Slovenia has the most farm tractors per capita in the world.) The Istrian peninsula of Croatia borders Italy and has beautiful rolling hills, vineyards and olive groves. These countries were not on my radar, and I'm delighted to discover them.

For summer reading, I always choose something relatively recent and something I've always meant to read. This summer, I'm reading The Mirror and the Light, the last of Hilary Mantel's magisterial Thomas Cromwell trilogy. My never-yet-read book is A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole's Rabelaisian novel about a misfit grumping his way through mid-twentieth century New Orleans. The accents, action, and atmosphere of that incomparable city are pitch perfect. 

Rucha Modi, MTS '25

This summer, I had the privilege of serving as a Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Fellow in the Office of Democratic Whip Katherine Clark in Washington, D.C. Whip Clark is the highest-ranking woman in Congress and represents the 5th District in Massachusetts, which includes Harvard Divinity School.

I engaged with constituents on federal issues, produced daily briefings synthesizing international policy developments, and drafted memos on topics including the Israel-Gaza ceasefire negotiations. I particularly enjoyed writing questions for members of Congress to pose to civil society stakeholders during a trip to Kenya and Tanzania. Through these queries, I sought to disrupt entrenched power dynamics and encourage cultural and religious sensitivity.

The Hill is a core component of the American social change ecosystem. Observing how and when members of Congress and their staff leverage their power was instructive. Witnessing strategy and faith, hyper-individualism and friendship, and apathy and compassion spar behind the curtain of the well-scripted floor speech was disconcerting at times—and energizing at others. At the end of my fellowship, I was blessed to process this experience with esteemed U.S. House of Representatives Chaplain Margaret Grun Kibben, who serves members of Congress through pastoral care and prayer.

Public service is a key avenue through which I seek to live out my Hindu faith. I ultimately found it deeply valuable to work with Congresswoman Clark’s team of uniquely sharp and empathetic changemakers. I look forward to carrying these learnings into my future work.

“Pardon us and our arrogance that has kept us from hearing Your counsel. O God, have mercy on us when we think we are better than we are. And humble our spirits to follow You that we would be agents of Your steadfast love.”—Chaplain Kibben

Nikki Hoskins, Assistant Professor in Religion and Ecology

My summer was filled with writing and archival research. But when I wasn’t steeped in historical documents or pounding away at my keyboard, I saw a play directed by Phylicia Rashad called Purpose. The play concerns a civically engaged and influential black Midwestern family of activists, pastors, and politicians. Some have gestured that the play is about a particular “iconic” black family, but more than a fictitious portrayal of a famed family, for me, it was a commentary on the limits and harmfulness to an approach to black political and religious life as legacy, particularly when understood within the framework of a family business and brand.

I was also able to see an art exhibition by Chicago-based artist Candace Hunter, The Alien-Nations and Sovereign States of Octavia E Butler. The exhibit explores Afrofuturism through Butler’s ideas in Parable of the Sower and Lilith’s Brood. The exhibit was fascinating and expanded how I typically engage Butler’s texts. I hope to incorporate elements from Hunter’s exhibit in a course I am creating: “The Religious and Ecological Dimensions of Octavia Butler’s Work.”

My favorite part of summer vacation, however, was the Ecowomanist Retreat I attended in North Carolina, hosted by Dr. Melanie Harris. An intimate group of brilliant women/non-binary environmental scholars and activists of color gathered for a week-long retreat in nature. We supported each other’s work, we reflected on the trajectory of ecowomanism, and importantly, we rested.

Finally, toward the end of my summer vacation, I took a brief trip to Mexico, which overlapped with the election of their first female president, President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum.

Photo caption: From left, Grace Sill, MDiv '26, Eddie Moreira, Maddison Tenney, MTS '25, Shir Lovett-Graff, MTS '24, Kidron Martin, MTS '25, and Matty Murphy, MTS '26

Matty Murphy, MTS '25

At the outset, my summer reading in preparation for HDS was basically ad-hoc, mostly within the western canon, and not even adjacent to being thorough. Provided the enormity of the life transition entailed, I’ll admit that feeling sufficiently “read” was likely never on the table. I began with what I expected to be one of those life-changing books, Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, because of its overtly religious subject matter and the high, high praise a close friend had given it. To cut a lengthy review unfairly short: it remains only about a quarter of the way finished.

What ended up being the book was Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir. Identifying as an agnostic—a space which often feels to me like the spiritual home for the ambiguous—the title was truthfully the most significant factor for this falling into my lap. With socks knocked cleanly off, it has more than convinced me that intensive reading in philosophy is worth pursuing at HDS.

The other book which set my hair on fire this summer was a collection of transcribed conversations between the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber and number of his colleagues titled Anarchy-In a Matter of Speaking, which I picked up at the Harvard Book Store. Wanting to submerge myself in models of productive dialogue between well-established academics, I came out swirling with countercultural takes on everything from techno-spiritual transhumanism to play as political practice.

—by Maddison Tenney, HDS student social media assistant