![Swartz Hall Summertime](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-09/08172021-SwartzHall-001.jpg?h=0d0a9c2a&itok=yL1RqZyw) # A Summer of Service and Scholarship: Harvard Divinity School Faculty and Students Share Their Experiences For HDS community members Sarah Adegbite, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, and Julia Jackson, summer 2025 was dedicated to faith-driven justice work, fruitful academic research, and demystifying deathcare. September 18, 2025 For HDS community members, the summer of 2025 was a time of research, service, discernment, and growth. From community justice work to productive research to vital end-of-life spiritual care and beyond, HDS faculty and students made a major impact this summer. HDS faculty member [Ahmad Greene-Hayes](https://www.hds.harvard.edu/people/ahmad-greene-hayes), MTS student Sarah Adegbite, and MDiv student Julia Jackson reflect on what they learned and experienced over the summer, as well as how they found rest, rejuvenation, and joyful moments. ## Sarah Adegbite, MTS Candidate: Faith-Driven Community Work ![three people standing near a table with a van behind](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2025-09/Sarah%20A%203%20wide%20crop.png?itok=f2kjMkzU) Sarah Adegbite (left) serving the community during a summer internship with the Boston Faith and Justice Network. Photos Courtesy of Sarah Adegbite. I spent this summer working as an intern for outreach and faith-based activism at [Boston Faith and Justice Network (BFJN)](https://www.bostonfaithjustice.org/), a nonprofit whose mission is to ignite justice work among churches and Christian communities in Boston. We host book groups, educational tours, and service-learning programs, with the goal of connecting faith and justice in the lives of ordinary believers. This year, our focus was on housing justice, and doing this work has had a transformative impact on me. During my undergraduate degree, I volunteered with a homeless outreach program that delivered food and supplies to unhoused people in our town, but I was deeply ignorant of how unjust housing policy, segregation, lack of affordable housing, and damaging misconceptions conspired to ignore and disadvantage unhoused and housing-insecure populations. Working with BFJN has opened my eyes to many of these issues, as my main role there was to create a database of education, volunteering, and advocacy resources for churches in Massachusetts to address homelessness and the housing crisis in their local communities. I spoke to policy experts at affordable housing organizations, visited the State House to demand rent control, led discussions on engaging with local housing policy, and accompanied faith leaders to homeless shelters in and around Boston as we enacted ministries of accompaniment. At times, it was hard to know how to help people in such difficult circumstances, but I began to realize over time that it wasn’t about me. I had a role to play in addressing the problem, but a lot of the time my job was simply to listen. Listen to those doing the research, listen to those advocating for affordable housing, listen to those fighting for rent stabilization, and listen to those forming community in and around the streets of Boston. Mobilizing faith communities for justice is not always easy, and I am still grappling with a lot of questions about how we organize, how to center poor and marginalized people in advocacy work, and how to communicate the intersections of (de)coloniality, housing, theology, and property, but returning to a few key biblical passages helps me keep focused. One is Matthew 25, where Jesus identifies with the “least of these,” those whom society wants to pack up their encampments and leave. Instead, Jesus tarries with them. Another is Luke 10, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It is also a story about tarrying, to make the decision not to walk past those in need, but to stay and help. Spending the summer at BFJN has taught me to tarry. I hope to continue doing that for the rest of my life. ![Sarah Adegbite in front of a stove with two pans of pasta in the foreground](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-09/Sarah%20A%204%20square.jpg?itok=_D75F9gN) ![two people posing for photo](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-09/Sarah%20A%201%20square.png?itok=ii_Hgxfy) ![Sarah Adegbite serving alongside community member](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-09/Sarah%20A%202%20crop.png?itok=9MPILSXA) ## Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies: "Little Richard's Witness" ![Ahmad Greene-Hayes](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2025-07/AGH-News-Banner.jpg?itok=bYqFC87_) Professor Ahmad Greene-Hayes. Photo by Justin Knight. After a productive year of research and writing at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music while on sabbatical during the 2024-25 academic year, I spent the summer completing the full draft of my second book, provisionally titled, *Little Richard’s Witness: Liner Notes on Black Religion and Sexuality.* The book will be published by Penguin Random House in the Significations series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphone Fletcher University Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard. *Little Richard’s Witness* is part religious biography, part cultural criticism on Minister Richard W. Penniman—one of the twentieth century’s most influential queer architects and rock’n’roll stars. I explore how Little Richard drew upon the creative placemaking of church mothers and Blues people in Macon, Georgia to cultivate his own identity and aesthetic performances, while charting a Black spatial future deeply attuned to the ecological space of the Black queer South. Richard’s story sits at the crossroads of Black studies, African American religious history, and music and cultural performance studies. One intervention of note is that my book, especially the third chapter entitled “Crying in the Chapel,” explores Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) records related to Richard’s initial conversion experience and his time as a seminarian at the historically black SDA Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. When I wasn’t writing and revising and trying to get Richard’s story right, I rested and traveled a lot. Some of those trips were for bookstore events related to my first book project, *Underworld Work,* which was released by the University of Chicago Press in May 2025. Other trips included time away with family, friends, and my five-year-old poodle Sadie. We ate lots of good food, stretched out on the beach, and soaked up the sun. I also attended Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter concert and was gratified by her sonic and visual veneration of Little Richard through a series of stunning montages. She also flew over our heads on a golden horse. Iconic. ## Julia Jackson, MDiv Candidate: Demystifying Deathcare ![Julia Jackson posing before a body of water](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-09/Julia%20Jackson%202%20square.jpg?itok=6u4OtruS) Photo Courtesy of Julia Jackson. ![Julia Jackson holding blackberries with green background](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-09/Julia%20Jackson%201%20square.jpg?itok=OakoN6mD) Photo Courtesy of Julia Jackson. As part of my Certificate of Religion and Public Life (CRPL), this summer I completed an internship with the National Home Funeral Alliance (NHFA). The NHFA works to educate "individuals, families, and communities on caring for their dead” through resources, community events, advocacy, and trainings. I was drawn to their work because of the organization’s strong sense of justice in end-of-life care and their work to demystify deathcare while making it more accessible across communities. During my internship, I gathered an initial group of community leaders in conversation to see how the NHFA can best support community deathcare from a national perspective. With their feedback and my personal research, I also worked to create a community deathcare guide offering resources for people looking to start deathcare groups within their own communities. The guide will eventually be published through the NHFA. In conversation with NHFA members, I found the range of what people associated with community deathcare to be incredibly broad—spanning religious beliefs and practices, making deathcare more environmentally friendly, and lowering the cost burden of funerary care on community members. Death clearly is an issue that touches everyone’s life at some point, and it was incredible to see the multifaceted approaches NHFA members had towards not only talking about death, but also dealing with the practical realities associated with it. This work is particularly close to my heart as I’ve focused my MDiv on end-of-life care and bioethics, and I hope to further delve into many of the ideas this internship brought up in my CRPL capstone and future field education work. Though my work this summer was remote, I felt deeply connected to many of the people I met on organizing calls and found myself having conversations around deathcare within my own communities in Boston. I also spent many hours outside in Massachusetts and beyond throughout the summer. Making space for time with the ocean, berry picking, and taking long neighborhood walks kept me grounded in the rhythms of life that punctuate daily routine as well. ## Stay Connected to HDS Stories Members of the HDS community are finding creative and meaningful ways to live out their callings and commitments beyond the classroom. To read more of their stories and their impact in the world—and to stay connected with all that’s happening at HDS—follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter. [ HDS on Instagram arrow\_circle\_right ](https://www.instagram.com/harvarddivinity?igsh=ZTQzdDJ0aGN0aTZ6) [ Subscribe to our HDS Newsletter arrow\_circle\_right ](https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/connect) See also:- [ Faculty and Research ](/discover-stories-about/faculty-and-research) - [ Student Activities and Interviews ](/discover-stories-about/student-activities-and-interviews)