‘From the Heart to the Page’ Highlights Harvard Divinity School Alumnx Authors

This fall, three Harvard Divinity School (HDS) alumnx authors will return to campus to share their voices in a series of book talks. The annual series, “From the Heart to the Page and Back Again,” is sponsored by the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life (RSL) and spotlights alumnx authors whose books explore themes at the intersection of intellectual and spiritual life.  

Kerry Maloney, HDS chaplain and director of RSL, described the series as an opportunity “to be in conversation with these members of our community who are contributing their significant expertise to the public through their writings.”  

The series highlights the valuable work of alumnx authors and explores how they have used their HDS education “to expand spiritual wisdom and the common good,” said Maloney. 

The series will open September 30 with a talk from Lynn Cooper, MDiv ’07. Since graduating, Cooper has remained connected to HDS while serving as a Catholic chaplain at Tufts University since 2008. Her book, Embracing Our Time: The Sacrament of Interfaith Friendship, was published in May 2025. 

On October 7, Rev. Liz Walker, MDiv ’05, will return to HDS to reflect on her book, No One Left Alone: A Story of How Community Helps Us Heal, which was published in April 2025. Rev. Walker is the director of the Can We Talk Network, serves as Pastor Emerita of Roxbury Presbyterian Church, is a retired broadcast journalist with decades of experience in Boston, and is a 2025 Gomes Distinguished Honoree. 

The series will conclude on November 4 with Mark Longhurst, MDiv ’07. After years of work in Boston nonprofits and later as a UCC pastor in western Massachusetts, Longhurst now serves as writer and publications manager at the Center for Action and Contemplation. His book, The Holy Ordinary: A Way to God, was published in fall 2024.  

Cooper, Walker, and Longhurst’s books each take a different approach to community, storytelling, and the ordinary. Their hopes for the series, however, all reflect the work they began at HDS and have brought into their spiritual and creative lives in the years since: finding and creating communities centered around connection, curiosity, and open-heartedness.

Looking ahead to the series, Longhurst posed questions central to his book: “How do we pray when the world is on fire—and at the same time, how do we not pray?” he asked. “My book seeks to ask how prayer can become a foundation of just and compassionate living in our ordinary lives.” 

Longhurst’s attention to the ordinary is shared by Lynn Cooper, who noted how easy it can be to “overlook seemingly small points of connection,” rather than seeing such small, ordinary moments as “potential sites of transformation and meaning making,” she said.  

Cooper reflected particularly on the importance of HDS in her life and spiritual journey, noting that it provided her “the space to wrestle with gnarly questions in community,” she said.  

While sharing her hopes for the series, Walker, too, emphasized the importance of community as “one strand of the thread that pulls HDS’s hopeful series together.” Walker added that “the most important and necessary work to get us through these troubling times is inside work—the opening and widening of our hearts toward each other,” she said.  

Walker’s call to connection resonates with Cooper’s reflections on interfaith friendship. Her book “centers empathy and the transformative act of listening to others’ stories, honoring them as the living, breathing holy things that they are,” Cooper said. “In this time of deep polarization and what feels like a dearth of humility, these practices have much to teach us.”  

The series invites community members to participate in conversation around the works of these alumnx and, as Walker thoughtfully phrased it, to join in “the heart-stimulating refuge of sharing hope in community.”