Navigating the Unknowable

Michelle C. Sanchez, MDiv ’09, PhD ’14, grew up in a conservative Christian family deeply involved with several Protestant churches in Florida: Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, and Presbyterian (PCA). From a young age, Sanchez was curious about faith and religious beliefs, but she found that she was expected to sit on the sidelines of these conversations in her religious community.  

“As a young woman in the church, I could play music—which I still do—and I could listen in and read. But I wasn’t supposed to be thinking of myself as a leader in any sense other than to eventually raise children as Christian leaders,” says Sanchez, now Professor of Theology at HDS. “But after being homeschooled and then enjoying two years at a local community college, I was intent on continuing my education. I ended up at New College of Florida, which was close enough to home to let me keep going to church on Sunday. And because no one expected me to pursue a career, I didn’t get any family or community pushback when I decided to study philosophy. That was the beginning of my pathway toward academia.”

Amazing Grace  

In the early 2000s, Sanchez, a first-generation college student, enrolled in New College of Florida, the state’s honors college. She says that her undergraduate experience, which offered an affordable and excellent education, changed the trajectory of her life. “The campus was filled with students who came from working-class families like me, and who also loved thinking deeply about the world,” she says. “They were inquisitive and generous. As one of the only conservative Christians on campus at the time, there is a sense in which I was an oddity.” Sanchez recalls that her home community was concerned she would be attacked and lose her way in such a place: “Some part of me expected to be hated or rejected, but I found myself welcomed by a bunch of people ready to talk about our differences with grace.”  

She remembers that questions about her more conservative beliefs were asked with care—invoking curiosity, and sometimes incredulity or even frustration, but never ridicule. “This was a big experience, because these same people who befriended me upset the stereotypes I brought with me—that ‘nonbelievers’ were deficient morally or even out to get me,” she says. “Yet I could not, in good conscience, write off all these people as somehow failing.”

One of the many undergraduates who engaged her in meaningful dialogue was Tim Sanchez. With a Venezuelan father who had long ago rejected his Catholic upbringing and an American mother whose job in the Middle East introduced the family to people with deep ties to the Muslim faith, Tim Sanchez held a much different view of the world. As the two students discussed, debated, disagreed—and found new forms of agreement on their understanding of religion, politics, and life—they also traveled across the world together. “And we got married along the way,” says Sanchez, who credits her now-husband of 20 years with helping her to approach perceived outsiders with more openness.  

Life-Changing Advice  

It was an undergraduate professor and advisor, the late Douglas Langston, who first introduced Sanchez to the idea of applying to Harvard Divinity School. Without his guidance, Sanchez says she would have never considered pursuing a career in academia: “I share that as a testament that one conversation with a student can open up entire worlds that have been previously unknown.”  

Sanchez came to HDS as a master of theological studies candidate and then shifted to the master of divinity program, citing her growing interest in working as a leader in communities of practice as she continued to study theology. HDS’s pluralistic environment gave her a deeper understanding of the world, including the tradition by which she had been formed, and gave her a better sense of the many ways she could continue to embrace it, albeit differently than she had before.  

“One of my big realizations from undergrad was the extent to which our desires and loves shape what we’re able to recognize and the way in which we’re able to claim knowledge about things,” she says. “At HDS, I found out that this very thing is a very old theological theme within and beyond Christianity.”  

With the guidance of many HDS mentors and professors, Sanchez went on to earn her doctorate from Harvard, focusing on her dissertation, “Providence: From Pronoia to Immanent Affirmation in John Calvin’s Institutes of 1559.” Sanchez was appointed to the Harvard Divinity School faculty as an assistant professor in 2014 and celebrated achieving tenure as Professor of Theology last year. Her dissertation provided the basis for her first book, Calvin and the Resignification of the World, published in 2019. She is now in the final stages of completing her second, From Religion to Worldview: The Intellectual Remaking of Calvinism for Culture War.