Harvard Divinity Faculty Honored at AAR/SBL Religion Conference
Highlights from the annual meeting reflect the School’s commitment to multireligious and multidisciplinary inquiry.
At the 2025 American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Annual Meeting, Harvard Divinity School (HDS) faculty demonstrated the School’s expertise in the study of religion and its commitment to advancing rigorous, mission-driven scholarship across diverse traditions.
Across the five-day November meeting in Boston, MA, HDS faculty participated in panels, paper presentations, roundtable discussions, and honorary retrospectives that reflected foundational components of the School’s academic identity. From celebrating field-changing interreligious scholarship and critical engagements with ethical and community-centered approaches, to showcasing novel interventions in religious studies marked by historical rigor and attentiveness to lived experience, the 2025 AAR/SBL Annual Meeting highlighted HDS’s vital academic work.
Honoring Interreligious and Comparative Scholarship
Two HDS faculty members were honored at the annual meeting for their career-long contributions to interreligious and comparative scholarship—one of the key guiding principles of HDS’s academic vision.
The Dharma Academy of North America presented its annual Dr. Adarsh Deepak Memorial Book Award to Parkman Professor of Divinity Francis X. Clooney, S.J., for his 2024 autobiography, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story. The book traces Clooney’s lifelong spiritual and intellectual journey of becoming a committed Jesuit priest with a scholarly dedication to Hindu studies.
In his keynote speech, Clooney offered a meditation on the unique trajectory of his life, one filled with surprise, coincidence, and chance encounters that, upon looking back, he realized were parts of a larger divine plan.
“As Kierkegaard wrote,” Clooney said, “‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’ I had no idea my life would turn out this way, but things are given to us along the way that stay with us, which we can later share with others. That is part of what this book is.”
Clooney’s pioneering work in comparative theology—his lifelong engagement with Hindu and Catholic traditions and the relationships between them—was the subject of another panel exploring the possibilities of cultivating a “comparative imagination” in religious studies.
Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion Kimberley C. Patton was also honored for her extensive contributions to the study of comparative religion. In papers engaging with Patton’s analytic of “divine reflexivity”; her work on various global religious traditions spanning centuries and continents; and writings on the concepts of divine motherhood, icons and idols, and sacred oceans, a panel of her former students highlighted how Patton’s scholarship and tutelage shaped their respective projects.
Reflecting on the connotations of “theory” in her field, Patton emphasized the importance of ensuring that the religious experiences of those immersed in the analyzed traditions determine the shape of the scholar’s analytical project—and not the other way around.
“Instead of theorizing about theories, ‘theory’ in religious studies should help us see more clearly that which we are studying,” said Patton. “It subordinates the watcher to what is holy.”
Together, Clooney’s and Patton’s contributions exemplify a core tenet of HDS’s academic approach: dedicated interreligious scholarship promotes deeper understanding across traditions within a multireligious world.
Indigenous, Decolonial, and Community-Centered Approaches
An important aspect of the scholarly focus at HDS is attentiveness to difference: across intersecting identities, the relationships between religious traditions and ideologies, and interpretive perspectives centering historically marginalized—both politically and archivally—communities of religious creation and practice.
Small acts in the archive take on cosmological significance through indigenous hermeneutics."
Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies Jacob Olupona’s field-changing work in African religions was honored in a panel analyzing his development of “indigenous hermeneutics”: the practice of interpreting indigenous traditions through epistemological and other frameworks developed by those communities themselves.
In her paper reflecting on the significance of Olupona’s approach for her own budding academic work, MTS candidate Sarah Adegbite—one of Olupona’s students—shared an example of the possibilities of this framework. In her research, Adegbite came across a confrontation between an Afro-Antiguan woman, likely enslaved, and a ranger (defined as "the head officer among the enslaved workers on an estate"). The woman made a gesture at the man that Adegbite first read as mere insolence, though thanks to Olupona’s work, she later came to interpret the act as a subversive embodiment of West African female ritual power.
“Small acts in the archive take on cosmological significance through indigenous hermeneutics,” said Adegbite.
At a packed author-meets-respondents session organized in tandem by the Afro-American Religious History and Religion and Sexuality Units, an eight-person panel critically engaged with Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies Ahmad Greene-Hayes’s 2025 book, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans.
Greene-Hayes’s book follows Zora Neale Hurston as a guide through the vast array of Black spiritual practices and expressions that emerged in New Orleans from emancipation through Jim Crow, including faith healing, ancestral veneration, spiritualized sex work, and other esotericisms aimed at conjuring a freer world in the face of state-sanctioned violence and terror. His work challenges conventional narratives about Black religion by foregrounding practitioners and communities whose experiences have long been ignored.
As Greene-Hayes said, this book was an attempt to “transmit messages from the dead,” whose voices are still alive in the archive. Quoting Lucille Clifton, he said, “Sometimes the spirits possess the hands.”
Sacred Text and Scholarship
AAR also highlighted how HDS faculty approach the study of sacred texts with both historical rigor and contemporary relevance for practicing communities.
During the “Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures” session, a book review panel responded to a recently published text that embodies this dual emphasis: Israel’s Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath by Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies Jon D. Levenson.
The book is a historical-critical, theologically rigorous work that traces the ancient development of the Jewish Sabbath to the present day, exploring its ethical and spiritual significance for present-day Jewish communities along the way.
In his remarks at the beginning of the panel, Levenson emphasized that, contrary to some contemporary applications, the Jewish Sabbath is meant to be a constitutive marker of communal identity, one that serves as a “foretaste of the world to come.” “The Sabbath was and continues to be a ritualized creation of a counter-reality,” Levenson said.
Shaping the Future of Religious Studies
The 2025 AAR/SBL Annual Meeting highlighted the broad and deep scholarly expertise and intellectual range of the HDS faculty and showcased the School’s enduring commitment to academic excellence.
Driven by its world-class faculty and its continued commitment to advance and strengthen its academic focus, HDS will continue to strongly influence the future of religious studies, advance research on global religions, and prepare students to serve and lead in a multireligious world.
Banner photo: SeanPavonePhoto, Adobe Stock. All story images by Tyler Sprouse