Exploring Belief through Storytelling: Ellie Ashby, MTS ’26, on Religion and Journalism
For graduating MTS student Ellie Ashby, the study of religion is inseparable from storytelling—tracing how faith is practiced, embodied, and understood in everyday life.
Somewhere between ethnographic research, late-night writing sessions, and conversations while walking back from Porter Square, Ellie Ashby, MTS ’26, realized the question driving her work had never really changed: How do people live what they claim to believe?
At Harvard Divinity School (HDS), that question led her deep into the study of American evangelicalism, lived religion, and public life. It also shaped her journalism, her writing practice, and the stories she continues to tell about faith and community.
Ashby’s path to HDS began at Harvard College, where she studied social studies, an interdisciplinary concentration that combines history, sociology, anthropology, government, and economics. She was initially interested in law and the humanities, but she found herself increasingly drawn to questions that did not fit within traditional academic categories.
“So many of the questions that I had been building in social studies found an even deeper home within this further lens of religion,” Ashby said.
Studying Lived Religion
Raised in Texas as the daughter of a pastor, Ashby grew up surrounded by church life and religious practice. It was not until her junior year at Harvard, in a course taught by HDS Professor Catherine Brekus called “Religion and Nationalism in the United States,” that she began to see religion itself as the central subject she wanted to study.
“I fell in love with the study of religion in that class,” she said. “I found that so many of the theoretical questions that I had been building in social studies found an even deeper home within the lens of religion.”
Under Brekus’s mentorship, Ashby completed an undergraduate thesis exploring how American evangelical Christians interpret and embody the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. Through ethnographic interviews, she became interested not only in theological ideas themselves, but in how people attempt to live them out.
That question remained central throughout her time at HDS, where Ashby pursued a Master of Theological Studies degree focused largely on American evangelicalism, scripture, pluralism, and public religion.
The deeper Ashby moved into the study of religion, the more she wanted to understand faith not simply as a political force, but as something deeply meaningful in people’s daily lives.
“I was interested in taking religion seriously on its own terms,” she said. “Not just using it to predict political behavior, but asking what actually matters to people inside these communities.”
At HDS, Ashby studied closely with faculty members including Brekus, David Holland, and David Hempton—mentors she describes as deeply influential to both her scholarship and personal growth. Courses like Holland’s “Ballots and Bibles” expanded her understanding of religion beyond the assumptions she brought with her to graduate school.
Historical study, classroom conversations, and relationships with student peers and faculty pushed her to challenge many of the assumptions she brought with her to HDS. “I’ve loved being proven wrong as much as I have been at HDS,” she said.
"Stories are the way that we connect. It’s this baseline understanding that we have with one another."
Ellie Ashby, MTS ’26
Storytelling as Public Scholarship
Much of Ashby’s work centers on the space between scripture and lived experience. As an undergraduate, Ashby wrote for the Harvard Crimson, where many of her columns explored religion, faith communities, and spiritual life at Harvard.
At HDS, that commitment to storytelling continued through both journalism and creative writing. Ashby co-founded 300 Words, a campus writing group built around the practice of writing 300 words each day, and she served as editor-in-chief of Suture Magazine, a student publication featuring creative and reflective work from across the HDS community.
“Stories are the way that we connect,” she said. “It’s this baseline understanding that we have with one another.”
This summer, Ashby will work part-time with Harvard’s Pluralism Project while also returning to Texas to begin a journalism fellowship shared between Religion News Service and the Texas Tribune, covering religion and public life during a pivotal election cycle.
The opportunity feels like a natural convergence of the work she has been building throughout her time at Harvard: scholarship, storytelling, religion, and public engagement. Though she is also considering pursuing a PhD in the future, Ashby sees journalism as a way of bringing academic questions into broader public conversation and helping people better understand the lived realities of faith.
“I don’t think this work should exist independently from the public,” she said. “I want to understand how real people integrate faith into their lives and help tell those stories.”
Banner photo by Alex Bayer.