HDS Students Deepen Vocational Focus Through Summer Service

This summer, I interned at the Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY), a secular nonprofit organization that works to overcome prejudice, violence, and misunderstanding by engaging religious and civic leaders across New York City. My work included researching and writing grant proposals, developing materials for spiritual programming, organizing vigils, and supporting the organization's broader community engagement efforts. These experiences allowed me to think more critically about the role religion plays within public life and the ways in which religious communities are understood and mobilized within civic spaces. 

One of the most important learning aspects of my time was observing ICNY’s understanding of religion as not merely a matter of personal belief but rather recognizing it as a form of community infrastructure. Religious communities can provide social support, advocacy, and networks of trust, particularly for populations experiencing political or social uncertainty. This approach allowed me to see how religion intersects with questions of immigration, race, ethnicity, language, and civic participation. Simultaneously, it made me question what can be lost when religious identity is primarily understood through its utility within civic or political work. 

My academic study of religious literacy has emphasized the internal diversity of religious traditions and the importance of understanding their historical, cultural, political, and individual contexts. Working at ICNY challenged me to consider what happens when that complexity encounters the urgency of public-facing work. Interfaith organizations often rely on shared values such as dignity, justice, and compassion to create opportunities for collaboration. Yet, these values do not retain a similar meaning across faith traditions. Communities may have fundamentally different understandings of values such as justice, equality, responsibility, and their role in public life. I have grown to understand that interfaith work may not necessarily require agreement, but rather the ability to work alongside difference. 

The most meaningful lesson I took from my internship was that religious literacy is not merely about learning how to understand religion more accurately; rather, it requires attending to how institutions use categories of religion and seeing whom those categories include and whom they leave out. My experience at ICNY taught me that public-facing interfaith work is often about navigating these tensions rather than resolving them. This summer challenged me to think of how academic understandings of religion can remain attentive to complexity while still responding to the practical demands of communities and their public life.

“Everyone deserves to be listened to.” 

This was a common refrain throughout our unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) this summer with the San Francisco Night Ministry, a multifaith nonprofit established six decades ago on the streets of downtown San Francisco, California. As chaplain interns, we worked between 6 pm and midnight, providing non-anxious, non-judgmental listening to underserved populations on the streets, on the phone, and at various outdoor services our organization hosted, such as Open Cathedral, Open Shabbat, Open Sangha, and more. As two MDiv students, we were both heavily shaped by this rather non-traditional CPE program. 

I (Paige) was struck by how much heartbreak plays a role in chaplaincy, and how this sorrow can be deeply connective. I also learned how embodied approaches to spiritual care offer moments of much-needed respite for both me and those living on the streets. Through a bilingual pilot yoga program funded by the Buddhist Ministry Initiative summer grant, Audrey and I explored where the physical meets the spiritual by hosting chair yoga sessions outside train stations. I was amazed at how grounded I could feel in my own clinical setting while hearing how impactful this simple somatic care could be for those who joined us every other week. 

I (Audrey) grappled with the unique challenges of this freeform ministry and the large ethical questions that arose for me in this clinical setting. At first, my offering of a simple listening ear felt meager compared to the larger material needs of our care seekers on the streets. It took many shifts, many deeply connecting conversations and encounters, for me to truly trust that our unique and agenda-less work was meeting an important and often overlooked human need for witnessing and connection. For many reasons, this was a difficult and intense summer. Though now, at the end of the summer, I am confident that I was right where I was meant to be. This internship was the first time I felt like I was able to explore my spiritual, academic, and professional questions and goals all at the same time. 

As we meditate on the privilege of what it means to return to Harvard classrooms, we remain curious to see how the seeds planted this summer will continue to grow and develop here: in discussions, conversations with peers on campus, and with our unhoused neighbors on the streets of Cambridge and Boston.

I spent the summer in prison and enjoyed every minute. Let me explain.

“Insight” has been a cornerstone of American parole evaluation since the mid-twentieth century. Incarcerated individuals appearing before a parole board are prompted to share with the panel significant insights they’ve gained while inside. It is a qualitative bridge linking the applicant’s past offense to their present suitability for re-entry. For board members, insight is the ability to look truthfully, not only at their actions, but also at their intentions. But insight is a subjective metric, a standard that applicants are expected to meet but are rarely taught to identify and articulate.

My field education placement at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections sought to change that.

“Insight to Insight,” a pilot program preparing inmates for successful parole hearings and subsequent re-entry, introduced Vipassana, or insight meditation, to a dozen men scheduled for hearings within the next few months. Vipassana works in tandem with the Noble Eightfold Path, a non-linear, interconnected system fostering wisdom, ethics, and mental discipline. The steps on the path nurture wholesome attitudes, intentions, speech, and actions. In a prison context, these are not abstractions or generalizations; they are the precise behavioral markers by which parole boards gauge the level of insight and determine a candidate’s readiness for re-entry.

Although the true test of the pilot program will take place in each inmate’s scheduled hearings, my own informal assessment of the initiative’s impact is positive. During our twice-weekly sessions spanning 12 weeks, members shared stories of transformational changes, large and small. In individual conferences, participants displayed increased willingness to look truthfully, unflinchingly, at the nature of their offenses. As a result, they were able to realistically envision a future free of the conditions that contributed to the actions that caused harm to their victims, their families, and themselves.

In other words, they were gaining insight—and so was I.

I met a number of program providers over the summer. We shared stories of lesson plans disrupted by unforeseen circumstances. Materials waved through by one officer were scrutinized by another. Navigating the system requires dexterity and resilience. To maintain equanimity, I learned to expect the unexpected. To embrace impermanence. Like the prison’s stone walls, the system can appear hard, impervious, and immovable. But we don’t take it personally; we show up. Breaching barriers of hard stone and cold steel, of rigid rules and petrified policy, we enter—with an iron will and an open heart.

Later, we exit—changed.