Environmental ethics

Over the 2023-24 academic year, HDS Writer-in Residence Terry Tempest Williams and Professor Stephanie Paulsell led 16 students from the classroom to the landscape of Great Salt Lake through a year-long seminar. The course, “Walking the Inland Sea: Desert...

The Fielding Garr Ranch at Antelope Island State Park in Utah served as the venue for a “gratitude concert,” during which lake-inspired poetry, song and music was performed. The event was organized by Terry Tempest Williams, a conservationist, educator...

Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Senior Lecturer, details Boston’s history with climate activism, and how religion, ancestry, and spirituality tie in.

“We don’t know how to get there, but we know to take the next step and the next step,” writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said during HDS's Climate Justice Week, quoting E.L. Doctorow’s description of writing as an apt analogy: “Writing is like driving at...

"Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought." Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations...

“I don’t see grief as the opposite of hope,” said Terry Tempest Williams, writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School and environmental author and advocate, referring to the sense of loss shared by some over the damage already done. “But if we...

"For environmentalists today, the Forest Festivals are both an inspiring model of movement building and a reminder that we cannot save the planet without the commitment of ordinary people," writes HDS faculty member Dan McKanan.

Madeline Bugeau-Heartt, MDiv '24, delivered the following remarks at Morning Prayers in Harvard's Memorial Church on March 28, 2022. ♦♦♦ First and foremost, I will offer a reading from the children's Bible. It's a fiction book by Lydia Millet and the...

On a recent November morning, the hustle of Harvard Yard was interrupted by the steady glide of a North Atlantic right whale. From Massachusetts Avenue to Cambridge Common and across the Science Center Plaza to the Divinity School, the more than 6-foot...

“Nothing is inevitable; everything’s evitable; and that’s really important. That’s one of the reasons we study history, and we see that very specific decisions resulted in specific outcomes. It didn’t just happen. We’re very fatalistic. People assume...