For episode 15 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome Fryderyk Kwiatkowski, Assistant Professor at the University of Krakow, on to discuss the relationship between ancient Gnostic myth and modern cinema. Fryderyk takes us through the impact European intellectuals Carl Jung, Hans Jonas, and Eric Voegelin on popular conceptions of Gnosticism. Then we dive into analyses of the Gnostic elements in films like the Matrix, Dark City, Truman Show, and more recent cinema like Free Guy, Chappie, and the television series Silo.

For episode 14 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome the linguist and philosopher Wouter Kusters. Kusters is the author of Pure Madness (2004) and A Philosophy of Madness (2014), both of which won the Dutch Socrates Award for best philosophy book of the year. We discuss how the experience of psychotic thinking challenges and illuminates our notions of language, philosophy, and mysticism. Along the way, we touch on the similarities between mystical and mad experiences, apophatic and psychotic uses of language, the phenomenology of time, and the impact of Kusters’ books on mental health specialists.

David Holden, MDiv '24, came to HDS after a career in politics in search of ways to help others heal as a hospital chaplain.

Transcript forthcoming.

On this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from second year MTS students Becca Leviss and Rucha Modi sharing the story of their early HDS friendship as a source for inspiration.

Transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/04/30hope-podcast-featuring-becca-leviss-and-rucha-modi-mts-candidates

On this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from third year MDiv candidate Matta Zheng who teaches us about the interconnections between justice, the mundane, and hope.

Transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/04/29/hope-podcast-featuring-matta-zheng-mdiv-candidate

For Episode 13 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome Shannon Taggart, an American photographer, writer, researcher, and curator known for exploring how photography can navigate boundaries between the seen and unseen. Her book, Séance (Fulger Press, 2019), offers hundreds of photographs documenting contemporary Spiritualism across the U.S. and Britain. We discuss what sparked Shannon’s interests in Spiritualism, the intersecting histories of photography and Spiritualism, ectoplasm, what inspires people to become mediums, and the techniques she developed for photographing the invisible.

In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from 2nd year MDiv candidate Paula Ortiz. Together we discuss the Andes mountains, being awestruck, and seeing hope in the present.

Transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/03/26/hope-podcast-featuring-paula-ortiz-mdiv-candidate

You’re listening to Harvard Divinity School's Praxis Podcast, where I, Maddison Tenney, interview HDS students about what brought them here, what they study, and where they hope to go next. This week's guest, Kristen Maples, MDiv '24, explores end of life care and the sacred practice of watching horror films.

Full transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/03/25/end-life-care-and-horror-scholarship-praxis-podcast-featuring-kristen-maples-mdiv-24

When is peace not peace? When does pluralism only seem like pluralism from the perspective of the people in power?

Christianity famously took form during the Pax Romana—an era of celebrated stability in the Roman empire—even as its message about the dawn of the messianic age and the coming of the kingdom of God resonated among those who saw the same age, instead, as a time of political oppression, cosmic upheaval, and eschatological unraveling. Likewise, to the degree that the Roman empire can be characterized by terms like ethnic “diversity” and religious “tolerance,” it was in a manner marked by massive erasures—both of knowledge and ways of knowing, pertaining to whole peoples. Arguably, a parallel dynamic marks Christian approaches to Jews and so-called “heretics” and “pagans,” with consequences for memory, forgetting, and archival amnesias especially with the empire’s Christianization—and with rippling effects that continue to shape our present.

In this session of "Religion and Just Peace | A Series of Public Online Conversations," Annette Yoshiko Reed, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, reflected upon the perennial questions above using examples from these ancient religions and empires.

This is the second event of a five-part series of online public conversations with members of the HDS faculty to explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide to the work of just peacebuilding.

This event took place on February 3, 2025.

Full transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/02/03/video-empire-and-epistemicide-historical-perspectives-rhetoric-peace-and-its-erasures

"Christian Nationalism in Global Perspective," a conversation with David Hempton and one of the 2024-25 Yang Visiting Scholars, Nilay Saiya.

This event took place on February 27, 2025.

Full transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/03/05/video-yang-scholars-2025-christian-nationalism-global-perspective