Harvard Divinity School

Join HDS students for perhaps the most popular of all Hindu festivals, also known as the Festival of Lights. This celebration is dedicated to the goddess Kali in Bengal and to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, in the rest of India. As with several other festivals, Diwali is associated with one of the stories about the destruction of evil by Vishnu in one of his many manifestations.

This event took place on October 24, 2022

Cynthia Wilson, (RPL Native and Indigenous Rights Fellow) and Angelo Baca (Cultural Resources Coordinator for Utah Diné Bikéyah) speak from their experience as Indigenous community organizers helping to secure the protection of Bears Ears National Monument. Located in southeast Utah, Bears Ears was subjected to Proclamation 9681 by President Trump in 2017 to reduce protected lands by more than 1.1 million acres. Following an Indigenous-led movement to protect Bears Ears, a reparative proclamation to modify the boundaries was issued by President Biden in October, 2021. Cynthia Wilson and Angelo Baca will discuss lessons learned from listening, organizing, mobilizing, and planning from a placed-based approach while engaging local Tribal voices, advancing community priorities and goals of ancestral land protection.

This event took place on April 28, 2022

Learn more: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu

Full transcript: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/12/15/video-bears-ears-listening

Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, talks about coloniality and race, environmental catastrophe, and transforming the way we see the world.

Faculty Focus is a special new podcast series from Harvard Divinity School, where we speak with HDS professors about their courses and research interests.

Full episode transcript: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/11/04/faculty-focus-mayra-rivera

Learn more about HDS: hds.harvard.edu/

Music track: "Old Dog New Tricks"; Extreme Music Limited

Illuminations is a new limited series from Ministry of Ideas that reveals the untold friendship of religion and science. Through interviews and stories drawn from a range of cultures, faiths, and eras, this series reveals the unknown and unexpected histories of how religion and science have been entangled across time. We hear why the Dalai Lama loves quantum mechanics; why the Mormon faith inspires a search for extraterrestrial life; why the Scientific Revolution was catalyzed by a religious quest to uncover divine craftsmanship. These surprising narratives explode the myth that faith and science are destined to be enemies and reveal how they worked as mutual inspiration.

This event took place on October 24, 2022

Learn more: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/public-events-calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D162727621

Full transcript: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/12/8/video-illuminations-launch-party

When a sacred lake bursts into toxic flames, and the temple at its shore is charred, the resident goddess flees. Where can She go? Highlighting the paradox between Hinduism’s view of water as female, sacred and sentient, and the endemic pollution of water resources and climate- driven drought in contemporary India, this ethnographic and archival project considers the existential ethics at stake in apocalyptic climate change. If water is life, as our popular understanding suggests, we ask, what is a life without water? Visiting Professor of South Asian Religions and Women's Studies in Religion Program 2022-23 Research Associate Tulasi Srinivas explores these questions in this lecture.

This event took place on October 13, 2022

Learn more: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/home

Full transcript: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/12/2/video-runaway-goddess-sacred-waters-era-climate-apocalypse?admin_panel=1

This conversation with religious studies scholar and Black and biracial educator Marcelitte Failla (Emory University)” our Research Associate Giovanna Parmigiani, the host of the series, discusses the practice of Tarot reading, Black Witches, Divination, Resilience, and the meanings, limitations, and possibilities of being a “scholar practitioner.”

Marcelitte Failla is a Black and biracial educator and scholar of African-heritage religions. Through a Black feminist lens, her work explores how religions such as Yoruba Ifá, Haitian Vodou, and North American Hoodoo are used for collective healing and social justice.

This event took place on Wednesday, October 19, 2022.

Learn more: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/

Full transcript: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/12/5/video-black-tarot-african-american-women-and-divine-processes-resilience

This lecture was part of the 60th anniversary symposium for God is Red at Harvard Divinity School. This lecture series discusses how Vine Deloria Jr.'s landmark text speaks to the field of religious studies, Native American studies, theology, and environmental studies in the twenty-first century. In this lecture Dr. Suzan Harjo (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee) from the the Morning Star Institute discusses the impact of Deloria's work on studies of Native American rights and Native American Religions.

This event took place on Thursday, October 6, 2022

Learn more: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/public-events-calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D162305702

Full transcript: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/11/15/video-impact-god-red-native-american-rights-and-native-american-religion

This lecture was part of the 60th anniversary symposium for God is Red at Harvard Divinity School. This lecture series discusses how Vine Deloria Jr.'s landmark text speaks to the field of religious studies, Native American studies, theology, and environmental studies in the twenty-first century. In this lecture Dr. Dan Wildcat (Yuchi/Muscogee) from Haskell Indian Nations University discusses the impact of Deloria's work in the present and in future scholarship.

This event took place on Friday, October 7, 2022

Learn more: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/home

Full transcript: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/11/29/video-impact-god-red-future

Repeated elections in Israel reveal the intensification of rhetoric around "transfer" and the normalization of the settlement project in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. At the same time, recent reports by a host of respected human rights organizations brought into question the limits and blinders of the construct of "Jewish democracy." A panel of public intellectuals examined the gradual strengthening of Jewish exclusionary political parties, the influences of Jewish and Christian American agendas on Israeli political trends, and the historical and philosophical meanings of Jewish political modernity.

This event took place October 25, 2022.

Learn more: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/programs/religion-conflict-peace

Full transcript: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/10/27/video-another-israeli-election-assessing-trends-israeli-and-jewish-politics

This lecture was part of the 60th anniversary symposium for God is Red at Harvard Divinity School. This lecture series discusses how Vine Deloria Jr.'s landmark text speaks to the field of religious studies, Native American studies, theology, and environmental studies in the twenty-first century. In this lecture Dr. Susan Hill (Mohawk) from the University of Toronto discusses the impact of Deloria's work on studies of religion, land, and the environment .

This event took place on Friday, October 7, 2022

Learn more: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/home

Full transcript: https://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/11/21/video-impact-god-red-religion-land-and-environment