Mondays, 6-7:30 pm (Eastern Time Zone) - Zoom
Harvard Divinity School Spring Semester 2025 - Religion and Just Peace: A Series of Public Online Conversations - What contributions can the study of religion bring to definitions and practices of just peacebuilding?
This five-part series will take place live on zoom and is free and open to the public. Sessions must be registered for individually.
Hosted by Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean for Religion and Public Life.
Sponsored by Religion and Public Life and by HarvardX. The first two sessions are also co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies.
February 3 - Empire and Epistemicide
Annette Yoshiko Reed, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity
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, Reed reflects upon the perennial questions above using examples from these ancient religions and empires.
Annette Yoshiko Reed joined the Harvard Divinity School faculty in July 2022, having taught previously at New York University as a professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies (2017-22), as well as in the Departments of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2007-17) and McMaster University (2003-07). Her research spans Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and Jewish/Christian relations in Late Antiquity, with a special concern for bringing ancient examples to bear on the theorization of identity and difference. Reed’s books include Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity, Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism, and Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism.
The vision statement of Harvard Divinity School is “to provide an intellectual home where scholars and professionals from around the globe research and teach the varieties of religion, in service of a just world at peace across religious and cultural divides.” Harvard Divinity School will host a series of online public conversations in which five featured faculty members present a case study from their individual areas of expertise that considers the above question. Consider the relationship between religion and just peacebuilding along with these scholars and explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide to this work.
Source & Upcoming Events: Religion and Just Peace | Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School