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.
Session Three - Feb 10th: The Fog of Religious Conflict: Can the Fog Lift?
David N. Hempton, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies
On becoming dean of HDS in 2012, David N. Hempton gave a Convocation address entitled ‘The Fog of Religious Conflict: Eleven Reflections from a Conflict Zone.’ The talk was a play on Errol Morris’s film about the Vietnam War and was based on his experiences in Belfast during the ‘Troubles’. The aim was to build understanding for those caught up in conflicts with roots much deeper than their own lifespans.
In this session, Hempton will first speak from his own background in Belfast, which showed him that religious ideas, in George Eliot’s words, ‘have the fate of melodies, which, once afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.’ He will reflect on the impact of the ‘Troubles’ on his own scholarship, which can be framed around the dialectical tension of religious ideas operating as both attractive and detestable melodies.
Hempton will then discuss how the fog of religious conflict was slowly lifted after the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998 under five alliterative headings: identity aspirations; institutional access; investment opportunities; injustices and inequities; and international support.
David N. Hempton has taught at Harvard since 2007, when he moved from his position as University Professor at Boston University. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Divinity at HDS from 2012 to 2023. Hempton is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and former Professor of Modern History and Director of the School of History in the Queen’s University of Belfast. He has research and teaching interests in religion and political culture, religious identities and ethnic conflicts, the interdisciplinary study of lived religion, the history and theology of Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism, the global history of Christianity since 1500, and religious disenchantment and secularization.
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