Harvard Divinity School


Harvard Divinity School is one of the constituent schools of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school's mission is to educate its students either in the academic study of religion or for leadership roles in religion, government, and service. It also caters to students from other Harvard schools that are interested in the former field. HDS is among a small group of university-based, non-denominational divinity schools in the United States.

History

was founded in 1636 as a Puritan/Congregationalist institution and trained ministers for many years. The separate institution of the Divinity School dates from 1816, when it was established as the first non-denominational divinity school in the United States.
During its first century, Harvard Divinity School was unofficially associated with American Unitarianism.

Harvard Divinity School and Unitarianism

Throughout the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among Congregationalist ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties.
When the Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and the president of Harvard Joseph Willard died a year later, in 1804, the overseer of the college Jedidiah Morse demanded that orthodox men be elected.
Nevertheless, after much struggle, the Unitarian Henry Ware was elected in 1805, which signaled the changing of the tide from the dominance of traditional, Calvinist ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas. The appointment of Ware, with the election of the liberal Samuel Webber to the presidency of Harvard two years later, led Jedidiah Morse and other conservatives to found the Andover Theological Seminary as an orthodox alternative to the Harvard Divinity School.

Today

Today, students and faculty come from a variety of religious backgrounds: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and others. Its academic programs attempt to balance theology and religious studies—that is, the "believer's" perspective on religion with the "secular" perspective on religion. This is in contrast to many other divinity schools where one or the other is given primacy.

Buildings

Divinity Hall

Divinity Hall, dedicated in 1826, was the first Harvard building built outside Harvard Yard. It contains classrooms, faculty and staff offices, and Divinity Chapel, also called Emerson Chapel, where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave the Divinity School Address in 1838.

Swartz Hall (formerly Andover Hall)

Completed in 1911 at a cost of $300,000, Andover Hall was designed by Allen and Collens, a firm that focused largely on neo-medieval and ecclesiastical designs, and is the only building at Harvard built in the Collegiate Gothic style of architecture.
Andover Hall was commissioned by Andover Theological Seminary, which, by 1906, saw its enrollment slide and entered an affiliation with the Divinity School in 1908. The Hall contained a chapel, library, dorms, and seminar and lecture rooms. Today, the building still contains a chapel and some classrooms, but it also holds many administrative and faculty offices.
On 1 May 2019, the building's name was changed to Swartz Hall in honor of philanthropists Susan Shallcross Swartz and James R. Swartz.

Jewett House

Jewett House, constructed in 1913, is named for its first occupant, James Richard Jewett, a Harvard University professor of Arabic from 1914 to 1933. Jewett's son had donated the house to Harvard for the use of the Divinity School, but it was instead used by Harvard University Press. In 1956, the house was renovated to serve as the home of the Harvard Divinity School's dean.

Carriage House

The Carriage House of Jewett House is now the home for the Women's Studies in Religion Program. In the past, it served as a home or office for a series of Divinity School faculty and staff, including the family of Brita and former dean Krister Stendahl, who lived in the Carriage House in the 1960s.

Library

Previously housed in Andover Hall, the library moved into its own two-story granite building, designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott in 1960. In September 2001, the library completed an $11.5-million renovation that added two stories, enhanced its technology facilities and study areas, and improved its information systems.

Center for the Study of World Religions building

Constructed in 1960, the Center for the Study of World Religions building was designed by the Catalonian architect Josep Lluis Sert, then dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, for what was his first Harvard commission.

Rockefeller Hall

Rockefeller Hall, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1970, featured seminar rooms and a refectory on the ground floor and student housing above. A 2008 renovation by VSBA/Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. transformed the upper floors into staff offices, modernized access and created the fourth LEED Gold building at Harvard.

Academics

Degrees

Harvard Divinity School is accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada and approved by ATS to grant the following degrees:
In April 2014, the faculty of HDS voted to suspend admission to its doctor of theology program, although students already enrolled in the ThD program were allowed to complete their degrees. Instead, doctoral students pursue doctor of philosophy degrees under the auspices of the Committee on the Study of Religion, which is made up of 50% Arts and Sciences and 50% Divinity faculty members and housed in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. While many PhD students in the GSAS take courses at HDS, and both HDS and FAS characterize the PhD as a joint program, PhD students are formally enrolled in the GSAS and not HDS; only the GSAS at Harvard may award the PhD.

Curriculum

Candidates for the MTS choose among 18 areas of academic focus:
Candidates for the MDiv are required to take at least twelve courses in scriptural interpretation and histories, theologies, and practices. Those 12 courses must include:
  • Three courses in the theories, methods, and practices of scriptural interpretation
  • Six courses in the histories, theologies, and practices of religious traditions
  • No more than nine courses in the same religious tradition, or listed in no religious tradition
  • At least six courses addressing one or more religious tradition; of those six, only three may be in the same tradition

    Harvard Divinity School Library (previously Andover-Harvard Theological Library)

Library support for the study of religion at Harvard predates the establishment of the Divinity School; almost three-fourths of the 400 volumes that John Harvard gave to Harvard College in 1638 were theological in nature. Books on religion made up a third to a half of the college's holdings until the Divinity School was established in 1816 and duplicates from the College Library were combined with new purchases to form the beginnings of a specialized library for the school. In 1911, Harvard Divinity School and Andover Theological Seminary formed a partnership and agreed to house their collections together in a common library; when the educational partnership of the schools was dissolved in 1926, Andover Seminary's deposits remained in the library under the terms of a continuing agreement. The library's name changed from "Andover-Harvard Theological Library" to "Harvard Divinity School Library" in 2021.
The library's collections include all religious traditions in order to support the many approaches to the study of religion at Harvard Divinity School. Its historical collection strengths include Protestant Christianity, Unitarian Universalism, and biblical studies. Additional areas of collecting emphasis since the second half of the twentieth century include women's studies in religion, the relation of religion to ethnicity and to LGBTQ studies, the ecumenical movement, interreligious communication, and religion and peace-making. Similarly, the rare book collection has strengths in early Protestant Christianity, Unitarian Universalism and related “nonconforming” traditions, and biblical studies. Notable special collections include the papers of Unitarian preacher and theologian William Ellery Channing, theologians Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr, and New Testament scholar Caspar René Gregory.
Harvard Divinity School Library is part of Harvard Library, whose resources are available to all faculty, staff, and students at HDS. Harvard Library's collection has over six million digitized items, 20 million print volumes, 400 million manuscripts, one million maps, tens of millions of digital images, and rare and special collections. Harvard Library collects collaboratively with peer institutions and facilitates international open access, multiplying researchers’ access to materials.
The HDS Library also participates in the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium library program, which extends borrowing privileges to HDS students and faculty at libraries of other BTI schools.

Research and special programs