The resurgence of the “divine feminine” as a discursive concept and framework in religious studies and in popular practice in Europe and the United States, raises the question of the salience of the concept in African Religions.... Read more about Video: Your First Heart is Not in Your Chest: An African Indigenous Interrogation of the ‘Divine Feminine’

Ever since Columbus reported he was hailed as "a celestial being" in 1492, stories of unexpected apotheoses have haunted the modern age—arising particularly at times of imperialist invasion, nationalist struggle, and political unrest. From Haile Selassie to Prince Philip, men unwittingly turned divine have much to reveal about empire, race, and the relationship between politics and divinity, as HDS alumna Anna Della Subin argues in her recent book Accidental Gods.... Read more about Video: Accidental Deification: A Conversation with Anna Della Subin

Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TV’s, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you irresistible. Interesting poetry awakens us, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of its materiality, how it enters into us. Sacred poetry, from antiquity to the present, teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. In reminding us that language has history, density, complexity, such poetry becomes a potent antidote against an empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.
... Read more about Video: THE WORD DROPPED LIKE A STONE: Sacred Poetics Under the Reign of the Money God

Where do our ideas about how the economy works, and our views on economic policy, come from? Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets, among economists as well as many ordinary citizens, is a form of religion. The foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought at that time within the English-speaking Protestant world.... Read more about Video: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism