On the evening of November 30, 2023, the much-anticipated event celebrating the launch of Peripheries, the Center for the Study of World Religions’s (CSWR) annual literary and arts journal, unfolded with a blend of poetry, music, and art, drawing over 140 attendees both in-person and virtually. The air buzzed with excitement as guests, including Chef Daniella Malfi, a MRPL candidate and musician deeply inspired by the journal, expressed their eagerness to delve into the 6th edition. 

by Tristan Angieri, MDiv Student and CSWR Student Research Assistant

On the evening of November 30, 2023, the much-anticipated event celebrating the launch of Peripheries, the Center for the Study of World Religions’s (CSWR) annual literary and arts journal, unfolded with a blend of poetry, music, and art, drawing over 140 attendees both in-person and virtually. The air buzzed with excitement as guests, including Chef Daniella Malfi, a MRPL candidate and musician deeply inspired by the journal,...

by Gosia Sklodowska

Peripheries, our annual literary and arts journal, occupies a special place at the CSWR. The journal publishes poetry, prose, visual art, and music that is, broadly understood, "peripheral"; work that, in form, explores the interstices between discourses, traditions, languages, art forms, and genres; and, in topic, explores the marginal, the incidental, the tangential, and boundary- and limit-experiences, such a mystical experiences on the margins of religious traditions. In this, the journal is consistent with the Center’s focus on the...

In working to advance its mission to “promote the study of the world’s religions in their classical and contemporary forms,” the Center for the Study of World Religions(CSWR) focuses its efforts along five themes, one of them being, “poetry, philosophy, and religion.”... Read more about The Peripheries Poetry Series and Sherah Bloor at the Center for the Study of World Religions 

On Monday, May 8, 2023, CSWR Resident Fellow and Editor-in-Chief of Peripheries, Sherah Bloor hosted a Poetry Craft Talk and Reading with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Tracy K. Smith for a capacity Zoom audience.  "During the Zoom lecture, Smith read aloud not just her own poetry, but the works of poets with parallel themes to her own: divinity, healing, history, race, and love—to name a few." (Quote provided courtesy of HDS Communications Intern, by Cecily Powell Tolleson. Full story here.)

... Read more about Video: Poetry Craft Talk and Reading with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith

“If this were the only poem that you had ever seen, what would you suspect poems are for?”

On a recent sunny afternoon, Harvard Divinity School students and community members made their way to the Center for the Study of World Religion (CSWR) for a special poetry workshop with Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K. Smith.... Read more about Pulitzer Prize-Winner Tracy K. Smith Hosts Poetry Workshop at HDS

On February 25, Vivian Liska, Professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, delivered the annual List Lecture in Jewish Studies at the CSWR.

The Jew as archetypal migrant is a pervasive trope in philosophy, politics, and the arts. Since Biblical times, the condition of exile was a source of discrimination, oppression, and suffering. Recent philosophical discourse, however, often regards it as the embodiment of a glorious deterritorialization that overlooks the hardship inherent in exile and migration....

This talk, held February 3 at the CSWR, examined the forms that grief can take, in the work of Zoe Leonard, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, and John Constable.... Read more about Video: Forms of Grief

Residents at the CSWR are scholars deeply committed to the study of religion. Below, we spoke with Sherah Bloor, a PhD student in the Study of Religion, on her work in poetry, philosophy, religion, and community.... Read more about Sherah Bloor: Poetry, Philosophy, Religion, and Community

Award-winning American poet Susan Howe visited Harvard Divinity School on April 24 to speak about the binding together of freedom and law, spontaneity and habit, as occasions for awakening a reader to the exaltation of spirit in process. Crossing the guarded borders between image and word, individual and community, history and the present, poetry provides an opening to the transcendent order that chance makes possible.

Susan Howe's collection of poems, That This, won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. In 2017 she received the Robert Frost award for distinguished lifetime...

In Navajo worldview, thought creates the world, which is then spoken into being. This process places sacred value on the power of language. Sherwin Bitsui’s poetry attempts to connect Diné thought to a changed world by translating the present through an encoding rooted in his culture and language. In this excerpt from his talk at Harvard Divinity School, he offered insight into how Navajo thought and language can inform a poetics, thus opening possibilities for poetry.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of three collections of poetry: Dissolve, Flood Song, and ...

Based on personal study and experience, Anne Waldman speaks on the refuge and Bodhisattva vows, the Six Realms of Existence, “co-emergent wisdom” and a parallel vow to poetry, and the joys and contradictions therein.... Read more about Video: Dharma Gaze: Practices of Buddhism and Poetry--An Evening with Anne Waldman

Robin Coste Lewis, National Book Award winner and poet laureate of Los Angeles, will give a talk and reading at the inaugural event in the Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion series at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Her lecture, titled "Boarding the Voyage: The Archive as Altar, Research as Ritual," will explore how research and literary efforts toward social change can transform from scholarly engagement into acts of communal devotion. More particularly, it will explore how excavations of race, gender, and desire—and the writing those findings...

On March 8^th, Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) resident and MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), Melissa Lago, gave a presentation entitled, “Embodied Practices and Poetry.” She began by sharing what led her to her interest in embodied practices and poetry and how her courses at HDS have supported her research. Then she invited residents to participate in a guided yoga practice accompanied by music, which was followed by reading, reflecting on, and discussing the poem Traveling Companions, by Rumi.

Melissa is interested in how the...