HDS 2779 – Piety, Practice, and Politics: Thomas Merton and Martin Buber

HDS 2779 – Piety, Practice, and Politics: Thomas Merton and Martin Buber

Semester: Fall
Offered: 2025
Instructor: Shaul Magid
Meeting Time: T 12:00pm-2:00pm

The twentieth century produced numerous figures in Judaism and Christianity that developed ways of understanding religion in modernity that included the practical application of religious practice (piety) with activist engagement in the world (politics). This course will focus on two such figures; the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (d. 1969), and the Jewish theologian Martin Buber (d.1965). Merton excavated and taught the history of monasticism and Christian piety, living as a monk in the Gethsemane Monastery in Bardstown Kentucky, and became active in anti-Vietnam War politics until his untimely death from accidental electrocution in Bangkok in 1969. Buber was a leading philosopher/theologian and Zionist activist in Germany until his immigration to Mandate Palestine in the late 1930s and then became a voice of inspiration for humanistic Zionism, religious renewal, and the revival of Hasidism.
This course will examine the writings and lives of both figures, paying close attention to their use of the past, theological worldviews, their understanding of a life of piety, and their commitment to political activism. They will serve as two exemplars of the ongoing attempt to reconsider, reconstruct, and revise religion in a changing world.

For more details please visit the Harvard Course Catalog.