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Serendipity is my favorite word. It is defined as the occurrence of fortune purely by accident; finding good things even while we are not looking for them. Reminiscing on life, and the winding roads that have led me here, I’m convinced that I’m the product of little pockets of serendipity. For example, after high school, I joined Makerere University in my home country, Uganda. However, two months later the university shut down indefinitely due to a strike by disgruntled, unpaid lecturers. Concerned about the uncertainty of my future at Makerere, I applied to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Not long after, I received my acceptance letter, and thus began the chain of events that would unfold, as my life in America began.
The biggest culture shock I experienced in America was the expression of a fully functioning secular society. Religion has been a significant part of my life since I was a child so this was a world I had never lived in. My evangelical Christian parents raised me to believe in the absolute inerrancy of scripture, and every school I ever enrolled in was either Anglican or Roman Catholic. So, as one might imagine, I was overwhelmed with the freedom of spiritual thought and expression that I found here. Many times, I contemplated abandoning my faith, but how could I strip from myself something that had been as influential as any classroom in the shaping of my opinions, thoughts, and principles? This admittedly is a reality I viewed negatively and I envied people who had begun on a clean slate; those who had the chance to birth their ideologies and define their own truths without watchful eyes or forceful hands.
I declared a major in accounting which – in retrospect, I did to detach myself academically from the humanities and any introspective discipline that required me to define myself or explain how I viewed the world. I had never been given this liberty and so, having it suddenly thrust upon me was a curious thing. Initially, I took to accounting because there was less opinion and more fact. Having only known structure my entire life, the methodological rules that governed accounting computations felt almost… homely. I’m happy to say that this pseudo-sense of comfort didn’t last long. It would certainly be dishonest to myself to think that as a black, female, immigrant, in America I could distance myself from social justice in any form. Martin Luther King JR is famously quoted as having said “There comes a time when silence is betrayal. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Hearing this in an African-American literature class in my junior year of college was a sobering wake-up call.
Junior year was a period of reflection wherein I swam upward, from the deep sea of imposed piousness that had drowned me all those years. When my face finally broke the surface of the water, it felt like I finally knew how to breathe. For the first time In my life, I began to read the bible because I loved its teachings. That sacred text awakened in me a passion for the pursuit of justice and moral responsibility. During this time, I joined a non-denominational church in downtown Baton Rouge whose heart for serving the community reeled me in.
Growing up in Uganda gave me an unobstructed view of poverty, homelessness, and the struggles of families in low-income communities. But going to business school showed me that we as a community have the ability to challenge the status quo. In May of 2018, I had the pleasure of participating in Opportunity Funding Corporation, a pitch competition designed to encourage entrepreneurial initiatives by black college students in America. I left that experience imagining just how beneficial such entrepreneurial training would be if there were more efforts to empower economically marginalized groups. To further educate me on the role of humanitarian aid in the eradication of poverty, in February 2020 I will intern with the African-American relations team of Compassion International, a Christian nonprofit organization that connects children living in poverty with financial sponsors.
I believe that Harvard Divinity School is the next critical step in my pursuit of ministry. And if I wasn’t completely sure before, Divx 2019 extinguished all doubt. Discussing the role of faith in nonprofits and humanitarian aid as I sat in a Government and Humanitarian Action lecture with Dr. Diane Moore reassured me that HDS could truly become a home for me. Business and religion often do not publically intersect in the way that politics and religion, history and religion, and other such humanities do. And therefore, prior to visiting HDS, I was apprehensive about the insufficiency of resources for students with a business school background and an accompanying desire to study religion. This notion was proven wrong after I visited Professor John Brown and heard about his cross-disciplinary experience in getting his Master’s degree in both Business Administration and Divinity at Harvard University. If admitted, I would be honored to work with her and discuss my research interests in analyzing the intersection of contemporary religion and economics with him. Furthermore, I was elated to read that Dr. Catherine Brekus has a similar interest in the relationship between Christianity, capitalism, and consumerism in the United States.
Throughout this application process, many asked why I would choose to study religion. The answer is simple. Numerous social injustices have their genesis in the abuse of religious freedoms, for example, terror attacks due to extremism, and racism that was perpetrated by the KKK sacred places of worship being used as a tool to ostracize and harm those deemed as others. What we believe as individuals and as a collective often shapes our political, social, and economic landscape. Community and strife, Integrity and hypocrisy, extremism and apatheism; Religion is chockfull of endless contradictions owing to the fact that a singular belief can inspire people to respond in diverse, pluralistic ways. By seeking to understand how religion or the lack of it drives human behavior, we can address injustices from the root whilst knowing that majority of the injustices we see and experience are merely an outward manifestation of a spiritual disconnect. Does religion claim to have all the answers? Certainly not. It’s just like Dean Hempton said, “We don’t have all the answers. But if we do not think about them, then we don’t have any answers at all.”
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