The three-year, full-time master of divinity (MDiv) program consists of rigorous intellectual scholarship combined with real-world experience, in settings such as churches, synagogues, mosques, hospitals, shelters, and other institutions of care. Students study their own faith tradition (and many others) alongside students from different traditions and backgrounds. Students who consider themselves 'spiritual but not religious, atheist, agnostic, or have embarked on their own spiritual formation, are a welcome and large segment of the HDS master of divinity cohort.
Students graduating with a master of divinity leave HDS with knowledge and experience that prepare them to serve within a religious community, to explore spiritually formative intellectual work, to evaluate and act on the needs and questions of religious and other communities, and to speak with both a pastoral and a public voice in many different settings.
The MDiv program includes:
Rigorous education in the religious traditions that shape the scholarly, spiritual, and practical dimensions of a vocation to ministry
The capacity to use the fundamental intellectual tools of the study of religion
Genuine reading competence in a scriptural language and/or a language of theological scholarship that allows for the lifelong use of that language in ministerial leadership and scholarly inquiry
Education in the arts of ministry pursued in both the classroom and the field
Significant learning in a religious tradition other than one's own
Cultivation of the intellectual, spiritual, and pastoral agility that will enable graduates to move with skill, confidence, generosity, and grace across the complex and diverse religious, cultural, and moral spheres of modern society.
