Div School Lit

Ralph Waldo Emerson's eyes failed him about a month after he started at the Harvard Divinity School, in 1825. (My late mentor and friend Robert D. Richardson suggests, in his brilliant biography of Emerson, that uveitis caused by tuberculosis was probably to blame.) His fitful postgraduate career ended the next year, when he left Harvard without taking his divinity degree. In 1838, however, Emerson returned to the Divinity School to give one of the most famous lectures of his lifetime, in which he lamented "the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society" brought on by traditional religion.

Long before she wrote the works for which she is more regularly remembered today—The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Human Condition—Arendt wrote a doctoral dissertation on Augustine's concept of love, under the supervision of the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Several of the poems in What Remains were written around the same time.

Camus, who insisted that he was not a philosopher, is best known as the exponent of an existentialist philosophy that takes the absurdity and transcendental meaninglessness of life as a given. During his graduate studies at the University of Algiers, however, he wrote a thesis on the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity.

When I was in graduate school, Buechner was still the go-to example of a Div School alum-turned-novelist. Godric, his semi-fictional novel about the adventures of a twelfth-century monk and mystic, was a finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

Reece, now an ordained Episcopal priest, studied theology at Harvard and Yale. I've admired his poetry since his first book, A Clerk's Tale, was published in 2004. Acts is his new collection of poems.

Coste Lewis has, among other degrees, an M.T.S. from the Harvard Divinity School. Her stunning debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, won the National Book Award in 2015, and over the past decade she's produced work in a forbiddingly wide range of artistic mediums.

O'Leary is the author of one of the epigraphs in The Nimbus, and (no coincidence) one of my favorite working poets. Watchfulness is as good as any of his books, but I happily recommend them all.

If you're ever feeling bad about not having gotten enough done in life, I highly recommend...not thinking about Chris Adrian. He has an MFA, a divinity degree, and an MD, and he currently works (as best I can tell) as a pediatric oncologist. A Better Angel is his first story collection, and it's full of terrific work.

Cep, who holds an M. Phil in theology from Oxford, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship, and an M.Div from Yale, is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Furious Hours, a brilliant nonfiction account of the true-crime story that Harper Lee spent years working on and never managed to complete.

Akpan, a former Jesuit priest, studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of East Africa, in Kenya. I have not read his more recent book, New York, My Village, but I remember being wildly impressed by the stories in Say You're One of Them.