Harvard Divinity School

For episode 14 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome the linguist and philosopher Wouter Kusters. Kusters is the author of Pure Madness (2004) and A Philosophy of Madness (2014), both of which won the Dutch Socrates Award for best philosophy book of the year. We discuss how the experience of psychotic thinking challenges and illuminates our notions of language, philosophy, and mysticism. Along the way, we touch on the similarities between mystical and mad experiences, apophatic and psychotic uses of language, the phenomenology of time, and the impact of Kusters’ books on mental health specialists.

David Holden, MDiv '24, came to HDS after a career in politics in search of ways to help others heal as a hospital chaplain. Transcript forthcoming.

On this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from second year MTS students Becca Leviss and Rucha Modi sharing the story of their early HDS friendship as a source for inspiration. Transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/04/30hope-podcast-featuring-becca-leviss-and-rucha-modi-mts-candidates

On this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from third year MDiv candidate Matta Zheng who teaches us about the interconnections between justice, the mundane, and hope. Transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/04/29/hope-podcast-featuring-matta-zheng-mdiv-candidate

For Episode 13 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome Shannon Taggart, an American photographer, writer, researcher, and curator known for exploring how photography can navigate boundaries between the seen and unseen. Her book, Séance (Fulger Press, 2019), offers hundreds of photographs documenting contemporary Spiritualism across the U.S. and Britain. We discuss what sparked Shannon’s interests in Spiritualism, the intersecting histories of photography and Spiritualism, ectoplasm, what inspires people to become mediums, and the techniques she developed for photographing the invisible.