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Angie Heo, Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion, delivered the following address at the University of Chicago Divinity School’s 2026 Convocation Hooding and Pinning Ceremony, revisiting her 2023 Admitted Students' Day address on“The Work of the Divinity School.”

Dean Robinson and Dean Maduff, esteemed colleagues, proud families and precious friends, and especially those of you in cap and gown: the Class of 2026. Congratulations. 

I am truly honored to deliver this address as you stand at the threshold of all that lies ahead. While preparing my remarks, I found myself returning to a previous address I delivered in March 2023. It was Admitted Students’ Day, and I’d been assigned to speak on the topic: “The Work of the Divinity School.” Some of you here were seated there, in the century-old Swift Lecture Hall beneath those magnificently carved rafters and “reading angels,” asking if this degree would justify what it would ask of you.

So, here we are: on the other side, together once again. And now, the question is truly yours to answer: Well … was it worth it? Truth be told, only time will tell. But to get you started, allow me to revisit with you once more “The Work of the Divinity School.” 

Let’s face it, the value of slow thought and deliberative conversation is in peril these days. In honoring the work we do today, I remember as much for my own sake as I do for yours, because we need to. We all know well that the humanities, including the study of religion, confront, perhaps more than ever, the relentless pull of markets and machines. To resist the pull, let’s elevate what you did here and why it matters for when you leave and go elsewhere. To do justice to “The Work of the Divinity School,” I’ll be borrowing a term you’ve likely encountered in your years with us: “craft.”

“Craft” is a term I regularly encounter at the University of Chicago and nowhere else. “Craft”—as in “the craft of teaching” or “the craft of writing”—is a word that connotes care and capacity. It refers to a technique forged over time and through practice, failure, iteration, and return. The craft of drafting drafts. Or the craft of reading a text until it reads you back. “Craft” has an old-school feel to it, calling us to imagine a world of artisans and guilds, sturdy chairs and flashes of creativity, and a place, yes, “Where God Drinks Coffee.” 

To our dear alums: I completely get the nostalgia. To our dear graduates: I recognize you pursued the myriad crafts of learning in a fierce crucible, in the shadow of a pandemic and amid forces openly hostile to higher education. To our MAs and MDivs in particular: a little bird told me that you went that extra mile to ensure we do our work in a supportive community. When I asked around about whom I’d be addressing today, I was told that this year’s graduating master’s cohorts are truly special, and I quote: “They have big hearts, they check in with each other, they show up, they’re excited to be here.” For this, we thank you. 

In recent years, I’ll admit, there have been times when I’ve questioned what we’re doing here, and I’m willing to bet you have, on occasion, also indulged your doubts. For me, my reckoning stems not from doubt in the value of what we do, but more from concern that what we do is not valued by the world surrounding us. 

To my good fortune, a friend and colleague of mine, without knowing it, reminded me that our crafts are needed more than ever. A prominent historian of the Korean War, he directed my attention to an editorial penned by a foreign policy analyst.

The opening statement stopped me in my tracks, and it reads: “Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.”¹

We live in a time of incomprehensible information density. We are flooded with content faster than we can understand it, and the stakes of moral attunement are very heavy indeed. There is an unavoidably human gap between data (algorithmic surveillance, real-time feeds) and meaning—dare I say it, ultimate meaning—that is, what someone fears, cherishes, commemorates, and dies for. That gap between observing and understanding, that great tradition of interpretation—that is the gap your education here at the Divinity School was precisely envisioned to probe and close. 

I want to make a case that everything you have gathered here—all the techniques, all the methods, all the hard-won capacities—amounts to something larger than a toolkit. Call it “craft” in the fullest sense: not just technique, but wisdom.  A way of knowing that is far from innocent, like the cunning of a curious fieldworker, or the discernment of a philosopher who sits longer with a question to know what it is really asking. In a moment when others chase bloated paychecks or the simple ease of not needing to know, you chose differently. You chose the slow, attentive work of poring through sentences, wrestling words into shape, and inhabiting a new language, even two. You sat with communities, with rituals, with texts, long enough to understand not just what people do, but what it means to them, and why. That is not a small thing; in fact, it is the most necessary thing.

When I survey the dissertation titles of our PhD graduates today, I am confident you carry with you the great importance of interpretive inquiry. Let’s take a moment to recognize the significance of these topics and the courage it must have taken to write about them:  topics including Jewish supremacy in medieval exegesis; white nationalism and civil religion in the American South; moral responsibility in a world after truth with a capital T; and the list goes on. You are the ones to remind us that the crafts of deliberate thought and deep meaning are not only valuable but vital if we want to maneuver, flourish, and, frankly, live fulfilling lives.

This brings me to my final point. Obviously, the “work of the Divinity School” was and is hard, at times, grueling. It makes sense that some liken academics to athletics, a fitness of mind that requires exercise and stamina. But, at the risk of bordering on the banal: yes, “learning is fun.” 

Our great fortune in this universe of unequal vocations is that our work here is actually supposed to be fun, not drudgery. The fun I am talking about here is not unserious gab or disposable leisure. The fun I am talking about here is one of unbought pleasure: the sudden bursts of unexpected association that arrive uninvited and illumine something or everything. It’s the way in which our minds and bodies make every ordinary encounter more vibrant, attuned, keen, and sentient to what many others pass by without a second thought. What else would a “full life” be and look like? How else would we get through the endless monotony of swiping up and down, or the thin satisfaction of going viral? 

Legend has it that the University of Chicago is “where fun comes to die.” Well, here’s a reversal for you: in a world where fun has not so much died but been flattened, our craftwork is nothing short of the antidote. The truth is, we don’t really need to bring bouncy castles into the quad because our work was precisely intended to make the so-called slow and boring leap, spring, and pop. We all know well that religion is not going away any time soon, in the U.S. or elsewhere. Whatever Netflix’s best may be, it still can’t match the raw power of a vision of Jesus, the devil, or the mystics. And if the History of Religions has anything to tell us, ravenous ghosts are all the more active in times of scarcity and purging. Let’s just say we’re not short of any interesting material as you walk out of Rockefeller today.

The Divinity School is not Swift Hall. It is not the faculty who stay like fixtures after you leave. What our School really amounts to is what you carry out with you, something forged in the craft itself. Your voice is thicker than when you first arrived, more vibrant, animated, and tempered by the voices around you. I can’t tell you how many times, while leading a discussion, one of you around the table will bring an insight no one has brought before. Or spark a line of thought for someone else’s project that would end up occupying a decade of that other person’s life. Call it “communion” or call it “social impact.” The whole point is that much of the thrill of the craft is also reaching someone else in the room under just the right conditions. 

The conversations you had here remain yours when you leave—now with more cunning, discernment, and ownership.  Go out. Let yourself be surprised by what you can see and do. Come back and visit us sometime; I heard you might even miss us. Congratulations, Class of 2026.

1. ^Yonatan Touval, "Is It 1914 in America?” New York Times, March 29, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/israel-us-war-iran-literature.html.