Religious Trauma Symposium 2026

Religious trauma is a subject of mounting scholarly and popular attention with direct implications for the challenges of modernity. Yet despite academic and professional interest across fields, there has yet to be an event designed to bring these various circles into direct dialogue with one another.

The Religious Trauma Symposium 2026 will bring together scholars, clinicians, policymakers, artists, and members of the public to critically and compassionately engage with the realities of religious trauma. While conversations about religious trauma are gaining traction in public spaces, academic research and professional practice have yet to fully shape the discourse.

This symposium seeks to create a rigorous, interdisciplinary platform for dialogue, rooted in lived experience and dedicated to advancing both understanding and healing.

• Kickoff event: staged reading of Broken Covenant: Stories of Religious Trauma, followed by a talkback with the playwrights

• Plenary and Breakout panels.
• Keynote conversation with Dan McClellan and Dan Beecher from the podcast Data Over Dogma

Info: Written by our symposium chair, Leah Gawel, this verbatim play will serve to introduce symposium themes on religious trauma through narrative storytelling.

Info: Talkback after the play with the author, Leah Gawel, and supervisor Martin McClendon on the process and application of verbatim theatre as social commentary and activism.

Info: From the podcast Data over Dogma, Dan and Dan discuss religious trauma and religious studies

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Host or Publisher Graduate Students of Harvard Divinity School, University of Texas in Austin, and University of Chicago Divinity School