Harvard Divinity School

Divinity School professors have long taught ethics in the Yard. Beginning early in the 1880s, as HDS pioneered the analysis of "social problems" using the case method, Francis Peabody taught an undergraduate course on urban ills. Students called it "drainage, drunkenness, and divorce." Today teaching has to address other ethical anxieties. Despite claims of universal liberation, many of them have to do with sexuality and gender. Professor Mark Jordan discusses teaching sexual ethics at Harvard in the age of hook-up apps, fluid identities, and "affirmative consent." Mark D. Jordan is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Christian Thought at Harvard Divinity School and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.