Memories and beginnings
Eighty years to the day from when Harvard’s Memorial Church was dedicated in honor of the University’s dead from World War I, members of the University community gathered again in the sacred space on Veterans Day weekend to remember the fallen heroes of wartime, and to welcome a new spiritual leader. The Rev. Jonathan Walton‘s installation as the Pusey Minister and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals on Sunday coincided with Harvard’s annual ceremony to commemorate those who died for their country. “We are all beneficiaries of someone else’s sacrifices,” said Walton, citing his own indebtedness to his distant ancestors and extended family, as well as the nation’s debt to its war dead and its veterans. “None of us are self-made women or men, for it’s by the good will and grace of another, seen or unseen, that our imaginations, our aspirations, and our industriousness are able to take root and blossom into what...