Harvard Divinity School is one of the constituent schools of Harvard University, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. The School's mission is to train and educate its students either in the academic study of religion, or for the practice of a religious ministry or other public service vocation. It also caters to students from other Harvard schools that are interested in the former field. Harvard Divinity School is among a small group of university-based, non-denominational divinity schools in the United States (the others include the University of Chicago Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Wake Forest University School of Divinity).

Harvard College was founded in 1636 as a Puritan/Congregationalist institution, and trained ministers for many years. The separate institution of the Divinity School, however, dates from 1816, when it was established as the first non-denominational divinity school in the United States. (Princeton Theological Seminary had been founded as a Presbyterian institution in 1812. Andover Theological Seminary was founded in 1807 by orthodox Calvinists who fled Harvard College after it appointed liberal theologian Henry Ware to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity in 1805. ) Nevertheless, for most of its history, Harvard Divinity School was unofficially associated with the Unitarian church. However, it also retains a historical tie to one of the successor denominations of American Congregationalism, the United Church of Christ.

A seminary, theological college, or divinity school is an institution of secondary or post-secondary education for educating students (sometimes called seminarians) in theology, generally to prepare them for ordination as clergy or for other ministry. The English word is taken from the Latin seminarium, translated as seed-bed, an image taken from the Council of Trent document Cum adolescentium aetas which called for the first modern seminaries. As such, in the West the term usually refers to Roman Catholic educational institutes, but has widened to include other Christian denominations and American Jewish institutions.

The establishment of modern seminaries resulted from Roman Catholic reforms of the Counter-Reformation after the Council of Trent. The Tridentine seminaries placed great emphasis on personal discipline as well as the teaching of philosophy as a preparation for theology.

Some seminaries elect to acquire accreditation. In North America, four entities that accredit religious schools in particular are recognized by the United States Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation: Association of Advanced Rabbinical and Talmudic Schools, Association for Biblical Higher Education, Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, and Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools.

Leila Ahmed (born 1940; Arabic: لیلى أحمد‎) is an Egyptian American writer on Islam and Islamic feminism as well as being the first women's studies professor at Harvard Divinity School.

Born in the Heliopolis district of Cairo to a middle-class Egyptian father and an upper class Turkish mother in 1940, Ahmed's childhood was shaped both by Muslim Egyptian values and the liberal orientation of Egypt's aristocracy under the ancient régime. After Egypt's last ruling monarch was overthrown by the Free Officers Movement in 1952, life for Ahmed's family along with others in her milieu was irrevocably changed. Her father, a civil engineer, was a strong opponent of Gamal Abdel Nasser's construction of the Aswan High Dam on ecological principles. This earned him the wrath of the ruling regime for years to follow and had detrimental effects on the family.

She earned her doctorate degree from University of Cambridge during the 1960s before moving to the United States to teach and write, where she was appointed to professorship in Women’s Studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981 followed by a professorship in Women's Studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School in 1999, where she currently teaches.

Darryl Hunt (born 1965) is an African American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina who, in 1984, was wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a young white newspaper copy editor, Deborah Sykes, but was later exonerated by DNA evidence. He served 19 and a half years in prison before he was freed after review and exoneration.

A modern cause célèbre, his case was said to have "helped define race relations in Winston-Salem for 20 years."

Darryl Hunt is now a Muslim and involved in the Innocence Project, as well as his own group called The Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice. This project is devoted to "educating the public about flaws in the criminal justice system, advocating for those wrongfully incarcerated as a result of those flaws, and providing resources and support for those trying to rebuild their lives."

Darryl Hunt was charged with murder due to inconsistencies occurring during the early phases of the case. The 19-year-old Hunt was charged with the rape of a local copy editor, Deborah Sykes. No physical evidence linked Hunt to the crime, but there were claims, later proven to be false, made by a hotel employee who saw Hunt enter the hotel bathroom later that morning and exit leaving bloody hand towels, as well as other witnesses who placed Hunt near the scene. He was convicted by an all-white jury, and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1994, DNA testing cleared Hunt of any sexual assault, and because sexual assault was at the heart of the murder case, the murder charges were then in question. In December 2003, Willard E. Brown confessed to the 1984 rape and stabbing death of Deborah Sykes after DNA testing linked him to the crime. His confession led to the release of Darryl Hunt, who had served about 19 years of a life sentence for a crime he always denied committing.