Divinity Hall (1826) is the oldest building in the Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University. It is located at 14 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Hall was designed by Solomon Willard and Thomas Sumner, and dedicated on August 29, 1826, with William Ellery Channing giving the dedicatory speech, "The Christian Ministry." It was the first Harvard building constructed outside Harvard Yard. As George Huntston Williams wrote in his 1954 history of the Divinity School, theological students needed to be isolated from undergraduates lest they drink up "more of the spirit of the University than of the spirit of their profession."
A decade later, on July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous Divinity School Address, "Acquaint Thyself at First Hand with Deity," in the Hall.
In its early days, Divinity Hall contained the entire Divinity School. It was later used as a dormitory, then classrooms. Notable residents have included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and philosopher George Santayana. Its chapel contains a fine organ by George S. Hutchings, recently restored.
Today, the building houses classrooms, faculty offices, and several administratie offices, including the Office of Student Life, the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, the Office of the Registrar, the Office of Communications, and the Office of Development and External Relations.
Famous quotes containing the words divinity and/or hall:
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The statements of science are hearsay, reports from a world outside the world we know. What the poet tells us has long been known to us all, and forgotten. His knowledge is of our world, the world we are both doomed and privileged to live in, and it is a knowledge of ourselves, of the human condition, the human predicament.”
—John Hall Wheelock (1886–1978)