christianity

Desmond Mpilo Tutu (1931-2021) was a South African Anglican archbishop who became one of the moral authorities of his century, leading nonviolent resistance to apartheid and later guiding his country through the painful work of reckoning with what apartheid had done. Born in Klerksdorp to a schoolteacher father and a domestic-worker mother, he trained first as a teacher before entering the priesthood, ordained in 1960. He became Bishop of Lesotho in 1976, then Bishop of Johannesburg, and in 1986 became the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town, using the pulpit and the press with equal skill to make apartheid’s injustice visible to a world that preferred not to look. Tutu’s resistance stayed deliberately nonviolent even as the system he opposed grew more brutal, a discipline that cost him surveillance, threats, and the revocation of his passport, and that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. After apartheid fell, Nelson Mandela appointed him to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he insisted that justice required truth-telling before it could require forgiveness, and that forgiveness, rightly understood, was not an erasure of harm but a costly act of repair. He also popularized the Zulu-rooted concept of ubuntu for audiences well beyond South Africa, teaching that personhood is not a private possession but something realized only through other people. That teaching, captured in his own words, that his humanity is bound up in others’ humanity, for people can only be human together, names a relational view of personhood that resonates with a Mormon transhumanist emphasis on growth achieved in community rather than isolation. Tutu held that every person carries the image of God, and that cruelty against one person wounds that image everywhere. His life’s work, holding truth and reconciliation together rather than letting either substitute for the other, offers a model of moral seriousness for any tradition that hopes human beings might yet become more fully what they were created to be.

Jaxon Washburn is a Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures with a focus on Armenian Studies at UCLA. He holds a Master of Theological Studies in History of Christianity from Harvard Divinity School (2023) and dual bachelor’s degrees in Religious Studies and History from Arizona State University (2021), both earned summa cum laude. Raised in an interfaith household, Jaxon has long been passionate about religious studies and interfaith activism, with early speaking engagements at venues including the Parliament of the World’s Religions and the United Nations. He formerly served as youth advisor for the Arizona Interfaith Movement and as a member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. He went on to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Armenia—an experience that profoundly shaped the trajectory of his academic career. At Harvard Divinity School, Jaxon deepened his commitment to both scholarship and faith. He worked as a Research Associate with the Harvard Pluralism Project, contributing to efforts promoting religious literacy and interreligious engagement. His studies there also led to a published essay, “Mormonism: The Most American ‘Religious Other,’” in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Fall/Winter 2022). During his time at HDS, he developed a strong interest in Armenian religious history, studying Classical Armenian and working with Dr. Christina Maranci following the reestablishment of Harvard’s Mashtots Chair for Armenian Studies. Jaxon’s current research interests encompass the history of Christianity, Eastern and Armenian Christianity, mediums of interreligious exchange, and religious pluralisms in the South Caucasus. His earlier work on intersections between Hindu and Latter-day Saint traditions around themes of transfiguration and divine embodiment has broadened into a wider exploration of how religious communities interact, exchange, and develop across cultural boundaries.