Zach at Harvard Div,Where Laughter Is Serious and Well Funded

Meet Zach

Zach Warren, MDiv '07, was drawn to Harvard Divinity School because of its juggling club. Once here, his talent for juggling and unicycling led him to the children's circus that would become the focus of his research and ministry training.

During his first year at HDS, Zach learned about the Mobile Mini Circus for Children (MMCC) in Afghanistan. When the circus invited him to teach juggling and unicycling, he created a summer field education placement through the Office of Ministry Studies: "It was the most magical experience I've had." The MMCC uses entertainment to provide education and support to over 300 children, helping to feed their spirit and sustain moments of joy. "For me, one of the primary reasons that religion, circus, and forms of artistic expression are important is because they help people move beyond survival mode."

Zach's passion for the circus has been woven into his time at HDS. He wrote his MDiv senior paper on the circus as a theological expression of Christian faith. "I looked at what it is about wonder and fascination that the circus tradition holds and which the Christian tradition celebrates, at where they overlap and compete for the same mythic space, and why it is that American churches over the past few decades in particular have taken on more strategies for entertainment that are circus-like, such as drumming, magic and dance." Themes of the circus pervade his research on Christianity: "The circus is about celebration, and Christianity is a strategy for celebration. Jesus' death and rebirth is a joyful trick, in a simple sense, the way peek-a-boo was pleasurable to us when we were children. Circus and Christianity tell mythic stories about death and rebirth, disappearing acts, impossible possibilities, the tightrope walker who tempts fate and survives, the lion tamer, the woman sawed in half and restored."

While completing his MDiv, Zach also made use of the resources at Harvard Medical School as a research fellow. "I wanted to find a way to measure children's resilience through laughter and smiles." He is working to find a quick tool to assess Afghan children most at risk for problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.

Zach was awarded the prestigious Frederick Sheldon Fellowship to return to Afghanistan and complete three research projects. First, he will create a cross-cultural laughter databank for research, examining "laughter acoustics." Second, he will collect jokes, particularly from religious leaders—continuing research he began several years ago, which has been funded by The New Yorker, National Public Radio, and HDS's Office of Ministry Studies. Finally, he will examine the way laughter affects stress responses across cultures.