The Harvard Divinity School Alumni/ae Association honored Dr. Mary E. Hunt with the 2008 Rabbi Martin Katzenstein Award on June 3, 2008 at the annual Harvard Divinity School Alumni/ae Dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hunt earned her doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union and is the co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland. A prominent feminist theologian and Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to liberation issues.

The Katzenstein Award recognizes a Harvard Divinity School graduate who demonstrates “a passionate and helpful interest in the lives of other people, an informed and realistic faithfulness, an embodiment of the idea that love is not so much a way of feeling as a way of acting, and a reliable sense of humor.”

Dr. Hunt spent several years teaching and working on women's issues and human rights in Argentina — work that continues through her present role with WATER. Previously, she was an adjunct assistant professor of women’s studies at Georgetown University, and lectured and taught at numerous other institutions, including Harvard Divinity School where she was a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life during the 2001-01 academic year.

Dr. Hunt’s work as an author and editor includes Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship, which earned the 1990 Crossroad Women’s Studies Prize. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, The Witness, and Open Hands. She is also an advisor to the Women’s Ordination Conference in addition to her membership with the advisory board of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Religious Archives Network, the Society for Christian Ethics, and the American Academy of Religion.