School Notes: Yale Divinity School
March/April 2017

YDS launches new concentrations

The Divinity School is launching two new concentrated programs of study in the master of arts in religion (MAR) degree path: Latinx and Latin American Christianity and Religion and Ecology. “We are excited to lead the way in these important areas of study,” said Jennifer Herdt, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and senior associate dean of academic affairs. “A rapidly growing percentage of US Christians today are Latinx. As symbolized by Pope Francis, Christianity’s center of gravity is increasingly shifting toward Latin America. And the environmental crisis is the most critical issue facing humanity today.”

The new program in Latinx and Latin American Christianity is led by a pair of new members of the YDS faculty, Erika Helgen and Benjamin Valentin—two of the nine professors in their first full year at the school. The Religion and Ecology concentration grows out of the decades-long work of senior lecturers Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim in building the field of religion and ecology, most recently in collaboration with the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

YDS dean Greg Sterling described the new concentrations as expressions of two of the major goals outlined in the school’s strategic plan: diversity and the effort to build a living-building residential complex.

New leadership for alumni board

Rick Spalding ’81MDiv is the new president of the Alumni Association Board of Yale Divinity School. Elected at the association’s fall meeting, Spalding will lead a board of 21 members who serve as ambassadors for the school, oversee the alumni awards program, participate in Convocation and Reunions planning, and support annual giving, among other activities on behalf of the school. Spalding, who is chaplain to the college at Williams College in Massachusetts, succeeds Kristin Foster ’77MDiv, who completed her two-year term as board president this fall. He has served on the board for five years and contributed to creation of its strategic plan in 2014.