School Notes: Yale Divinity School
May/June 2019

YDS climate panel in Atlanta pushes past denial and despair

Hope does not come easy or cheap, as YDS professor Clifton Granby put it, in a time when climate change is advancing and human society seems unable to respond. But while not flinching from the enormity of the challenge—the greatest humans have ever faced, in the words of panel member Mary Evelyn Tucker—a YDS public forum in Atlanta on March 13 offered the audience cause for hope and actions to take to address the crisis. “The good news,” said Tucker, cofounder of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, “is that young people, indigenous people, and religious leaders and laity . . . are mounting a fierce moral force.” The Atlanta panel, attended by 150 people at the Cathedral of St. Philip and many more watching the livestream broadcast, was part of a series of Divinity School public forums held around the country to apply a theological and ethical lens to pressing public issues. 

Alumna appointed dean of Andover Newton at YDS

Martin Copenhaver ’80MDiv, who has served as president of Andover Newton Theological School since 2014, has announced plans to retire from that position in June. Sarah Drummond ’93 will succeed Copenhaver as chief executive of Andover Newton, which has affiliated with YDS and sold its campus in Newton, Massachusetts.

Yale lands top New Testament scholar

Laura Nasrallah, currently professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, will join YDS and Yale’s Department of Religious Studies next year as professor of New Testament. “Yale has a long-standing tradition of excellence in New Testament,” YDS dean Greg Sterling said. “I have complete confidence that Professor Nasrallah will continue Yale’s and the Divinity School’s tradition of exemplary New Testament scholarship and teaching.”