Divinity school

School Notes: Yale Divinity School
September/October 2019

Gregory E. Sterling | http://divinity.yale.edu

Grant will support research on religion, race, and built environment

The Issachar Fund has awarded a grant to YDS professor Willie James Jennings to advance his research on the relationship between race, Christianity, and the built environment. At the center of the project is Jennings’s book in progress, tentatively titled Reframing the World. Jennings, associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies, plans to use the book and a related conference to start a conversation in academia and beyond that reimagines the meaning of human beings’ life together both intellectually and geographically, in relation to builtenvironments. “The formations of race and private property are joined developments in the Western world,” Jennings says. “Yet the importance of thinking about them together has for the most part escaped the academy.”

Divinity School honored for restoring Sterling Quadrangle

The New Haven Preservation Trust has awarded the Divinity School a landmark plaque in recognition of its more than 20-year effort to preserve and restore Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, the Georgian-style complex at the crest of Prospect Hill that has been the school’s home since 1932. The recognition “is wonderful for the entire university and for our school’s community because it both recognizes the beauty of the quad—and it is a beautiful place—and our appreciation and cultivation of that architectural beauty,” said Gregory E. Sterling, the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament at YDS. The Divinity School’s restoration culminated in late 2017 with completion of the renovation of the Old Refectory and Old Common Room, which today function as event spaces. New landscaping in the back courtyards and the installation of a Chartres-style labyrinth, both completed this past July, provide a finishing touch.

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