School Notes: Yale Divinity School
November/December 2011

Library’s missions collection online

The latest digitization initiative at the Divinity School Library focuses on early annual reports of missions agencies in the Day Missions Library. Most of these documents, totaling some 1,500 volumes, date from 1850 to 1950, a time when the foreign missions enterprise was in its heyday and when tens of thousand of missionaries sailed from North America, Britain, and Europe to Africa, China, and many other distant locales. Taken together, the documents weave an intricate tapestry of the day-to-day activities of missionaries. This project, funded through a 2009 grant from the UK–based Arcadia Foundation, marks the first time the library has digitized portions of its own collections. It should be completed by next spring.

Mural honors 9/11 anniversary

Three years ago Gerald Facciani ’13MDiv and his wife, Karen, obtained a 60-foot mural painted in honor of victims of the 9/11 tragedy by the late American Expressionist artist Gregory Etchison. The acquisition proved to be prescient, as the mural, titled The Day, became a perfect way for YDS to participate in the university’s tenth anniversary commemoration of the tragic events that unfolded on September 11, 2001. The Faccianis arranged to have the mural shipped up from their Maryland home, and it hung eloquently in the Old Common Room September 6–30.

Edwards Center creates online journal

Following on the heels of a massive digitization project that has made some 100,000 pages of eighteenth-century theologian and preacher Jonathan Edwards’s writings accessible to the public via the Internet, the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale is launching a new online journal,Jonathan Edwards Studies. Creation of the online journal continues the center’s efforts to make the writings of Edwards more accessible, not only in the US but internationally as well. “I am particularly excited by this new online journal,” said journal editor Kenneth P. Minkema, executive director of the Jonathan Edwards Center, “because it is the first of its kind devoted to all things Edwards, and it is the desire of the JEC to make this journal a venue for all sorts of new and exciting work on his life, times, and legacy.”