School Notes: Yale Divinity School
March/April 2011

Endowed chair will celebrate religion-environment nexus

A future joint faculty chair at the Divinity School/Berkeley Divinity School and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies promises to substantially enhance the interdisciplinary study of theology and the environment that has taken hold at Yale in recent years. The Porter Chair will honor H. Boone Porter ’45, ’96MES, and his wife, Violet M. Porter, and is funded by a gift pledge of $3 million from the Porters’ children through the Porter Foundation. Boone Porter, who died in 1999, was a scholar, priest, writer, and environmentalist. He also received degrees from Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal Church affiliate at YDS. Mary Evelyn Tucker, a leading ecotheologian with joint appointments at Yale in Divinity and Forestry, said, “The field of religion and ecology is growing at a rapid rate. The Porter Chair is a sign of this growth and will be the first such chair in the United States. It is an historic moment and a great contribution, not only to Yale Divinity School but to seminary education across the country and beyond.”

Professor to deliver prestigious Gifford Lectures

YDS theologian Kathryn Tanner ’79, ’85PhD, will join the ranks of those who have given the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland—including such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, A. J. Ayer, Jürgen Moltmann, and Albert Schweitzer—when she delivers her lectures in 2015–16. The Gifford Lectures began in 1888 and, with the exception of 1942–1945, have been delivered continuously since that time. Tanner’s research focuses on how Christian thought might be brought to bear on contemporary issues of theological concern using social, cultural, and feminist theory. In December Tanner was named the Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology.

Renewal and reflection in 2011

In 2011 Noelle York-Simmons ’03MDiv will be visiting Episcopal churches across the country—she herself is a priest at All Saints’ Episcopal in Atlanta—photographing people’s hands taking the Eucharist and interviewing them about how their hands become the hands of Christ as they go out into the world. Ruth (Mori) Douglas Merriam ’81MDiv of the Church on the Cape (United Methodist) in Kennebunkport, Maine, will travel to theologian John Wesley’s home in England and then to Antarctica, where she will board a National Geographic vessel to explore the frozen world of explorer Ernest Shackleton. Merriam wants to examine how, in facing formidable obstacles, both Wesley and Shackleton were able to inspire their followers. These two latter-day pilgrims are among nine YDS graduates serving congregations in the 2010 class of Lilly Endowment Inc.’s National Clergy Renewal Program. Under the program, Christian congregations receive grants of up to $50,000 to support extended periods of intentional reflection and renewal for ministers, individually tailored by each congregation.