School Notes: Yale Divinity School
January/February 2013

Sterling installed as 14th YDS dean

Rarely does installation of a new dean immediately precede Convocation and Reunions. But this year the October 23 installation of Dean Gregory E. Sterling set the stage for the annual festivities. In his address, Sterling said he hopes to draw on the traditions of YDS in ways that are responsive to the seismic shifts in the religious landscape of the twenty-first century. “There is an urgent need to think about theology and the church afresh,” said Sterling. “We should not and must not begin de novo; we must begin just as the author of Ephesians began with the sources that have shaped our identity. We cannot, however, simply repeat those sources or our interpretations of them. The world has changed and so must we.”

Scholarly research leads to adventure

After nearly a decade of what she calls “old-fashioned archival research,” Professor Janet Ruffing has finished editing a volume of correspondence between married mystic Elisabeth Leseur and nursing sister Marie Goby—Lettres sur la soufrance: Correspondence avec soeur Marie Goby (1910–1914). For Ruffing, it is both a professional and a personal achievement. With the help of her brother and sister-in-law, who were living in France during the years of her research, Ruffing was able to retrace Leseur’s life in Paris and track down Goby’s home and parish church in the village of Beaune. Brother Kenneth located relevant newspaper archives, while sister-in-law Lorraine helped scour them for mentions of Goby’s hospital during World War I. Said Ruffing, “It was an adventure.”

Jonathan Edwards iPhone app

Say you are traveling in East Timor with your iPhone. And say you are wondering about hell and eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards. If you had downloaded the new iTunes app WJE Online you could search for “hell” and the first hit would take you to the introduction of the Edwards volume Freedom of the Will, followed by 2,000-plus other “hell” search results. Or you could browse the chronological sermon index. All while on the road in East Timor. WJE Online includes a corpus of some 100,000 pages of Edwards sermons, notebooks, letters, and treatises maintained by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale.