School Notes: Yale Divinity School
January/February 2010

New journal launched by YDS students

At Yale Divinity School, students are always transforming the way scholarship is done in and outside the classroom. So it only seems natural that YDS would have a student publication that celebrates student scholarship in various fields of study. The inaugural issue of the new semi-annual, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal Glossolalia (from the Greek meaning “speaking in tongues”) has 15 articles, on subjects that include “Imagining Eve: Sensation and the Poet’s Sympathy,” “The Poetics of Epiphany in Arab-American Literature,” and “Religious Metaphor in Moliere’s L’Ecole des femmes.”Glossolalia co-founder Rebecca Lenn ’10MDiv said, “The diversity of interests and scholarly expressions presented in this journal is a testament to what I would call the multi-vocality of scholarship at YDS—scholarship that starts with each and every YDS student.”

“No Man Is an Island” and the Global Opportunities Fund

“I thought, what a tremendous inspiration for our Global Opportunities Fund. No one of us is an island.  We are all pieces of the human continent, and that is what we’re trying to lift up and affirm through the Global Opportunities Fund.” Those were the words of Ralph Barlow ’59BD, ’64STM, at Convocation and Reunions 2009, quoting the famous John Donne meditation “No Man Is an Island” as he announced the Class of ’59’s 50th reunion gift of $122,860. Under the terms of the fund, financial assistance will be available to send YDS students abroad for study and to bring overseas students to YDS. Barlow said his thoughts about Donne were inspired by the death in August of YDS professor emeritus James Dittes: “Something of me was diminished when Jim Dittes died.”

Saturday night and Sunday morning convergences

Indigo Girls musician Emily Saliers and her father, Don Saliers ’62BD, ’67PhD, liturgical musician and former Yale Divinity School professor of theology, entertained an enthusiastic Convocation and Reunions crowd at Battell Chapel October 13 with a richly woven tapestry of musical offerings and stories drawn from both the secular and the sacred. Two of the songs performed by the father-daughter team were dedicated to Annie Le ’13PhD, the 24-year-old Yale student murdered in a Yale research building in September. The first of those songs, an arrangement of “Be Still and Know that I Am God,” was followed by a deep silence, prompting Don Saliers to observe, “Some music breaks the silence. Some music brings the silence.” The evening of music and conversation was sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music.