School Notes: Yale Divinity School
May/June 2009

Divinity School expands student exchange programs to Asia

Over the semester break, Divinity School dean Harold Attridge traveled to the northern reaches of the coast of Asia in South Korea and down to the southern extremities in Malaysia. The trip, January 2-10, included visits with alumni, theological educators, and church leaders. When all was said and done, the dean had accomplished one of the trip's primary goals: to cement agreements with two theological schools in order to expand YDS's student exchange programs to include Asia as well as Europe. The School will now have exchanges with students at the Divinity School of Chung Chi College in Hong Kong and Trinity Theological College in Singapore, complementing ongoing exchange programs at Westcott House in Cambridge, England, and at three German institutions. Attridge called the expanded program "a step toward a new and more dynamic program to engage the world."

Recruitment efforts hit the road

The Divinity School's student recruitment efforts took a new twist this fall by bringing a bit of Sterling Divinity Quadrangle "into the pews" on a four-stop tour of New York and New England churches, where alumni and potential students were treated to presentations by senior faculty members Thomas Troeger and Emilie M. Townes. This initiative was the collaborative brainchild of the school's admissions and alumni offices, centered on the idea that churches with significant alumni connections are likely to be fertile ground for finding future YDS students. Each event, titled "An Evening With Yale Divinity School," was unique and took place in a parish where a Divinity School graduate serves as pastor or assistant pastor.

Meanwhile, applications to YDS are up 13 percent over last year's totals. Dean Harold Attridge told Newsweek magazine, "Maybe people are getting religion in the face of the materialist empire; maybe jobs are scarce out there. Divinity school looks good, especially if there's financial aid, and i-banking isn't as attractive as it was a while ago."

Beam me up: Jonathan Edwards in the twenty-first century

The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University has unveiled a next-generation digital online text collection relating to eighteenth-century preacher Jonathan Edwards. Editorially tagged and fully searchable by chronology, theme, and scripture, as well as full text, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online has offered, for the past three years, an expertly guided research experience in the papers of Edwards. Now, version 2.0 of The Works (http://edwards.yale.edu) takes that a step further with more bibliographic search and text object fields, refined search results, and the integration of a multimedia library of manuscript images and video recordings. "This edition of 73 digital volumes consists of almost all of the writings of Edwards. Such a vast collection of digital text, as a result of more than 50 years of scholarly work, will extraordinarily support the continuing and global interest in Edwards's writings," said Kenneth Minkema, executive director of the center.