School Notes: Yale Divinity School
March/April 2015

YDS-based researchers identify writer of prized 1776 journal

The Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP) and the Mohegan Council of Elders are reacting with great excitement to the discovery of historically significant writings by two noted tribal cultural figures: Samson Occom (1723–1792), an eighteenth-century Mohegan minister and preacher, and Fidelia Smith Fielding (1827–1908), the last known speaker of the Mohegan Pequot language. During a fall visit to the archives of the Thomas Leffingwell House & Museum in Norwich, Connecticut, Paul Grant-Costa ’08PhD and Tobias Glaza of the Divinity School–based YIPP examined an unidentified 1776 manuscript describing a religious deathbed discussion between a Mohegan Indian woman and her mother. The content of the document made it valuable in its own right, but subsequent research and analysis revealed a bigger surprise: The document narrative was written by Occom, and notations made on it more than 60 years later were penned by Fielding. (See “Deathbed Testament” for a Yale Alumni Magazine article about the find.)

YDS staffer wins international honor

Matthew Croasmun ’01, ’06MAR, ’14PhD, director of research and publications at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School, has been named a winner of the University of Heidelberg’s Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise for 2015. Croasmun is one of ten scholars from around the world named by the awards program, which recognizes outstanding doctoral or first postdoctoral works addressing the topic of God and spirituality, broadly defined. Croasmun was recognized for his Yale University dissertation, “The Body of Sin: An Emergent Account of Sin as a Cosmic Power in Romans 5–8.”