School Notes: Yale Divinity School
November/December 2015

Training transformational leaders

As one of the first major steps in the implementation of the school’s strategic plan, YDS is launching a new program in Transformational Leadership for Church and Society this fall, which aims to impart leadership skills and inspiration to students at YDS and across the university. The one-credit courses revolve around two-day weekend interactions with the guest lecturers; students do extensive preparatory readings and then write papers following the weekend events. The guest lecturers this fall include: DeRay Mckesson, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, on movement building; US Senator Chris Coons ’92MAR, ’92JD, on transformation in public service and politics; and Rev. Nancy Taylor ’81MDiv, senior minister of Old South Church in Boston, on transformational leadership preparing for disasters.

NEH funds YDS-affiliated projects

A biography of One World Trade Center and online publication of the papers of Jonathan Edwards are among the projects of YDS-related scholars to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in its latest grant awards. The awards include: $37,800 to independent scholar Judith Dupré ’11MDiv to write a biography of One World Trade Center, which will explore the tower’s planning, aesthetic premise, and historical origins; a grant of $250,000 to the Jonathan Edwards Center to help fund the online publication of the collected papers of Edwards; and a $100,000 grant to Greg Sterling, the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament, to prepare an English translation and critical commentary on The Life of Abraham by Philo of Alexandria.

A communion of subjects

A new interdisciplinary course, A Communion of Subjects: Law, Environment, and Religion, is taking Yale students to the intersection of law, religion, and the environment in pursuit of solutions to the challenges of contemporary environmental law and policy. Jointly offered by the law, divinity, and environment schools, the course grew out of the research and teaching of Douglas Kysar, the Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law. His book Regulating from Nowhere examines the traditional approaches to environmental law and regulation and finds a glaring flaw: the lack of a cogent and sustainable ethical foundation on which to build the familiar and accepted modes of decision making such as cost-benefit analysis. In an effort to create a course that provides equal value to ethical, environmental, and legal concerns in this pursuit, Kysar enlisted the help of John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, faculty with joint appointments at FES and YDS and the founders of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale.