School Notes: Yale Divinity School
January/February 2016

The theology of joy and the good life

A new, three-year research project at the Center for Faith and Culture will study the theological connections between joy and the good life and lay the foundations for a movement that pursues questions of the good life in the academy and the broader culture. Funded by a $4.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the project will include monthly public lectures, two new university courses, and the production of informational videos and edited volumes and books. Principal investigator Miroslav Volf, the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at YDS and director of the center, explains, “For a vision of joy and the good life to take root in the academy and the wider culture, we need to change the way that theology as a discipline understands itself and its role.”

Alumni endow two new scholarships

YDS alumni have recently made major gifts to create two new endowed scholarships that will support students’ theological education and enable them to enter their careers with less student debt. Stephen Henderson ’87MAR and his husband, James LaForce, have made a $50,000 commitment to endow a scholarship fund with a preference for MAR students who identify as LGBTQ. Susan Miller ’73MAR, ’81MDiv, and her husband, Rudy Hokanson ’74MDiv, ’81MBA, have contributed $50,000 to establish a new scholarship with a preference for students preparing for Lutheran ministry. 

Movement leader brings race justice conversation to YDS

In one of the most anticipated events of the year at the Divinity School, Black Lives Matter leader DeRay McKesson guest-lectured at a weekend intensive leadership course for divinity students and held forth in a public conversation with Associate Dean William Goettler. “Protest,” said the activist and movement leader who is sometimes derided by critics as a professional protester, “is as American as America itself.” McKesson also rattled off memorable lines about race, police, social media as a movement-building tool, and the purpose of the now-familiar #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and moniker. The phrase, McKesson told Goettler and the Marquand Chapel audience, is not an affirmation. “We know we matter. . . . I am saying it to see how [people] respond, how structures respond.”