School Notes: Yale Divinity School
May/June 2016

Discussing the “good life”

In a conversation on “Character, Flourishing, and the Good Life,” New York Times columnist David Brooks and Yale theologian Miroslav Volf agreed on at least one major point: In today’s world, people are “thirsty” to find deep meaning in their lives. Volf, the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at YDS, and Brooks, who also teaches Yale students as senior fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, shared the stage before a capacity audience February 22 in Battell Chapel, asking each other questions about what makes for a good life—a “life worth living.” Both speakers have recently written books exploring that subject. Volf’s book Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World was published by Yale University Press in January. Brooks is the author, most recently, of The Road to Character. Volf—who developed and coteaches the undergraduate Humanities Program seminar Life Worth Living as well as the Divinity School course Christ and the Good Life—told the audience that the great religions of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam “are our most potent repository of visions of the good life” and what it means to have a life that is “flourishing.”

Preserving voices of protest

A grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources will a fund a joint Yale-Harvard project to digitize, transcribe, and make available to scholars an archive of 4,500 petitions to the Massachusetts legislature by native tribes dating between 1640 and 1870. The experiences of more than 70 native communities—including some tribes’ frustrations over not sharing in the benefits of the Revolutionary War they helped win for the fledgling United States—are captured in the project, which is being undertaken by the Yale Indian Papers Project at Yale Divinity School and the Harvard/Radcliffe College Institute for Advanced Studies. Reads one petition, drafted in 1795: “At the close of a long & successful war, in which we had been honourably distinguished & had profusely bled, how are we disappointed!  How are our pleasing anticipations blasted!” The petition calls out the hypocrisy of those who had professed to cherish freedom and had “so enlarged ideas of the principles of civil liberty” but did not “respect the rights in others which they so warmly contend for themselves.”