Finding relevance in Christianity
As a student at Yale Divinity School in the late 1960s, I appreciated reading your cover story (“Living Faith,” May/June). It led me to reflect on the twin evils those of us at YDS at that time were confronting and contemplating in light of the church’s role in the world—an immoral war in Southeast Asia, on the one hand, and the daily scourge of white supremacy at home. The assassination of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in the spring of my senior year at Yale, along with the inspiration and mentorship of Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin ’49, ’56BD, led me to YDS. Many in our era came to the school not necessarily out of a clear conviction that Christian ministry would be our chosen field, but more from an existential struggle over how to make sense of our lives and find some meaningful way to serve.
Reading the YAM piece, I felt hungry for a deeper analysis, one that would cast some light on how YDS students and faculty today are grappling with the present relation of Christianity to two of the central evils of our time—the imminent threat of fascism, on the one hand, and the pernicious resurgence of white Christian nationalism on the other. If we are seriously considering “a blueprint for how faith practitioners, theorists, and educators can stay relevant” in the moment we are now in, we must confront these two realities—realities I am certain are being conscientiously wrestled with in the classrooms and common room conversations at YDS.
I would like to read that story.
Gary Howard ’68, ’69Div
Langley, WA
“Living faith.” So does the cover of the Yale Alumni Magazine entitle an article on the Divinity School. However, the article itself does not invoke the name of Jesus even once. Does its view of twenty-first-century Christianity include any room for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?
In Luke 12:8–9, Jesus says, “Also I say unto you, whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: But he that denies me before men shall be denied before the angels of God.” Apparently, YDS doesn’t take Jesus’s warning seriously.
A Christianity without Jesus and without faith in His atonement and resurrection offers nothing special. The Spirit of Jesus alone gives His ethical teachings divine power. Without the Living Spirit of Jesus, YDS promotes dead scholarship and progressive platitudes.
I pray YDS recovers its true spiritual roots.
Philip Turner ’68
Charlestown, NH
Your story reflected part, but far from most, of the practical theology YDS offers America and the world from its gleaming hilltop quad. Under Dean Greg Sterling, the school has navigated turbulent currents and stayed true to authentic and multi-denominational Christian faith.
YDS also shelters a vital constellation of centers and institutes. The largest might be the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, a leading center for the interdisciplinary study of sacred music, worship, and the arts. A second supports inquiry into the life, writings, and legacy of Jonathan Edwards (BA, 1720), widely considered America’s greatest theologian. Another is the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, whose work I observe firsthand as the chair of its advisory board. Led by director Miroslav Volf, YCFC fosters visions of human flourishing through two teaching and research platforms: Christ & Flourishing (for Christian contexts) and Life Worth Living (for pluralistic contexts, beginning with Yale itself). Over the last dozen years, YCFC has created a global network of educators who have taught more than 4,000 students in contexts ranging from churches to colleges to army bases and prisons.
In an increasingly polarized world, YCFC and YDS itself offer hope that all women and men can discover meaning and purpose in faith lived out day by day, not only by head, but also by hand and heart.
Bill Cross ’81
Manchester, MA
Yale as matchmaker
I loved the article about couples who met through Yale later in life (“Worth the Wait,” May/June). My husband (Joshua Faucett ’19DNP) and I met at the School of Nursing in 2016. We got married in 2019, two weeks before we graduated with our doctor of nursing practice degrees! (It was the second marriage for both of us.)
Kendra Faucett ’19DNP
Nashville, TN
A duel and its context
Readers of Tom Attard-Manche’s interesting article (“A Fatal Duel Between Yale Students,” May/June) might be curious about some quite different Cogdell family context and trauma, in particular James Cogdell’s father’s children with an enslaved woman, Sarah Martha Sanders. In my recent book, Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History (UNC Press, 2024), I mention the duel that is described in much greater detail here, but the story I tell is centrally about Richard Cogdell’s relationship with his formally enslaved children and their lives in Charleston and Philadelphia. Along the way, I invite readers to join historians in the process of American history-making itself.
Lori Ginzberg ’85PhD
Philadelphia, PA
Ms. Ginzberg is professor emeritus of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State University.
Thank you for publishing “A Fatal Duel Between Yale Students” by Tom Attard-Manché ’25. I very much appreciate that undergraduate history research can provide such insight into Yale’s history and the history of dueling in the US. I appreciate also the context that was provided by showing how both Yale leaders Noah Webster and Timothy Dwight IV actively spoke against dueling.
My larger question is, “what is ‘honor’ among slave holders?” I wish that this duel and the term “honor” had been placed in a larger context of a society that completely depended on and profited from the labor of enslaved Africans, even in the North. The article points out that 10 percent of Yale’s students in the early 1800s were from the South. What is not mentioned is that the vast majority of these Southern students were from the planter enslaver class. (As many have recently pointed out, these enslavers were an earlier version of the Epstein-like pedophile rapist class.) They were able to attend Yale because of the labor of their enslaved Black workers. Were duelers Wigfall and Cogdell slaveholders? We are not told, but it is likely they were. Would living and profiting from enslaved humans undermine or change our concept of these students’ version of “honor?”
What we do know, according to the Yale and Slavery Research Project, is that the last slave auction to take place in New Haven occurred in 1825 (!), after the date of the Wigfall-Cogdell duel described in the article. We know that Yale president Timothy Dwight, while against dueling, was an enslaver. We know that the primary defender of slavery in the US Senate for decades, John C. Calhoun, was Yale Class of 1804. We know that the largest donor to Yale in the nineteenth century, cotton merchant Joseph Sheffield, was fiercely anti-abolitionist. We know that 511 Yale students and graduates fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy, including, incredibly, 28 from Connecticut. This is the larger societal context in which this duel took place.
Nathan Dudley ’82
Brooklyn, NY
How united?
Lanny Davis (“More United Than You Think,” May/June) advocates a Clinton-like, poll-obsessed, compromise-at-all-costs approach, which worked once in 1992. Since then, we’ve seen that such a strategy allows extremist opponents to move your “moderate center” at will, and it signals to your supporters and opponents alike that your principles are malleable. It has resulted in fiasco after fiasco, both morally and strategically. My heart goes out to Davis, who is skilled at lobbying but apparently illiterate at reading the current moment.
Jane Garvin ’01
Williamstown, MA
Lanny Davis’s article poses a classic “half-full versus half-empty” question. The article finds it heartening that 80 percent of those polled say they believe in the right to free speech. But that suggests that some 20 percent of Americans do not believe in that most foundational right. According to the poll, 83 percent reject political violence, but apparently one in six Americans do not reject it. In a country of more than 250 million adults, those “half empty” percentages produce large minorities. Reaction to the numbers should depend on our aspirations. We need to make the glass fuller.
Jeremy Williams ’68MA
Altadena, CA
What's in a name?
Regarding the item about secretary of war Pete Hegseth announcing that the “department of defense” would cancel senior service college fellowships with 22 universities, including Yale, because of “woke indoctrination” (Campus Clips, May/June): way to beclown yourself while making Secretary Hegseth’s point. It’s the department of war, stupid.
Z. Dwight Billingsly ’76
St. Louis, MO
Like the Associated Press and many other news organizations, we continue to refer to the department of defense by its legal name, which takes an act of Congress to change.—Eds.
Trudeau's artistry
Like Garry Trudeau (“Garry Trudeau Is Still Learning,” March/April), I remember the draft lottery of December 1969, as I shivered in the frigid flurries after leaving the Linonia and Brothers room, where I was the desk monitor for the evening. Like Garry, I lived in Davenport, and though we never met, I was in his drawing class with Professor Bernard Chaet that year. Garry never attended, as he was working at the Yale Daily News each day, creating the extraordinary bull tales, which we all read with such relish.
What I want people to know is what a great artist Garry Trudeau truly is. For example, one of our assignments was to draw a self-portrait. Well, the next session, when we all posted our attempts on the wall of the studio, the rest of us had struggled to draw full heads, to greater or lesser success. But Garry—in his creative, imaginative individuality—had sent in a sheet on which he had drawn (in the most delicate graphite conceivable) a series of the most extraordinary, exquisite pairs of eyes you ever saw! There were joyful eyes, worried eyes, furious eyes, and tearful eyes. And just the eyes! But they were altogether amazing. I marveled over the delicate draftsmanship displayed before us on the wall, which bore no resemblance to the stylized cartoons we had come to love.
I remember the experience vividly! It was just like seeing Picasso’s youthful portraits and comparing them with abstractions for which he was later rightfully renowned.
Nathan M. Wise ’72
Old Saybrook, CT
Editor’s Note
In our May/June issue, we published a letter from an alumnus about his acquaintance with Garry Trudeau’s father. The details of the letter—the man’s first name, his military service, and his place of residence—are inconsistent with those of the elder Trudeau’s life. Apparently, the man our correspondent knew was not telling the truth. We have removed the letter from our online edition. We normally confirm facts in letters to the editor, and we made a mistake in not checking this one. We regret the error.
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