School Notes: Yale Divinity School
January/February 2007

At the Yale Divinity convocation and reunions: a spontaneous voice against torture

It's not always easy to predict what might happen at the Yale Divinity School Convocation and Reunions, beyond events planned months in advance. The surprise at this year's celebration October 9-12 was a spontaneous petition drive aimed at challenging the government's controversial position on prisoner interrogations. Heading up the effort were two YDS alumni from the Class of 1956: Donald Beisswenger of Nashville, Tennessee, and Edward Hummel of Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The pair gathered signatures of alumni and current YDS students who signed on to endorse the Torture Is a Moral Issue statement of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Not only did the group decide to send the petition to the president and members of congress; they also resolved to ensure that discussions of war and peace are part of every future convocation and reunions gathering. Beisswenger is not counting on a reply from President George W. Bush ’68, but neither is he ruling it out. "I'm always open to the spirit," he said. "I mean, you can never tell. This event [the petition drive] did not seem like it would happen, but it did happen."

Works of Jonathan Edwards now available online

Hundreds of sermons and theological writings of eighteenth-century preacher, theologian, and Yale graduate Jonathan Edwards went online in October, thanks to the efforts of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, housed at the Divinity School. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online website -- at http://edwards.yale.edu/archive/ -- is now available in a public beta phase, after thousands of hours of use by the closed beta team. Some of the 200 sermons in the 25,000 pages of online text have never been published. Others are very well known, such as the sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, perhaps the most famous sermon ever written in America. Ultimately, the goal is to make the entire Jonathan Edwards manuscript corpus available on the website, which features a fully searchable and thematically, scripturally, and chronologically tagged interface that can be used by anyone with the appropriate software and Internet access. The center was established in October 2003 on the 300th anniversary of the birth of Edwards, viewed by many scholars as the most significant figure in American religious history.

Three YDS faculty appointed to endowed chairs

Willis Jenkins grew up on a farm in Virginia and, early in his scholarly career, worked in theological education and sustainable development with the Anglican Church of Uganda. Among the Ugandan Anglicans, he recalls, "Environmental issues were right at the heart of a lot of their concerns." Those life experiences helped shape Jenkins's scholarly interests in religion and environmental ethics, which he will now be pursuing at Yale Divinity School as the first-ever Margaret Farley Assistant Professor of Social Ethics.

Two other members of the Yale Divinity School faculty, both senior scholars, were appointed to endowed chairs in the fall along with Jenkins. Thomas Ogletree, a former dean of the Divinity School, was named the Frederick Marquand Professor of Ethics. He served as dean at YDS from 1990 to 1996 after nine years as dean of the Theological School at Drew University and three years at Vanderbilt University. An ordained United Methodist minister, he was also one of the principal drafters of the current United Methodist disciplinary statement on doctrinal standards.

Appointed the Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics is Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, who joined Yale Divinity School this year after serving on the pastoral staff of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Her research interests are in congregational studies and preaching, women's ways of preaching, and prophetic preaching. A former president of the Academy of Homiletics, Tisdale has served on the faculties of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia and Princeton Theological Seminary, and as adjunct faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

School of Drama
James Bundy, Dean
www.yale.edu/drama

West meets East

A Beijing Opera adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is being created by the chair of Yale's directing department along with opera director Tian Man Sha and Vice President Sun Hui Zhu of the Shanghai Theatre Academy in China. Liz Diamond and Tian Man Sha recently presented a workshop of their project at the 2006 International Symposium of Drama School Directors, hosted by the Shanghai Theatre Academy in October.

The Shanghai symposium brought together heads of drama schools and departments from 20 institutions around the world to discuss the rapidly changing cultural contexts within which our schools are training the next generation of theater makers. Speeches and workshops at the meeting covered a broad range of questions, addressing such topics as expanding training to include film, television, and other media; problems of censorship and self-censorship; the challenges that a global, market-driven culture presents to the theater artist seeking to create new forms; and the problems faced by artists trying to keep alive ancient theatrical performance forms. Diamond's speech to the symposium described Yale's efforts to broaden and deepen our students' exposure to theater artists, theatrical forms, and theatrical production models from around the world.

Among the outcomes of the symposium: commitments to develop structures for sharing faculty, to provide students with more and varied exchange opportunities, and to launch collaborative projects.