Research and Outreach
The Yale Divinity School is part of a research university committed to transmitting and producing knowledge in ways that serve both students and alumni. At the Divinity School, with its emphasis on having an impact on the larger world, these functions continue to expand and deepen.
Yale Center for Faith and Culture
The mission of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture is to critically examine and promote, by means of theological research and leadership development, practices of faith which advance authentic human flourishing and the global common good. The center aims to understand the integral link between faith and human flourishing and then to nurture leaders in all spheres of life who draw on the resources of faith in their vision and promotion of human flourishing and the global common good.
Founded in 2003 by its present director, Miroslav Volf, the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School, the center seeks to engage major cultural issues from the perspective of faith, with groundbreaking research and leadership programs. Information on current activities and research can be found at the center’s Web site, www.yale.edu/faith.
The center’s mission is currently pursued in three major areas.
God and Human Flourishing, headed by Professor Volf, is the center’s cornerstone project, framing and informing the research and engagements of the other programs while at the same time drawing on their research results. Its goal is to explore human flourishing with an aim to expose the inadequacy of experiential satisfaction as the defining characteristic of human flourishing and to propose an alternative and deeper definition of flourishing rooted in convictions about God.
Faith, Ethics, and the Global Economy aims to encourage business leaders to increasingly recognize the contribution of faith-based virtues in the life of healthy economic institutions and to support leaders as they incorporate these virtues into their moral business vision.
The Reconciliation Program, led by Joseph Cumming, is concerned with overcoming the current crisis in relations with the Muslim world, seeking to promote reconciliation between Muslims and Christians, and between Muslim nations and the West, drawing on the resources of the three Abrahamic faiths and the teachings and person of Jesus.
The Jonathan Edwards Center and Online Archive
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Yale graduate, pastor, revivalist, philosopher, missionary, and college president, is the subject of intense interest because of his significance as an historical figure and the profound legacy he left on America’s religious and intellectual landscapes. The mission of the Jonathan Edwards Online Archive is to produce a comprehensive database of Edwards’s writings (www.edwards.yale.edu) that will serve the needs of researchers and readers. The Online Archive also serves to support inquiry into his life, writings, and legacy by providing resources and assistance, and to encourage critical appraisal of the religious importance and contemporary relevance of America’s premier religious thinker. Simply put, no comparable digitized archive for an American historical figure has yet been envisioned.
The Edwards Online Archive is housed within the larger site of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale Divinity School, the most prestigious center for scholarship on Jonathan Edwards and related topics. Staff members assist numerous scholars of Edwards and American religion every year, offering them a half-century of expertise in working with the Edwards manuscripts, as well as guidance through the vast secondary literature. The center’s staff provides adaptable, authoritative resources and reference works to the many scholars, secondary school and college-level teachers, seminarians, pastors, churches, and interested members of the general public who approach Edwards from any number of different perspectives. Complementing the archive of primary texts are reference works, secondary works, chronologies, teaching tools, and audio, video, and visual sources. The center also encourages research and dialogue through publications, fellowships, lectures, workshops, and conferences.
The staff of the Jonathan Edwards Center consists of Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Adriaan C. Neele, assisted by a team of student editorial assistants. The office can be contacted by telephone, 203.432.5340, or e-mail, worksje@yale.edu. The center also maintains a weekly blog: www.jonathanedwardscenter.blogspot.com.
The Initiative on Religion and Politics at Yale
The initiative seeks to foster thoughtful activism, enrich scholarly discourse, and deepen public conversation on the place of religion in public life, nationally and internationally. It is guided by a coordinating committee of faculty and students from a variety of disciplines and religious affiliations, and draws on the talents of local religious and community leaders, scholars from across the University, and their counterparts near and far.
The initiative aims to enliven students’ “social imagination”—their appreciation of the political dynamics of religious life and the religious dynamics of public life—and to equip them for a lifetime of service as progressive religious leaders rooted in a prophetic tradition. The initiative is also committed to creating an intellectual space in which scholars can pay sustained attention to the complex interaction of religion and politics in contemporary societies and can articulate the ways in which theological discourses are relevant to contemporary social and political concerns. A third aim is to speak forcefully in the public sphere about the social and political issues of the day.
The initiative is not partisan, in the sense of being aligned with any political party, organization, or platform. It does, however, recognize the profound power of politics—broadly conceived as the processes by which societies govern themselves, allocate goods and services, formulate public policies, and pursue the common good—to both help and harm. Thus the initiative aims to be a prophetic voice in the public square, directly addressing concerns of inequality and injustice in the many areas of common life where religion and politics meet.
The initiative can be found online at www.yale.edu/religionandpolitics.
Initiative in Religion, Science, and Technology
The mission of the Divinity School’s Initiative in Religion, Science, and Technology (IRST) is to engage the Yale community in interdisciplinary consideration of the ways religion and spirituality encounter and interact with science and technology, with special emphasis on the theological, spiritual, philosophical, ethical, and scientific implications of those encounters. IRST reaches beyond the Divinity School, inviting participation from students, faculty, and staff across the University and surrounding community. Participants come from Yale’s cognitive sciences, natural sciences, medicine and related health sciences, forestry and environmental studies, history of science, astronomy and physics, anthropology, applied technology, religious studies, philosophy, the arts, and the undergraduate colleges.
IRST identifies and facilitates access to existing University science-religion resources, and sponsors or co-sponsors a broad range of programming including weekly working groups, public lectures, course offerings, conferences and symposia, Web-based resources, and connections with external centers of science-religion studies. Its programming is coordinated by James Clement van Pelt. IRST is an initiative of the Divinity School co-funded by the Metanexus Institute, with material support from the Institute of Sacred Music. For event schedules and more information, see www.yale.edu/religionandscience.
Middle Passage Conversations Initiative on Black Religion in the African Diaspora
The initiative develops resources for local Black religious communities seeking to engage the public issues of the day such as education, military conflicts, racism, sexism, classism, and the environment through the moral and social resources found within these communities to help create a more just and pluralistic society and world through conversation and building networks that enhance public ministry. In addition, the initiative will explore issues of pedagogy in relation to the academic study of Black religion in university-based programs from an interdisciplinary methodology. Using the successful interdisciplinary conference that launched the initiative in April 2008, over time the initiative will coordinate conferences and consultations that are national and international focusing on the academy, religious communities and practitioners, and the interrelationship between the academy and religious communities to explore the ways in which Black religious communities have served as conduits for meaningful social change and the ways in which these communities can continue to serve as networks of advocacy in the public realm. In addition, the initiative will develop a robust interreligious dialogue, network, and encourage international, interreligious relationships among African American scholars, clergy, and laity that focus on African-based religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
World Christianity Initiative at Yale
World Christianity has confounded the Western establishment with explosive growth. It stands as the foremost ambicultural religion, the faith of multiple language users stretching across national and social boundaries. Economic and political pressures have required urgent and flexible responses to global issues, and that has strengthened Christianity’s appeal. The social agency role of religious organizations has grown in the midst of political upheaval and economic challenges, with Christianity offering hope and assurance in the face of mass disenchantment.
In light of these realities, what is happening today in the story of Christianity represents a fundamental historical shift in the fortune and character of the religion. Cooperation is now needed between the strong institutions with which the West is richly endowed and the Third World communities infused with energy and purpose. The West must assume commensurate responsibility. Under the leadership of Lamin Sanneh, the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and Professor of History, and Executive Director James Ehrman, the World Christianity Initiative at Yale seeks to contribute to that responsibility, recognizing needs in three areas.
Research is necessary to both understand the implications of World Christianity for the coming era and to increase awareness of the effects of World Christianity on the economic, political, social, and academic spheres of the world’s societies. The World Christianity Initiative is stewarding a conversation between the institutions of the West and those of emerging faith communities abroad. The initiative’s facilitation efforts are aimed at helping both Western and non-Western churches recognize and develop an appropriate interdependence. Finally, the World Christianity Initiative is promoting collaboration between surging post-Western Christianity and certain Western counterparts. The initiative collaborates with international Christian scholars and institutions and connects Western scholars, researchers, and students with developments in the burgeoning field of World Christianity.
