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 YDS, 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 that 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 center seeks to engage major cultural issues from the perspective of faith, pursuing 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 four major areas.
God and Human Flourishing, headed by Professor Volf, is the center’s capstone 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. The Spiritual Capital Program, a sub-program within Faith, Ethics, and the Global Economy, is a Templeton Foundation-funded project that creates case studies for use in business and management schools that showcase companies practicing virtues-based management. For more on this program’s research, please visit http://spiritualcapital.yale.edu.
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 is concerned with overcoming the current crisis in relations with the Muslim world, seeking to promote reconciliation between Muslims and Christians, and between Muslim-majority nations and the West, drawing on the resources of the three Abrahamic faiths and the teachings and person of Jesus.
The Faith and Globalization Initiative dovetails with the Yale Faith and Globalization course in pursuing a mission to create and disseminate knowledge of the specific ways in which practices of faith and facets of globalization can collaborate in promoting human flourishing and the global common good.
The Adolescent Faith and Flourishing Program seeks to advance authentic human flourishing among youth by enhancing and supporting transformative Christian youth ministries through application of insights from the God and Human Flourishing Program.
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 (http://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 global legacy by providing resources and assistance, and to encourage critical appraisal of the religious importance and contemporary relevance of America’s premier protestant religious thinker.
The Edwards Online Archive is housed within the larger site of the Jonathan Edwards Center at YDS, 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 its international affiliates, 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 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.
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 college.
IRST identifies and facilitates access to existing University science-religion resources and has sponsored or cosponsored 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 ’03 M.A.R. For event schedules and more information, see http://religionandscience.sites.yale.edu.
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 national and international conferences and consultations focusing on the academy, religious communities and practitioners, and their interrelationship 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 April 2010 the initiative cosponsored a conference on environmental justice and climate change. In addition, the initiative will develop a robust interreligious dialogue and will 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
The World Christianity Initiative at Yale is an interdisciplinary project established to focus attention on the current global religious resurgence and its impact on movements of democratization and social empowerment. Economic and political pressures have fueled an upsurge of religious ferment, creating new fault lines as well as new opportunities for encounter and outreach. The appeal of religion in an increasingly mobile and secularized world has given people an outlet for their hopes and dreams while also producing new fissures and barriers. The return of religion has demanded new configurations of structures and institutions of education, leadership, and social mediation. Amidst current economic challenges and rising expectations driven by demographic and labor shifts, religious resurgence is evidence of the search for new meaning and forms of community across the world. Religious diversity has increased, as has the sharpening of boundaries and the imposition or threat of restrictions. The global network has stimulated the circulation of ideas of hope and new possibilities as well as those of conflict and violence.
These new realities require new ways of research and scholarly collaboration and partnership among centers and institutions, and the encouragement of scholarship and academic exchange. Yale is richly endowed with a great University library system containing significant manuscripts and documents devoted to the topic, with an active research and teaching faculty well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities now available. With the support of the Yale Divinity School and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the World Christianity Initiative at Yale (www.yale.edu/worldchristianity), under the directorship of Professor Lamin Sanneh, is committed to developing work in the field in partnership with others, with critical attention to three areas:
- • Research is necessary both to understand the implications of new religious movements for the coming era and to increase awareness of the effects of the global religious resurgence on the economic, political, social, and research dimensions of the world’s societies.
- • The World Christianity Initiative is engaged in ongoing conversation and joint endeavors with institutions and centers in the United States and in emerging religious communities abroad. The WCI’s efforts are directed at assisting religious and academic organizations and churches in projects of partnership. The director is involved in new initiatives being undertaken in Africa and elsewhere on issues of religion and society, including producing the Accra Charter on Religious Freedom and Citizenship.
- • The work of the World Christianity Initiative is designed to be a platform of interaction among scholars and religious leaders, with a special focus on encouraging the participation of younger scholars in discussions on campuses and elsewhere. The WCI collaborates with international religious scholars and institutions in order to facilitate contact and conversation with North American-based scholars, researchers, and students.
Summer Study at Yale Divinity School
Each summer, clergy and laypersons from around the country come to New Haven for Summer Study at Yale Divinity School. Running during consecutive weeks in June, Summer Study brings together distinguished teachers and practitioners to teach workshops and weeklong courses that enrich and enlighten. While courses do not carry academic credit, Summer Study work can be submitted by clergy participants for denominational continuing education credit.
