One answer was found in the Yale School of Management, the seminary’s neighbor. Andover Newton students are now required to take 4.5 credits at the business school to complete their degree, making Andover Newton the country’s first seminary to require all students to take business classes. The News spoke with professors and students about this special relationship, which began in 2018 and is nearing its five-year anniversary.

“When we were in Newton, we didn’t have an SOM,” Drummond said. “But really, nobody else has an SOM –– because our School of Management is world-renowned for leadership education across different sectors of the economy. It’s not a place where you just get an MBA and you’re working exclusively in finance, or just business for business’ sake.”

Andover Newton — as opposed to the Divinity School as a whole, where students look to enter a variety of fields after graduation — is focused on ministry in local faith communities. According to Drummond, such a role requires an extensive knowledge of leadership; their responsibilities are not just religion specific, but also concern payroll, insurance and other business issues.

Understanding that ministers are leaders and administrators in their own way, Drummond believed that requiring students to take training at SOM would be a benefit to their education. Other people agreed — as Drummond consulted with alums, she found that the more successful the minister was, the more they were in support of the business school requirement.

Simultaneously, members of the SOM community were looking for new perspectives in their own classrooms. When management professor Raphael Duguay joined SOM three years ago, he was tasked with teaching “How to Measure Social Impact” and wanted to open the course to students from other professional schools. 

Duguay has taught students from the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale Law School, but he said he finds Divinity School students to be “the most unique.” When considering an issue, he explained, SOM students are initially concerned with ethical business questions, while Divinity School students focus on the intrinsic morality behind certain decisions.

“[Divinity School students] don’t tend to have a focus on things like potential litigation risk for the given course of action or implications for public relations, if [business decisions] are perceived as bad,” Duguay said. “What they’ll be worried about is, what if we’re doing something that’s intrinsically wrong, as opposed to right. There’s something of this intrinsic notion of right and wrong, or good and bad that’s definitely stronger with Divinity School students.”

Duguay’s class structure is mostly built around case studies where students primarily analyze nonprofit organizations. 

According to Duguay, Andover Newton students bring a special type of empathy to these cases.

“One of the characteristics or the qualities that these students have is just this proximity with the general population,” Duguay said. “When we talk about the types of populations that are served by nonprofits, we’re talking about people who are struggling in life. The YDS students have a really good understanding of these people’s needs, their reality.”

I’noli Hall DIV ’22 was an executive pastor in his North Carolina church before coming to the Divinity School. As a student of Andover Newton Seminary at YDS with a natural interest in business, Hall “lost count” of how many SOM classes he took.

Hall recognized the two different approaches he experienced while being a Divinity School student taking business classes. 

“It was certainly a different mindset, thinking about the bottom line and profitability, knowing that that is the primary driving force,” Hall said. “[That,] versus serving God, and making the world a better place, loving people well, and addressing those existential questions. It’s definitely a mental shift that has to take place. And so that can be a little jarring, you know, to step from one environment into the other.”

As an executive pastor, Hall was involved in financial management, logistics and administering the business of the church. 

After completing his requirement, Hall said that courses at SOM have helped him think more critically about the way ministry is done, and to question assumptions. 

“I think too often, we separate spirituality from various aspects of our lives,” Hall said. “I think that spirituality is a part of life, period. Spirituality informs the way that we live. And if we really are connected to the Spirit, then we’ll allow that to inform the way that we make decisions, whether that’s in business, whether that’s family, whatever work we do.”

The Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School was founded in 2017.

Editor’s Note, 9/20: This story was updated to reflect the correct spelling of I’noli Hall’s name. 

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The money originates from Lilly Endowment Inc., a private philanthropic foundation with a focus on community development, education and religion. The money will be put towards establishing the Young Adult Ministry Innovation Hub, which hopes to provide space for professionals to design and implement new ways of doing ministry with a focus on what resonates with young adults, according to a Divinity School press release.

Associate Professor of Religion Education Almeda Wright will be overseeing the implementation of the grant.

“[The Innovation Hub] signifies the key role YDS is playing in determining what’s next for American religion in a time of disaffiliation and of Americans opting out of institutions of all sorts,” Divinity School Communications Director Tom Krattenmaker wrote in an email to the News. “Professor Wright’s project is a new manifestation and continuation of the school’s longstanding mission to serve the church and world.”

Non-religiosity has been increasing within the young adult community over the last decade. According to a report done by Gallup, 31 percent of millennials have no religious affiliation — 10 years ago, the amount was 22 percent.

Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Young Adult Initiative has devoted $19.4 million in grants to 12 theological schools around the country in the hopes of discovering new ways congregations can connect with young people. Other schools include the Princeton Theological Seminary and Wesley Theological Seminary.

According to its website, Lilly Endowment Inc. started its Young Adult Initiative because “many pastors are concerned that too few 20-somethings are connecting with churches.”

The innovation hub will be a center for both young adults and religious leaders to think creatively about how to get young people involved in ministry. Wright plans on hiring about 20 “young adult coaches” to partner with 20 different congregations in the greater New Haven area to explore new methods for religious engagement.

“[Perhaps the question is not] how do we get young adults back in the building, but maybe how do we get congregations and congregational leaders out of the building into the communities where young adults are already working and active,” Wright said.

Wright said she was intrigued about the project after realizing many young activists are spiritual and approach their work with an implicit sense of religiosity.

Wright said that historically, churches and congregations have been the sites of social justice movements. For example, during the civil rights movement, Black churches were places of support and inspiration. She said this activist-church partnership seemed to have declined.

“There’s something I think valuable about communal and congregational life and resources, both historically and in contemporary times, that would benefit young people, and vice versa,” Wright said.

Wright said that the attributes that made churches a hub for social change –– meeting spaces, social capital, access to different constituencies –– still exist. Now, she wishes to reimagine how those partnerships could look.

One of Wright’s priorities with the project is to focus on Black, Indigenous and other POC leaders.

“In that constellation [of seminaries], I felt there was a need, and even looking at the demographics of what’s happening here in New Haven, for us to really prioritize Black, Indigenous, people of color voices and younger leaders,” Wright said.

Starting next fall, the Innovation Hub will work with a 10-church cohort for two years. Then, an additional 10-congregation cohort will join for another two years. After, the team will develop at least four general models for implementation within ministries.

The Yale Divinity School is located on 409 Prospect Street.

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American analytics company Gallup Inc. began tracking church membership in the United States in 1937. In Gallup’s inaugural year, 73 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque. The statistic steadily hovered around 70 percent over the next six decades — before dropping below 50 percent for the first time ever in 2020. The Survey Center on American Life credits this decrease to Generation Z, what it calls the “least religious generation yet.” 

To adjust to this climate, the Yale Divinity School has implemented several different offices that allow students more diversity in their future endeavors. The school has created an office that prepares students for non-profit and justice leadership. In addition, they are trying to expand their chaplaincy program. In recent years, the school has added new concentrations within its Masters of Arts program in the hope of appealing to a broader constituency, according to Dean of the Divinity School Gregory Sterling.

“We’ve realized that a lot of people who want to serve will not necessarily go to serve churches, but will still want to serve the not-for-profit world, whether it’s a homeless center, whether it’s some type of a charitable organization,” Sterling said. “There’s a huge range of these opportunities.”

Currently, the Divinity School’s population can be roughly divided into three categories, according to Sterling. One third of students typically establish a career in Christian church ministry, serving as pastors of churches, hospitals, universities and other places of worship. Another third of students remain in academia and pursue another degree. The final third of students — which Sterling said is steadily increasing — use their Divinity School degree for social justice work and establish themselves in the nonprofit sector.

Bill Goettler, associate dean for ministerial and social leadership, helps students figure out what they will do with their Masters of Divinity degree. Goettler said he has noticed an increasing set of students hoping to establish a career in the non-profit sector. 

“We are getting more students who are looking for ways to cause justice to happen, to address the places of hurt and injustice in society,” Goettler said. “We’re approaching that leadership in society with a broader brush. And expecting that our graduates are going to do that work in the places that they go, and where they live.”

Goettler said that many students are driven to pursue social justice work by the “core things” that led them to pursue a divinity degree in the first place: community, ethical clarity, justice and kindness.

Despite the general trend towards secularism in the United States, interest in the Yale Divinity School has fluctuated significantly in recent years, in particular due to various cultural movements. For example, the school reported a 13 percent increase in applications in 2009 — with administrators suggesting the 2008 financial recession led people to turn towards spiritual solace. 

“There are people who are seeking second careers, people who have lost their jobs, and people who were contemplating graduate degrees and then decide to pursue something meaningful like the Divinity School,” former Divinity School Dean Harold Attridge told the News in 2009.

Sterling believes this same logic can be applied to the present day. He pointed to current events — such as the war in Ukraine, the prolonged isolation of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement — as issues that might propel people to seek faith in a higher order.

“All of that is creating a sense that people are ill at ease,” Sterling said. “But they’re going to then look to what we traditionally call God. What I’m going to call God. A power that is bigger than nuclear weapons, a power that is bigger than an economy, which has runaway inflation, a power that is bigger than … racism. I don’t think that’s gone. I think that’s still very alive.”

Sterling said that secularism should not be understood as the direct opposite of the sacred or the religious. The issue, he added, is too nuanced to be reduced to a dichotomy.

At the Divinity School, people are expressing their religious affiliations in new ways, Sterling said. The second-largest group of divinity students — after Christians — are called “seekers,” and they are spiritual but not religious. Seekers, Sterling explained, have rejected the institutional forms of religion, rather than religion itself.

“There’s a serious, and in many cases, well placed mistrust of institutions, of all institutions, including churches, and churches have in some cases brought this on themselves, ourselves,” Sterling said. “There’s just been too many gaffes, too many problems, where institutions put institutions in front of people. And that’s created a lot of mistrust, but it’s also spilling over to people who don’t trust the government. They don’t trust corporations. They don’t trust universities, unfortunately. So it’s part of a larger situation.” 

Goettler said that students at the Divinity School are looking to lead lives with meaning and tackle bigger questions, rather than simply acquiring a set of skills. Through their studies — whether religious or secular — divinity students are discovering what is “good and just” for society and how to build a welcoming community for all.

Sophie Beal DIV ’22 said she believes that the line between secularism and religion is more nuanced than one would expect. 

“The lines between ‘secular’ and ‘religious/faith-based’ work are often blurrier than most people assume. And, of course, there are also many students who come to YDS without any particular religious affiliation who take what they’ve learned here and allow it to inform all different fields of work — from nonprofits and community organizing to law, healthcare.” 

The Divinity School was established in 1822.

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The Friday event was led by Tasha Brownfield DIV ’23 and occurred outside of Marquand Chapel. Around 80 students gathered at noon to celebrate Earth Day with songs, speeches and non-denominational prayers.

“There aren’t many spaces where people who fall outside a very particular Protestant lens can worship authentically at Yale Divinity School,” Brownfield said. “So for my colleagues and myself, I decided to make a space where people could worship authentically and include Black Theology, Indigenous ecology, some southern charm that separated from the elitism of the institution to something that’s really embodied and grounded within this space.”

According to Brownfield, who is one of the non-Christian students at the Divinity School, the service was Indigenous- and Black ecology-based with a sprinkle of cosmology and Pantheistic mysticism. Pantheistic mysticism is a religious practice that Brownfield is trying to found and curate herself. 

Brownfield has been preparing for this event for the past month. A variety of different works were incorporated into the service, including poetry from eco-justice poet Jordan Sanchez, music from Rising Appalachia and the reading of an excerpt of Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot.” 

The service began with a welcome speech by Brownfield. They first noted that the gathering represented the first non-Christian service in Divinity School history, and then went on to include a land acknowledgement, saying that participants “honor and respect the enduring relationships that exist between Native peoples and their land.”

This was followed by a Chalice Lighting, the symbol of the Unitarian Universalist tradition, and a prayer to Prithivi, Hinduism’s personification of Mother Earth. 

Nai Garard DIV ’23 gave an opening reflection on Black Ecology. Stemming from Nathan Hare’s 1970 article “Black Ecology,” the concept speaks to the racialized aspects of climate change, and the way that the fight against climate change can be a means toward Black liberation, so long as the racist attributes of some of the traditional ecological thinking are revealed and mitigated.

Nathan Leach DIV ’23 sang and played banjo for the event in a rendition of “An Invitation” by Rising Appalachia. 

“I think it’s really good to be figuring out how to integrate our spiritual practices into Earth care,” Leach said. “I think the more we can do to make that an expansive space, rather than a closed off space is really important –– eco justice does not belong to one movement, or to one religious tradition.”

Brownfield said that for the past month, she has been trying to figure out how to spread her religious ideas while not being exclusive to other voices that are also marginalized. 

Meredith Barges DIV ’23 attended the event, and noted the confluence of different perspectives. 

“This brought together the most eclectic, wide ranging set of voices and participation that I’ve ever seen,” Barges said. “It was just the most joyful thing to see all the different people and perspectives blended together and speaking to each other in this joint conversation about the Earth. I was so grateful that we could all do this.”

The Divinity School was founded in 1822.

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The display is located in the school’s Sarah Smith Gallery and is a collection of photographs that Olin took during her visits to the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the Levant from 2014-2019. “Gone Like a Sip of Water” is the latest of several exhibitions shown at the Divinity School. Olin described her work as a “photographic study” of the streetscapes of the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, with a particular focus on the role of martyr murals. Olin hopes to explore how people lived among them, and how these murals created and shaped the space there. In addition to photography, Olin interviewed the artists of the murals and incorporated some aspects of these discussions into the exhibit.

“I didn’t need to illustrate the murals and just show you what the murals are,” Olin said. “I meant to show the life of the murals on the street and the life of the street is the children, and most of the martyrs are also children. It’s really meaningful to show the children playing on the street being really watched, by other children their age, and a bit older, certainly old enough to be their older siblings who didn’t, you know, get to grow up.”

The Dheisheh Refugee Camp is located just south of Bethlehem. It was established in 1949 as a tent-city, and over the years has transformed into an urban area with over 15,000 residents, with almost half of them being children.

Because of the camp’s skewed demographic, many of Olin’s photographs not only depict Dheisheh’s murals but also include the camp’s children — one photo shows two young boys riding on bikes, in another photo a child is in the foreground. 

The phrase “gone like a sip of water” is an Arabic expression that is used to describe a sudden death. In her exhibition, Olin writes about the time she first heard the phrase. She was in conversation with Om Th’ar, a Palestinian woman whose 14-year-old grandson became the 31st Palestinian child killed by Israeli Defense Forces in 2018. Olin describes her relationship with Th’ar in the exhibition –– she met the 78-year-old during her 2018 visit and remembers Th’ar repeatedly inviting Olin into her home, offering her tea and asking Olin to tell her story.

It was this encounter that “crystallized” Olin’s interest in the murals that decorated the streets of Dheisheh. These murals depicted martyrs, or “shuhada,” like Th’ar’s grandson. 

“In seeing the life of the young people in the streets lined with murals of martyrs, I realized that I was also anticipating some of their deaths,” Olin said.

Olin wanted to showcase three stories throughout her exhibition. One of them is the story of Th’ar, and another is highlighting a particular stock character that often appears throughout the streets of the camp. 

In addition, Olin wanted to showcase the “intense” discourse among the artists. 

“Palestine in no way is a univocal society, and there are artists with very different approaches to commemorating the martyrs for even different beliefs on whether or not one should commemorate the martyrs and which martyrs,” Olin said. “There’s discussion whether it would be better to cover the walls with cultural figures of Palestine. As one of [the artists] put it, do you want children to grow up thinking that they should throw rocks and Molotov cocktails and get shot at, or do you want children to grow up feeling like there’s a culture in Palestine worth saving?”

Ban-Souk Kim DIV ’20 highlighted the importance of “Gone Like a Sip of Water,” especially in the way it captures a different part of the world. 

“It shows the reality of the world, that dangerous, terrible things happen on the other side of the world,” Kim said. “Everytime I see artists showcase their work here, it seems like they are trying to show that this is the real world, and as students we have a responsibility to have awareness of it.”

Olin states that “reading can be resistance” in her exhibition. Some people in the camp are trying to start a “free little library,” she said and host frequent teach-ins. 

In addition to murals, quotes from Palestinian authors are often graffitied to the street walls. One wall says, “you have something in this world, so stand up,” citing Ghassan Kanifani.

“Whether or not we know what we have got to do in the world, we still live in the knowledge that there is something,” an unidentified artist whom Olin interviewed in the camp said regarding the significance of the murals.

The Divinity School was founded in 1822.

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According to Chris Wood, his family has been involved in social justice work for generations. After graduating from the Divinity School on full-tuition financial aid, Jean Wood began working as the director of Christian education at her local Methodist Church. 

“Our whole family has a passion for social justice that goes back generations,” Chris Wood said. “And Yale University as a whole has been pushing that mission, so we just wanted to keep that going forward, and a little bit different way.”

At the local Methodist Church, Jean Wood got the congregation involved in social justice projects by taking the youth groups on social justice trips.

However, Jean Wood noted that it was attending the Divinity School in the 1960s that ignited her interest in specifically giving back to the school. 

“The genesis for me was being at the Divinity School in the early 60s, during the whole Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests,” Jean Wood said. “There were a lot of my fellow students who went on the Freedom Rides, but I couldn’t go at that time. And I always wished I had been a part of it.”

She continued her social work when she helped found the Coalition of Court Observers after the 1971 Attica Uprising. The organization advocated for equal treatment of Black defendants. Chris Wood, an ophthalmologist, has volunteered to perform eye surgery in parts of South America and Africa.

This donation is just one pillar of the University-wide “For Humanity” capital campaign that aims to raise $7 billion specifically geared toward scientific and leadership efforts. Recently, the Divinity School announced its accomplishment of offering full tuition coverage for students with demonstrated financial need.

“We are trying to recruit and nurture students who have been doing work in the social justice area, and want to come to divinity school to continue this work, in hopes of ultimately going out and with the refined education that they acquire here at YDS to even make a larger impact on the community and world,” Senior Associate Director of Major Gifts Rod Lowe said.

As a child, Chris Wood remembers thinking that all families heavily participated in social justice work. Currently, Chris Wood and his wife, Julie, work with Viator House of Hospitality, a safe home for young immigrant men seeking asylum in the U.S., according to their website.

This is not the Wood family’s first gift to the Divinity School. This gift follows their 2017 donation of “The Barry and Jean Wood Divinity Endowed Scholarship Fund” scholarship for students from underrepresented backgrounds. Jean Wood’s late husband Barry Wood initially suggested the idea of funding a scholarship at the school.

“The thing that I’m fascinated by the Woods family about is not only their philanthropy,” Lowe said. “But it is that they have deployed their resources in such a way that it is really transformational, both at YDS and through the various organizations that both Chris and Jean have supported over the years. I’m inspired by it.” 

The Divinity School was established in 1822.

Correction, March 15: This article previously included the incorrect first name for Chris Wood several times. It has been updated.

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The conference will take place on Feb. 25 on Zoom, with the theme “New Seeds, Strong Roots: Environmental Hope, Healing, and Restoration.” Co-coordinators Claire Barnes DIV ’22 and Katherine Smith DIV ’22 looked to previous conferences when crafting this year’s topic. Last year’s theme, “Ecological Place-Making Amidst Crises: Formation, Reliance, and Leadership,” aimed to put the climate crisis into the context of other social issues. 

“Carrying on from last year, we are continuing to grapple with the climate crisis,” Barnes said. “Last year, crisis was more of an expansive term, it was in the plural. We were thinking about not only ecological crises, but also human crises, like COVID-19 and racial injustice.”

Last year’s conference explored the complicated definition of “crisis.” This year, according to Barnes, the event will continue to work with those definitions and will further consider ways to move forward when thinking about restoration and hope for people and the environment.

Barnes noted that the conference is striving to create an interdisciplinary space for graduate students to come together, voice their interests and share their research in religion and ecology as well as receive feedback from others.

The Divinity School and Yale School of the Environment alumni are encouraged to attend the conference. Barnes and Smith said they specifically hoped to provide a space for alumni who never had the chance to explore the intersections of ecology and spirituality. 

It was only in 2016 when the Divinity School introduced the “religion and ecology” concentration to its Master of Arts in Religion degree, so the conference will explore new topics for many alumni. 

“The program in Religion and Ecology is relatively new in the Divinity School,” Barnes said. “The discipline of religion and ecology has recently become more mainstream. Alumni might be interested in exploring what they didn’t have when they were here.” 

Yale Divinity School’s Director of Communications Tom Krattenmaker noted a “growing sense of student and faculty interest” in the intersection of religion and ecology. 

Presenters at this year’s conference will include Yale graduate students as well as speakers from a range of different schools and countries. For example, Natasha Chawla, a graduate student at the University of Oxford who studies theology and religion, will speak about the differing attitudes to nature within religious groups during the industrial revolution. 

Other presenters come from Emory, Cambridge University and Lady Doak College in Madurai, India. 

Smith wanted to take on a leadership role in the conference because of her desire to create interdisciplinary dialogue on an “important and timely” topic of ecology. She hopes that attendees will leave the conference with regained energy.

“It’s no secret that there is a heaviness to our current times, and I hope this conference offers a respite and an opportunity to ignite new thoughts and hopes,” she said. “I desire everyone to taste that which the theme of our conference explores: hope, healing and restoration.”

The Divinity School was founded in 1822.

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Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of the Environment will co-host the conference on Feb. 25. The connection between religion and the environment is not new to the Divinity School; in 2016, the school introduced a “Religion and Ecology” concentration to its Master of Arts in Religion degree. The virtual conference will explore the ties between religion and the environment, and is open to graduate and undergraduate students across the world. Melanie Harris, professor of Black feminist thought and womanist theology at Wake Forest University Melanie Harris — whose work critically examines the relationships between race, religion, gender and environmental ethics — will serve as keynote speaker for the conference. 

“The conference is great, and it’s reflective of a larger ethic and commitment on the part of the greater YDS community, including many alumni, as well as current students, and faculty and staff,” Divinity School Director of Communications Tom Krattenmaker said. 

In 1996, Harvard University hosted its Religions of the World and Ecology conference series, cementing religion and ecology as a field of study. The field itself “focuses on retrieving, re-evaluating, and reconstructing narratives, practices, and worldviews that influence relationships between human society and the environment,” according to GCRE’s website. 

In addition to current students, the conference is also targeted toward YDS and School of the Environment alumni. Krattenmaker noted the underlying similarities between the two Yale graduate programs hosting the event. 

“There seems to be a natural affinity, with somewhat different starting points because the YDS is more religious, but a potent combination between the YDS and the School of Environment,” Krattenmaker said. “And that’s why I think this conference is so cool because it combines students from the two schools.”

Many YDS alumni use their education to fight for environmental issues. Nathan Empsall DIV ’19, for one, recently studied Episcopal congregations across the country and attempted to gauge the church’s engagement with creation care and climate change. 

Sophie Beal DIV ’22 recognized the different ways the Bible could be read to promote creation care. 

“Sometimes people read the story in the Bible when God gave humans dominion over the plants and animals, as ‘that’s our right to extract all of the world’s natural resources,’’ Beal said. “But what that really means is we are the caretakers of the earth.”

Krattenmaker noted that many of the environmental movements today can be seen through a religious and moral lens. He added that the climate crisis is a prevalent topic in some of the more progressive factions of American Christianity

While attention to the climate crisis is similar to some political movements, Krattenmaker said, it is also propelled by a religious dimension. He noted that there are themes in the Bible that give the movements momentum. 

I’noli Hall DIV ’22 sees the concept of stewardship in the Bible as important to the environment, as well. 

“We have a responsibility to take care of the earth that God has given us and to steward it well and to take care of it for the benefit of all people and creatures that inhabit this earth,” Hall said.

The Divinity School was founded in 1822.

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In addition to offering full tuition scholarships, the aid packages will also cover the school’s “comprehensive” and “board” fees, which total $1,770. This new plan will affect both new and returning students for the 2022-23 academic year. Sterling further announced the establishment of 10 ministerial leadership scholarships. 

“We are taking this step to encourage those interested in ministerial careers to make the commitment that it takes to enter a lifetime of service to churches,” Sterling said in a press release.

Covering full tuition has been a publicized goal for the Divinity School since 2015, when the school administration announced its intention to provide full tuition scholarships by 2022. Senior Director of Alumni Engagement and Development Barabra Sabia told the News that these full scholarships have been a priority for “more than a decade.”

Full tuition scholarships will reduce students’ educational debt and allow them to focus on their religious “calling,” according to Associate Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Vernice Randall.

“This exciting new development in YDS financial support will help to decrease our students’ need for excessive education loans,” Randall said in a statement. “Reducing the debt level that they must manage on limited incomes will allow them more freedom to do the work to which they feel called and are passionate about.” 

Over the 10 years, the Divinity School has raised more than $40 million for student scholarships. The school’s Annual Fund has increased by 60 percent and the school has established nearly 175 new endowed scholarship funds. Funding for these scholarships has come from several different sources: the Annual Fund, Andover Newton Seminary, the Berkeley Divinity School and the Yale endowment. 

Still, fundraising can sometimes be a challenge for the school. Sabia noted that the small size of the Divinity School’s development team might cause them to miss certain funding opportunities. Additionally, the school faces difficulties raising funds from its alumni, as theology is often not a lucrative career path.

“Most of our alumni do not have significant resources with which to fund the school’s priorities,” Sabia said. “But they are some of the most philanthropic donors with whom I have worked.” 

The most common reason that admitted students choose not to attend Yale Divinity School is because they receive larger financial aid packages from other schools, according to the Divinity School’s website. The Harvard Divinity School offers full financial aid for tuition and also provides $10,000 stipends for living expenses. Similar divinity programs at the University of Louisville and the University of Notre Dame are entirely tuition-free.

Divinity school scholarships are often necessary for students because they generally do not go into top-paying jobs after graduation.

“It is no surprise that most of our graduates go on to careers that are not highly remunerative,” Sabia said. “Achieving this milestone enables our graduates to pursue their callings without the burden of debt. Sending moral leaders out into a world that needs them more than ever is essential to our mission and to serving society.”

According to Sabia, this accomplishment has not relaxed the school’s ambition to free students from educational debt. The development team is looking forward to raising more money for students’ living expenses through Yale’s University-wide “For Humanity” campaign.

The new tuition policy will not just affect Divinity School students, but the world they graduate into, Randall said.

“If students cannot adequately fulfill the purposes for which they choose to attend divinity school, and if indebtedness impedes their ability to pursue their callings, the problem will not just be for the students, but also for the world that needs their dedicated service,” Randall said. 

The Divinity School was founded in 1822.

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Lan is a professor of systematic theology at the Emory University Candler School of Theology. She gave a lecture entitled “Toward a Political Theology of Postcoloniality.” 

“From responses to COVID-19 to the global refugee crisis to climate change, a political theology of post-coloniality needs to be transnational and interreligious, committed to thinking with people of other religious traditions,” Lan said in her speech.  

Before Lan’s introduction, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Joyce Ann Mercer DIV ’84 introduced the lecture, calling it “a great opportunity for people to get exposure and acquaintance” with Lan’s work.

Mercer said the lecture had a two-fold purpose. When the Bartlett family originally endowed the annual lecture program, they hoped it would foster knowledge and appreciation of the Plymouth colony’s Pilgrims and encourage understanding of the history and culture of modern China. In addition, after another gift in 1992, the lecture’s scope was broadened to include democracy, human rights and world peace. 

Divinity School professor Lyn Tonstead introduced the speaker, noting Lan’s “foundational contributions” to fields like feminist theology, Asian and Asian feminist theology and post-colonial theology. 

“It is always an exciting experience to get to the point in your life when you get to introduce people who once upon a time were the faraway almost legendary authors of works that you read in graduate school,” Tonstead said in her introduction. “I highly recommend it as a life trajectory.” 

Lan broke her lecture into three parts. The first section titled “Whither Political Theology?” outlined the history behind political theology. In the second segment, “Schmitt Fever in China,” Lan discussed the inspiration that Carl Schmitt, a German legal, constitutional and political theorist –– and prominent leader of the Nazi party –– had on the Chinese government.

Lan argued that countries need to stray away from Schmitt’s philosophy and instead adopt a political theology rooted in transnational and multicultural origins.

“What if we think about political theology in a comparative manner? Thinking [about political theology] with Asian religious traditions?” Lan asked the audience. 

The Divinity School was established in 1822. 

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