Yale Divinity School Today

Yale Divinity School granted its first professional theological degree, the Bachelor of Divinity, in 1867, and admitted women as candidates for that degree in 1932, decades before many of its Protestant peer institutions did the same. Somewhere across the twentieth century it stopped training clergy for one denomination and became what it describes today as interdenominational and nonsectarian outright, with faculty drawn from Catholic, Orthodox, mainline and evangelical Protestant traditions as well as other world religions, and students preparing for ministry across several dozen denominations rather than for the Congregationalist pulpits its founders had in mind. This trajectory mirrors Yale University's own broader path from a colonial ministerial college into a religiously unaffiliated research university, but the Divinity School occupies an unusual position within that larger institution: it is the one part of Yale that still exists explicitly to form religious leaders, even though it now serves traditions its Puritan founders would barely have recognized as legitimate at all. Its library, Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library among the university's wider holdings, and its faculty's work across biblical studies, world religions and practical ministry keep it a significant center for the academic study of religion quite apart from its original sectarian purpose.