16 reasons to celebrate: new titles by YDS faculty

“How do you write a book?” an undergraduate student once asked Margaret Olin, a senior research fellow at the University. Olin responded: “Well. It’s always written.”

On Monday April 8, the YDS community gathered in the Common Room for the annual Faculty Book Party, an event that celebrated 16 new publications of our professors’ “always written” works. The list of contributors included Olin’s own Touching Photographs (University of Chicago, 2012), a study of how photographs reach out and make connections with people.

The party drew over a hundred guests including a number of recently admitted M.A.R. students. According to M Tong ’13 M.A.R., such numbers in both publication and attendance illustrate “the mark of academic excellence we have here at Yale Divinity School.”

This, then, is excellence:

In The Promise to the Patriarchs (Oxford University Press, 2013) Joel Baden illuminates the interpretive layers embedded in the Pentateuch’s promise of land and lineage to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Baden writes from both a literary-historical and a canonically theological perspective to show how diachronic and synchronic reading methods need not be at odds in biblical studies.

How exactly does Christianity’s “one God” claim work with all this sourced talk about a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit? Christopher Beeley’s The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition (Yale University Press, 2012) offers new insight into the early debates between the Eastern and Western church. “The book aims to remap our understanding of the entire Patristic tradition. It’s all very timely,” he says.

Beeley’s other project of the year, Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus (Catholic University of America Press, 2012) also delivers fresh views on ancient sources. This collection of essays from various scholars fleshes out new insight into this oft-overshadowed trinitarian theologian.

John Collins also added two works to Monday’s event. In Early Judaism: A Comprehensive Overview (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012) Collins brings together fifteen essays that analyze the key figures and issues in Second Temple Judaism. His other work, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012) investigates “the story behind the scrolls” or, according to Dean Sterling, “the juicy story.” You decide.

Like the Wideness of the Sea (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2013), a new work by Maggi Dawn, shares a different kind of juicy story: an insider reaction against the failure of the Church of England’s General Synod to allow women bishops. Dawn calls the book “a theology of waiting” yet her quick response to the November 2012 decision—a book penned in a mere four weeks—demonstrates that certain opinions need not wait in silence.

Speaking of religious frustrations, a religious movement’s origins can be harder and harder to define these days. American Religious Liberalism (Indiana University Press, 2012), a collection of essays co-edited by Sally Promey, looks beyond some of the commonly held etiologies of America’s rich religious background to investigate liberal culture’s role in shaping America’s religious identities. 

Think it’s hard to source an American religious movement? Try translating the Bible into the vernacular. Bruce Gordon’s Shaping the Bible in the Reformation (Brill Academic, 2012) presents the dizzying portrait of the Reformers who tried to accomplish this very task. “Some translators were extremely literal while others more apt to adjust for the sake of meaning,” explained Gordon, “At heart, these debates questioned what the Bible was.”

And the work of translation is never over. In Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace (Liturgical Press, 2012) Teresa Berger edited a collection of essays tracing the ebb and flow of liturgical practices across borders of geography, ethnicity, ecclesiology, and chronology. Likewise, Dean Sterling continued co-editing The Studia Philonica Annual, a scholarly journal devoted to furthering the study of Hellenistic influences on Judaism in the Second Temple era.

Carolyn Sharp brings scholarly conversation into a different setting in Living Countertestimony: Conversations with Walter Brueggemann (Westminster John Knox Press, 2012). Reflecting on three years of exchanges with one of today’s leading authors in biblical studies, Sharp was pleasantly surprised to find that these conversations transformed her initial assumptions about Bruggemann.

Lamin Sanneh, missiologist, also added a more personal work to the night’s collection. Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012) shares Sanneh’s own journey from Islam to Christianity and from an impoverished village in Gambia to a teaching career at Yale.

Denys Turner, another resident storyteller, stepped outside of the jargoned comfort zone when publishers summoned him to write a biography of Thomas Aquinas fit for non-specialists, resulting in Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (Yale University Press, 2013). Turner thanked Emily S. Kempson ’12 M.A.R, ’13 S.T.M. for graciously helping clarify the book.

Rounding out the night were publications by Miroslav Volf and Ted Malloch. Volf assesses the intersecting places of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Do We Worship the Same God? (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012) and Ted Malloch’s The End of Ethics and a Way Back: How to Fix a Fundamentally Broken Global Financial System (Wiley, 2013) does also what its title so fittingly promises.

As the party came to a close, graduating students reveled in a list of lasts while incoming students put faces to many books they’ve read for undergraduate thesis projects. For Emilie Coakley ’14 M.A.R. the night represented that there is a “living tradition of knowledge here at the school.” Megan Barrett ’13 M.A.R. added that actively publishing professors bring a definite richness to the classroom.

And for those professors gearing up for next year’s Faculty Book Party: May your footnotes brim with labor and love; may your citations weave with wonder into your prose; and may your deadlines continue to inspire life in the YDS community.

But most importantly: Thank you.

For a detailed description of all new faculty titles, read the article by Student Book Supply Manager Micah Luce ‘07 M.A.R. ‘08 S.T.M. in the 2013 issue of Spectrum avaliable online.