Bruce McCann, Living Village Project Manager, will retire at the beginning of February. We hired Bruce in 2022 to serve as our internal architect for the Living Village, and he has been worth his weight in gold. An architect with 20 years’ experience at the Yale School of Medicine, Bruce quickly learned the intricacies of the Living Village and served as key adviser to me through the construction process. Simply put, he has been invaluable. Bruce’s position will become Living Village Program Director and Building Manager after this departure.
Tom Krattenmaker, Communications Director, will step down at the end of May after more than 11 years at YDS. Tom has led our communications effort with notable successes. He expanded our social media venues with great success, e.g., on Facebook we achieved 1.2 million in total reach in 2024 and 1.5 million in total views in 2025. He oversaw several reworkings of our Web pages. He has built “Notes from the Quad” into a substantive and widely read e-news publication that has an open rate any e-communication editor would envy. He worked tirelessly and effectively in getting our stories into the larger Yale media outlets, giving YDS far greater coverage than we could have otherwise achieved. He has also served as chair of the Walls/Art Committee that has brought a wide range of art to our campus. We will miss his expert work. We will run a search for a successor this spring.
Ray Waddle, Editor of Reflections, has superbly edited our journal of theological reflection for 19 years. An exceptional writer and astute theological thinker, Ray has also authored numerous excellent articles for “Notes from the Quad” and other YDS media platforms. One of his greatest accomplishments was writing our history book, This Grand Errand, published at the time of our Bicentennial in 2022. Ray will step down at the end of May, but we plan to hire him back on a part-time basis to edit several more issues of Reflections.
Bill Goettler, Associate Dean for Ministerial and Social Leadership, has elected to retire after 28 years at YDS. Bill has been invaluable as an administrator and as an adviser to students. His position has grown considerably over nearly three decades of service thanks to his effectiveness. He will be fondly remembered by many students who have benefited from his leadership and sagacity in the student assessment program. Bill has also been an effective leader of the Denominational Studies and Transformational Leadership programs. He has connected YDS to local churches in the Reimagining Church project funded by the Lilly Endowment. Perhaps the highest compliment that I can give any administrator in the School is that when I ask them to take on a responsibility, I never have to worry about it. Bill is such an administrator: he has handled everything with aplomb. His position will be transformed into a new Associate Dean for Spiritual Formation when he steps down at the end of June.
Graziano Krätli is retiring on January 31 from his role as Digital Projects and Technology Librarian in the Divinity Library. Graziano started at Yale in 2004 and has been at the Divinity Library for more than 13 years. He has evolved the technology programs at the Library, coordinating our digital preservation efforts, fulfilling countless digitization requests, troubleshooting misfiring equipment, and, most recently, launching the computational theology lab. Graziano has been an enormous help to many of us on the faculty, handling a great many of the materials needed for our course readings. I am deeply grateful to him for his assistance in this and in many other areas. After his departure, the Divinity Library intends to hire a librarian for computational theology to continue our technology outreach to students and faculty.
Suzanne Estelle-Holmer, the Library’s Associate Director for Collections, Research, and Access, will retire in May 2026 after 27 years of service at Yale. She has supervised every function of the Library, from acquiring books to teaching Zotero—she has even served as the acting director when we were between directors! Above all, she has instructed generations of students how to carry out theological research. The wisest students went straight to Suzanne’s office in the Trowbridge Reading Room before setting out to write their first exegesis paper. Suzanne’s impact on the wider profession of theological librarianship has also been profound; among other leadership roles, she served as a board member of the American Theological Librarian Association from 2017 to 2020. While no single librarian could aspire to replace Suzanne, the Library plans to redistribute her duties to new and existing team members after her departure.
The YDS community owes these six individuals a great deal of gratitude for the quality of their service and their passion for the mission of YDS. I hope that you will find a way this semester to express your appreciation to them. We will celebrate them as a community at the end of the year.
Best wishes,
Greg Sterling
