Meet these divinity graduates

When Odyssey Heredia was six years old, she and her four younger siblings were removed from their parents’ home in San Antonio. Her birth parents, entrapped in poverty, were unable to care for them. Heredia spent two years as a ward of the state until her great aunt and uncle adopted her and two siblings. In 2020, the remaining siblings were adopted and reunited.

Her adoptive parents moved to El Paso in 2010, where her adoptive father served as pastor of a Spanish-speaking church. Upon her graduation from El Paso High School in 2020, she enrolled in Southwestern College in Kansas. She’d been playing violin since she was six, and picked up the electric bass at college. She chose music and philosophy and religion as her majors, planning to be a composer or violinist. But, as she says, “God had different plans.”

A budget crisis at Southwestern led to belt-tightening, which included cutting music majors from the curriculum. Heredia led protests against the cuts, which remained in place. Nevertheless, she had enough credits to graduate in three years, so she left with a degree in philosophy and religion and a minor in music.

“The plan was law school,” she says, “but one of my mentors recommended Yale Divinity School.” Part of the School’s appeals was the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. She’s now thinking of a career in politics, which stems from her own childhood.

“In the situation I come from, a lot of kids are angry, and I myself am angry. Only three percent of former foster care kids go on to get college degrees, and it’s an injustice. My goal is to help people see that they can be more than what they were given.” People like her, she feels, are not well represented in the corridors of power. “Teachers, musicians, working-class people need to be in those rooms where it happens.”

Her passion for justice has continued at YDS, where she helped plan, with Latine organizations at Yale, a vigil for victims of ICE. “As Christians, we have a responsibility to hold those in power responsible.” She’s also celebrated her culture by forming a Yale Divinity mariachi band that has performed on campus.
Her activism will continue in the United Methodist Church, where she’s a certified candidate to become a deacon. Her aim is non-traditional ministry, likely in the policy realm.

Faith, music, and activism go hand in hand in her view. “Where does my sense of justice come from? Life is discernment and staying close to the divine. To me, staying close to the divine means staying close to community and music and following joy. Music really grounds me in my humanity.”

While her post-graduation plans remain uncertain, she sees a future in activism and social justice. “Long term, I probably will eventually go back to Texas or New Mexico and be involved with campaigns there and politics there.” Until then, Odyssey hopes to pursue her passions in Washington D.C or New York City.

Sonal Manoj spent last summer in the British Library London and the Vatican’s Bibliotheca Apostolica researching folios of two manuscripts from Syriac Christianity that had never been studied before. The folios—versions of a medieval story of a demon who repented– formed the basis of his master’s thesis at YDS.

“I was trying to prove that this story was a medium to bring people back to church in times when they were dependent on local magical sources in cases of demonic afflictions. Everything was connected with demonic afflictions then, even a very simple illness. There was always an intricate connection between medicine and religious services.”

Manoj grew up in the state of Kerala in southwestern India, home to more than a million adherents of Syriac Christianity, including his own family. “Growing up in this tradition, I felt really close to Syriac music and Syriac chants. I didn’t understand what we were singing because I didn’t know the language, but even without understanding what it is, the language really had an impact on me.”

Classical Syriac remains unspoken, only a language of liturgy, akin to Latin in the Roman Catholic church. And few historical documents remain to trace the history of Syriac Christianity in Kerala. Some sources say it reached India with St. Thomas in 52 AD, while others credit Eastern Christian missionaries and traders with bringing it from Mesopotamia around 300 AD. When the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama reached India in 1499, missionaries on the voyage were surprised to find Christians already there. A century later, at the Synod of Diamper in Kerala, many Syriac Christian texts were burned in an effort to Latinize the liturgy and religious customs.

For Manoj, his study of Syriac Christianity stems from a desire to understand simple believers in the past. He majored in history at St. Joseph’s University in India, then got a master’s degree at Pondicherry University. He taught Indian history in schools for two years before coming to YDS to explore questions about Kerala Syriac Christianity.

“Most Syriac documents exist in hagiographies, liturgical texts, prayers, and these were written by elite priestly classes. But how can this tell us the story of the common people who use that language for worship?”

At YDS his interests have grown to include the Syrian Christian world beyond Kerala, in particular the lived religion of Christians in the Islamic world. This summer he’ll return to the Vatican for an advanced course in the Syriac language, then travel to Bucharest for a conference on Syriac Christianity that’s held every four years. In the fall he’ll be in Vienna, beginning a Ph.D. program at Central European University. He’ll be looking at the intersection of liturgy and magical practices in Syriac Christianity.

Such Syriac texts as the Ktibta da-Nṭurya (Book of Protection) and the Spar Sammāne (Book of Medicine) include prayers seeking protection from ill fortune. “Things that we now call magic might have been simple prayers. It’s simple things, from an oven burning over, to protecting livestock, to resisting sexual urges. These prayers invoke God, they invoke certain saints, and these prayers were banned by the main church. But the priests were still writing them because people believed in it.”

After graduation, he plans to remain in academia, teaching and doing research. “I love teaching, so I’ll definitely get back to it. I’ll be in academia, that’s where I see myself.”

Before coming to YDS, ArDonna Hamilton earned a master’s degree in integrative medicine and health sciences at Georgetown, trained for the ministry, worked in nonprofit development and with women battling addiction, taught Zumba classes, and worked on women’s health projects as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala.

Along the way she’s nurtured a dream of becoming a doctor, with a theological slant. “I see myself working as a physician, but also teaching and looking at the theological roots of issues in the healthcare system, the ways in which the body is dealt with in the biblical text, the ways in which the body is seen as or treated as a problem.”

Her interest in the human body started when she was young. She was a fan of both “Grey’s Anatomy” and the Discovery Health Channel, and fascinated by her own childhood cuts and bruises. “Whenever I’d scrape my knee or something, I would just stare at it. I thought it was so cool.”

During her childhood in Alexandria, Va., her father worked in the Army at Fort Belvoir, and her mom was an employee of the federal government. She worshipped at a church on the base until joining the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria. She joined its Village ministry, then its Voices of Triumph Choir, before she became a chaplain, vice president, and deputy communications director for the church’s social justice ministry. That’s where she first felt a call to ministry and entered the church’s ministry-in-training program.

Religion had not been a big part of family life, but her grandmother, a missionary and evangelist in the Church of God in Christ tradition, gave Hamilton her first Bible. “She would put in little sticky notes to introduce me to a scripture.”

At the University of Virginia, ArDonna took some science classes but majored in African and African American studies. It was an opportunity to explore the distrust in the Black community around the medical system, fueled by forced sterilizations of African American women and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. She also looked at inequities in the medical system and racial disparities in access to care. “There are so many things that can go wrong when people are not going to the doctor, or not going to the hospital until it’s too late. Many people believe that prayer is enough, and that God will heal them, so they delay going. I see that over and over again.”

Her studies at YDS have led her to the subject of atonement theology and its influence on women in the Black church. “Because Jesus suffered unto death for us, we are taught to serve in that same way, seeing suffering as the way of Jesus,” she said. “I’ve seen it my entire life, Black women sacrificing their bodies, their time with their family, their mental health and well-being because they feel they have to, because it’s work for God. I believe it’s rooted in atonement theology, the ways that we’ve been taught to think about Jesus, the cross, and what it means to be a Christian.”

After graduation Hamilton plans to take classes in ethics while she prepares to apply for a joint M.D./Ph.D. program. She’ll pursue her Ph.D. in theology.

“My work is rooted in womanist theoethics. I’m interested in the ways in which theologies in the Black church, particularly the Black Baptist church, and also holiness traditions, affect Black women’s bodies, the decisions that we make with them, and our health outcomes.”

When Edward Ford was 20 years old and a student at Middlesex Community College, he won a seat on the school board in his hometown of Middletown, Conn.

“I saw that there were no young people on our school board, and everybody needs to have a seat at the table. I wanted to address equitable education funding and the academic achievement gap, which is correlated to that funding.”

During his two years on the board, Ford helped establish Men of Excellence, a mentorship program to help young men of color develop professional skills. From Middlesex he moved to Central Connecticut State University, and after serving on the school board, he was elected to Middletown’s City Council. Education, youth development, and local infrastructure were his top issues.

Ford’s interest in politics started early. In high school he was Vice President of his senior class, and the summer before college he interned at Middletown’s City Hall. When he started college, he chose psychology as his major. “I was trying to understand, when it comes to politics and ministry, how to have social impact for the greater good. And what’s central to all of that in psychology is the emphasis on our common humanity.”

Religion was always a presence for Edward as he was growing up in Middletown, where his father was the commander of an Army recruiting station. The family, which included his parents and sister, attended several churches, including a predominantly Black missionary Baptist church. In 2019, Ford was ordained at Bread of Life Ministries in Waterbury, Conn. Since 2022, he, along with his wife, Sazjanee, has led the young adult ministry at Shiloh Christian Church in Middletown. He also organizes and moderates services, preaches occasionally, and helps with administrative tasks at the church. Last Thanksgiving he was one of the organizers of an effort that brought together local congregations and organizations to feed more than 1,000 families.

Since 2021, he’s worked at Community Mental Health Affiliates in New Britain, a nonprofit focused on behavioral health. The nonprofit connects clients to care and offers clinical services and therapy. Ford has held various posts there and is now head of compliance. He’s also a member of the State Comptroller’s health cabinet, which seeks to increase access to health care in the state.

He came to YDS to deepen his understanding of the diversity of Christianity and of Christians around the world. His studies, he says, have strengthened the clarity of his calling in pushing for humane public policy. In addition to an M.Div., Ford will graduate with a certificate in Public Theology and Public Policy from the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at YDS, where he studied under Bishop William Barber.

His experience at YDS, Edward says, “made it more clear to me that my call in the world is to continue to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to be a voice for justice and for human flourishing, and continue to share that love in the work that I do, whether it’s in ministry, through public policy, in politics, or any space I occupy.”

For all his professional life, Sergio Lopez Palacio has worked in education. Fresh out of the Universidad de Los Andes in his hometown of Bogotá, Colombia, he worked at an online education startup that offered career advice to high school students. Then he taught history, philosophy, political thought, and economics at an international high school. When he came to the United States to be with his partner in 2018, he taught Spanish at the Cold Spring School in New Haven. He next spent three years teaching Spanish at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford and another two at the Hopkins School in New Haven before coming to YDS.

As an undergraduate he’d studied philosophy, which sat at the nexus of several of his interests. “I was really into literature, but I also got into questions about religion, eventually into Greek mythology, and through that, I inevitably got to philosophy. The main question was how to live a good life?” He’d also become interested in education, which fit the questions he was asking. His quest brought him to YDS, where he concentrated his M.A.R. studies on ethics.

“That’s the focus I had during my college experience. What is the ‘right’ thing? What is the ‘good’? How do we guide our lives and our decisions? And how do we be in justice with others? Given that we live in an unjust world, I think the imperative is to try to solve and correct that, and I believe in the power of education in allowing us to get to a better place.”

Growing up in Colombia, he became aware of his country’s socioeconomic disparities. He attended a private bilingual school where he learned to speak English and moved through a wealthy social circle. His nuclear family, however, was not as well off as others. “We had to go through many struggles and that started to inform my sensibility in terms of noticing injustice.” He also learned from his mother, a devout Catholic who went to Mass every Sunday and in between watched Mass online or on TV. “My mom spoke about the teachings of Jesus, and her reading was very social justice oriented.”

As a teacher he’s tried to bring his ideas into the classroom. “What are the kinds of questions we’re asking? What are the things that we’re discussing? What are the voices that I’m bringing in? Are we just reading the same four or five Latin American writers, or are we bringing in other voices that haven’t been heard in the same ways?” At Choate Rosemary Hall, he joined a year-long seminar for faculty called Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity, which explored such topics as identity, privilege, and systems of power/oppression. He then trained to become a facilitator of the program, and lead it for the next two years. When he moved on to Hopkins, he started the program there as well.

During his time at YDS, Sergio decided to follow up his master’s program with doctoral studies. He considered psychology, anthropology, and sociology before coming back to philosophy. This fall he’ll start a Ph.D. program in philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

Once he’s completed his doctorate, he hopes to continue teaching, preferably undergrads. He’s always found the late-teen age group interesting. “That’s where many questions are coming up, and in that transition of senior high school and first year, second year of college, those things are starting to solidify in a way that could become what you are for the rest of your life.”

In the late 2010s, Carolyn Streets, an English language arts teacher in New Haven, was exploring summer workshops at the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment of the Arts. To her surprise, administrators handling her applications would say, “We’re familiar with who you are because of the curriculum that you’ve created.”

Her curriculum, developed with the Yale Teachers Institute, explores themes of racism and social justice through the novel Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry, about a Black sharecropping family in the South during the Great Depression and Jim Crow. For her middle-school students it was revealing. “We’d get into the historical documents and look at some of those laws that were on the books, and they would be outraged. ‘Are you kidding me, this was something that folks had to do because of the color of their skin?’”

The impact reached beyond New Haven. With the curriculum available to teachers anywhere through the Teachers Institute, it was sought after around the country. “It engendered deeper conversations about what it means to be a citizen of the world, a citizen who cares about their neighbors, what it means to have influence in a way that shapes your community.”

Streets grew up in New Haven, both her parents having graduated from YDS. (In 1992, her father, Frederick “Jerry“ Streets ’75 M.Div., became Yale’s first African American Chaplain. He continues to serve on the YDS faculty today.) She majored in English literature at Ottawa University, a Baptist school in Kansas, then worked briefly as a buyer in the fashion industry in New York. During an economic downturn in the early 2000s, Streets switched to adult education in New Haven. When a colleague saw her interact with her students, she suggested that Streets pursue a career in teaching. Streets went to Quinnipiac University for a master’s in education, then began teaching middle-school students in New Haven public schools.

“I love seeing their growth and development at that critical time in life. They come in as sixth graders and leave as ninth graders, and a whole lot happens in between.”

From the outset, she wanted to bridge the gap between rosy depictions of the nation’s history and the reality of many of its citizens. “I knew—from my own historical context, my own family context, the lived experiences of my community, and being tuned in to Black liberation theology—what that meant and how that shaped the development of our country.”

During the COVID pandemic, Streets secured a Fulbright scholarship to study in Finland, which ranks No. 3 in the world for its schools. Immigrants were arriving from Africa and the Middle East, and the country was seeking ways to integrate them into society. With faculty at the University of Jyväskylä, she created an equity team to address gaps in the university’s approach to diversity.

She came home in 2024 set on applying to divinity school. She wanted to study the rise of the Christian right and its impact on public school education. “I wanted a theological understanding, and I wanted to think about how I can use that to think critically about policy and practice.”

Over the past two years she’s taught full-time while pursuing her M.Div. This summer she’ll go to Tokyo to study manga-anime. Once back in the classroom, she plans to develop a curriculum for middle-school students to storyboard and write their own graphic novels.

She’s also applying to Ph.D. programs in education, a degree she feels is necessary to influence policy. “I want to be one of those people in the room when we’re talking about educational policy who says, ‘How does this impact the students and family who this is designed for in a way that centers that word justice.’ I want to be that voice of dissent.”

When Abby Langford arrived at Yale College in 2018, she came with a deep curiosity and a desire to keep asking questions about faith. She grew up in New Iberia, in Louisiana’s Cajun country. (She’s Cajun on her mother’s side.) Her parents met at a Southern Baptist college, and her father’s went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Greek New Testament textual criticism. In her early childhood, he pastored Southern Baptist churches. More than hearing him preach, Langford recalls the drives home from church, eating fresh vegetables from parishioners’ gardens in the back seat and discussing his sermons.

Her dad eventually took a position in a United Methodist Church, which Langford joined at age 12. “The church met me with a grace-filled theology when I especially needed it, as I was processing my parents’ divorce,” she said. She served on the youth ministry council and helped plan statewide youth retreats. At one of those retreats, she preached for the first time and felt a call to ministry. She has carried a picture from that day through her many moves since.

“When I came to New Haven, I wondered what other expressions of the United Methodist Church or Christianity I would find and what they would reveal to me about God’s work in the world.” At First and Summerfield United Methodist Church in downtown New Haven, she said, “It was the first time I attended a church where a woman was the lead pastor and a pride flag hung on the back wall. Being welcomed into this community and finding belonging in it was exciting and emotional.”

In college, she began gathering with a group of students, including some from YDS, for pizza and conversations about faith. “They were asking questions that I had never felt brave enough to ask in a religious or spiritual community. I was meeting queer Christians for the first time, who talked about their queerness as sacred, and I felt really held in that fellowship.” She helped turn these gatherings into an official student organization that continues today, the Yale Progressive Christian Students Group.

Although she knew that applying to YDS was a possibility, after graduation, she spent a year as a teacher’s assistant in Nîmes, France, planning to become a teacher. That experience ultimately clarified her call to div school. In one of the public schools where she taught, many of her students were Muslim immigrants from North Africa. “I witnessed a lot of mistreatment, racist comments, and anti-Muslim sentiments. I was realizing just how important my spiritual life was, and how I felt called to engage others in conversation about their spiritual lives alongside the material realities they faced. I felt a deep kinship with my students, who wanted to be seen and treated as beloved children of God rather than just future workers or citizens.”

She’s now pursuing ordination in the New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church and hopes to become a deacon. “In our tradition, deacons connect the work of the church with the work of the world.” This summer, she’ll be training as a spiritual care chaplain at Yale New Haven Hospital. “Afterward, I’m looking for work within or outside of the church doing faith-rooted organizing work or justice ministry.”

When Spencer Beckman arrived in Memphis in 2015 to attend Rhodes College, he saw things he’d never seen in his hometown near Nashville.

He’d planned to become a doctor, but growing up in Murfreesboro, he’d been unaware of the poverty, racial inequalities, or health disparities that he saw in Memphis. “I was at a Bible study in my junior year, and there was the story of the rich young ruler, and Jesus asked him to give up all of his possessions and give them to the poor. It made me wonder what Jesus might be asking of me—what I had never considered giving up of my own volition.”

Although he’d grown up in the Methodist church, he now describes himself as a “Christian mutt” without a denominational home. His faith had led him to medicine to help individual people, but in Memphis, he felt a calling to effect change on a larger scale. He shifted his studies from biology and psychology to religion and urban studies with a concentration on health. “I was really interested in systems and structures, but through a health equity lens.”

After his graduation in 2019, he got a job at Church Health, a nonprofit started by Scott Morris, a physician, Methodist minister, and YDS alumnus. Beckman saw that it filled a health care gap—because it wasn’t dependent on Medicare, Medicaid, or insurance coverage, it could take on any patient who needed care, regardless of religious affiliation or ability to pay. “They served the people that fall in the cracks, hard-working people who don’t have insurance, but don’t qualify for government-provided services.” It also takes a holistic approach to health care, including social, nutritional, and spiritual health.

Beckman was at Church Health for less than a year when COVID arrived, and realizing he needed administrative skills, he began an MBA in healthcare management at the University of Memphis. “That lined up well with the health equity data work that I was already doing. Once the COVID vaccine was available, we had to start reaching out to our most at-risk patients. We had a limited supply of vaccine, so I had to quickly weigh several different measures to figure out the best way to prioritize our patients.”

Still, something was missing. During COVID, Church Health had become a crucial source of information about the pandemic. “Church Health was a faith-affiliated organization, which bought them trust from churches and faith communities.” But Beckman doubted his own ability to engage with those groups. “I found myself maybe not having the depth of language to communicate what felt true in my heart, that people of faith should care about our sick neighbors.”

In 2023, he moved to New Haven to study at YDS, along with his wife, Caroline, who works at the School of the Environment. He’s been part of YDS Student Government in a number of different roles. As President this year, he’s led initiatives related to Israel and Palestine (“a theologically important conversation to have”) and food insecurity among students. One of Beckman’s favorite efforts is what he calls the YDS Lunch Lottery. Every month, students are assigned to random groups of three to meet over coffee, lunch, or drinks, and “spend that hour talking with people that you may not know. People want to know and be known in this community, so it’s been very fun to create a pathway for new conversations. Unsurprisingly, they tend to be wonderful discussions.”

Once he graduates, he’ll return to Church Health as its director of faith partnerships and strategy. “In addition to relationship-building and organizational spiritual care, I imagine that I’ll likely be speaking at churches and sharing how a faith-based Church Health works to serve our Memphis neighbors.”

Joan Lavaki spent the summer of 2025 as a chaplain intern at the Punahou School in Honolulu, reading scripture, leading prayers, giving blessings, and playing the ukulele during worship, and at Arcadia Adult Day Care & Day Health Center, where she interacted with senior citizens.

Her time in Hawaii fueled her desire to connect with her roots in Papua New Guinea, where she was born. When she was two, her family moved to the United States. Because she didn’t grow up around other Pacific Islanders, she struggled with learning how to embrace that part of her identity. “I didn’t know that I was Pacific Islander until the fifth grade. I looked at a map of the world and saw that Papua New Guinea was this island in the Pacific Ocean. Since then I’ve had a deep desire to learn more about that side of my life.”

While in Hawaii, she had the experience of people recognizing her Pacific Islander identity. “To be in a place where people saw me and were like, oh, she’s a Pacific Islander, was an experience I’d never had before. I didn’t have to tell people ’Papua New Guinea is here’ and ‘this is what their culture is like,’ because they already knew. It was a relief to be somewhere like that for the first time.”

Lavaki’s parents met in Papua New Guinea, where her father was a minister and her mother, a Filipina, was doing missionary work. The family moved first to California, then to the Dallas area. Her parents, now retired but still active in the church, were ministers in a Four Square Pentecostal congregation. Joan and her four siblings helped out in the church, Joan playing the piano and singing as part of the worship team.

When it came time for college at Abilene Christian University, she planned to study vocal music education with an eye on becoming a choir director. But that major lasted just one semester. “It wasn’t challenging me in the ways that I wanted to be challenged.” She switched to biblical studies with a concentration in youth and family ministry.

She came to divinity school, among other reasons, to ascertain her own religious beliefs. “When I was in college, on my own for the first time, I had to figure out what I believed for myself. And I realized how a lot of what I grew up around was not as loving or accepting as I wanted to be.”

Affiliated with Andover Newton Seminary at YDS, Joan first traveled to Hawaii through her participation in the ANS Emmaus Encounter in 2025, directed by ANS Associate Dean JaQuan Beachem. Andover Newton’s Dean, Sarah Drummond, recommended Joan for the summer internship at the Punahou School, where Joan worked under the leadership of ANS Senior Fellow George Scott.

At YDS she’s followed her curiosity about the gospel as seen through a Pacific Islander lens. “I learned a lot about the history of Christianity in the Pacific and how it conflicted with, and also integrated with, Indigenous Pacific Islander spirituality. The human and earth interrelationship is central to Pacific life, and that’s missing from Western Christian theology around creation.”

As she contemplates her life post-graduation, Joan is taking a break from more schooling. She has applied for jobs as a library assistant, a position she held at YDS. Her next steps could include working with incarcerated populations, working in non-profits that combat food insecurity and poverty, or developing youth programs in a library. “I’m still figuring this out.”

By the time Isaac Carroo graduated from Rice University in 2019, he knew he wanted to work in sustainable agriculture in ways that that respected the culture, sovereignty, and traditions of local and indigenous communities. After graduating with dual degrees in ecology and evolutionary biology and religion, though, he spent two and a half years at Deloitte Consulting. The seemingly unlikely choice offered him a chance to develop new skills.

“I was looking for an experience that would give me exposure to different topics, different industries,” he said. One project he worked on looked at strategies for decarbonization. Another found ways to help a supermarket chain get fresh produce to the shelf faster. “That reduces food waste, and it reduces your costs because you’re not throwing stuff away.”

While such projects were unique among Deloitte’s typical corporate undertakings, Carroo said, “there was some interesting stuff going on, so I felt lucky that I was able to work my way into that part of the firm.”

In his pursuit of solutions to ongoing problems around the globe, Carroo saw his parents as role models. His dad, an agronomist, traveled the world for agrarian development projects, and his mom worked in community development finance. Although his mother was raised Catholic and his father, who’s from Jamaica, was raised as a Seventh Day Baptist, religion was not a big part of his upbringing.

A first-year course at Rice on religion and hip-hop, taught jointly by a scholar of Black religion and a well-known Houston rapper, led him to study religion. “That was an awesome class. And then I was like, okay, what if I just made it into a major?”

He sought a way to intertwine his interests. “How would the experience of divinity influence people to do the right thing, whether it’s socially or environmentally? That was how I started to bring together these two majors that started out as separate interests for me.”

After his time at Deloitte, Isaac landed in northern New Zealand, working on sustainable practices with Māori farmers. “I was trying to be part of the food systems piece in a bigger puzzle of cultural revitalization, working against socioeconomic disadvantages that Māori have faced since colonization. That means keeping traditional crops in the food system and doing sustainability work, but also fulfilling a social need that still keeps people, communities, and culture in mind.”

His interest in the environment and sustainability has also taken him the Pacific Ocean, where he spent weeks on a sailboat surveying tuna larva, and to Liberia and Sierra Leone, where he worked on projects with his father and village farmers.

He’s still looking for a job after graduation but has backup plans. One is to spend the summer working on the Divinity School farm. The other is to continue a project he began last summer on family land in Jamaica. “I was putting in an agroforestry system, mostly focused on cacao as the end-state crop, but also plantains, bananas, and pineapples.”

Long term, he sees himself working on sustainable and more just food systems. “I think in an ideal world, I’d be working with local communities to build greater food sustainability, but also resilience and opportunity for those communities.”

Between college and divinity school, Emily Wright spent a few months backpacking and “wwoofing” in Aotearoa, New Zealand. WWOOF is the acronym for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, a global network of farmers that offers volunteers homestays in exchange for labor. Her daily chores at places like the Paws Awhile Animal Sanctuary included “property maintenance, harvesting from the gardens, and animal care, and lawn care.”

At YDS she’s been active in the DivFarm, a student-run garden, where she helps with communications and planning community events, as well as everyday garden tasks. As a DivFarm coordinator, she’s introduced accessible gardening equipment into the space and advocated for increased funding. Harvests include okra, zucchini, green beans, and tomatoes. Divinity School students and the larger New Haven community are the primary beneficiaries of the produce. “We also have some deer that come through, and they’ll harvest first.”

Ecology was not in her plans when she began her studies at W.A. Franke Honors College at the University of Arizona. She’d planned on continuing studies of American Sign Language that she’d started in high school. “I was on track to become an interpreter, but during the pandemic, I had a switcheroo. I wanted to dip into journalism.” She also began religious studies courses, and her advisor encouraged her to make it a second major alongside global journalism.

She grew up near Phoenix in a town where most people belonged to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. “We weren’t raised in it, but we were surrounded by it.” At YDS, she said, “I had questions about the way that religion operates in the world. It permeates every aspect of our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Coming to YDS It was also a big step in unpacking my upbringing in a conservative LDS area.” Additionally, her late mother, a devoted gardener and multimedia artist who engaged with the natural world, offered an alternative spiritual practice that inspired her studies at YDS.

Wright’s journey at YDS culminated in serving this year, with classmate Margaret Witkofsky, as co-chair of the 10th Annual Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology. People came from around the world to attend academic presentations, workshops, and an art exhibit on the theme of Return to the Roots. “You’ve got to create something expansive enough that people feel welcome, but specific enough to inspire. So we decided to get down to the source and have people think about their own relationship to place, whether it be the roots of their faith tradition, or ancestral roots, or literal, physical roots in the ground.”

The intersection of climate and culture is where she hopes to work as she applies for jobs, ideally in journalism or nonprofit communications. “Public communications is one of the greatest ways that we can arm the public with knowledge in order to advocate for themselves. I’m especially interested in translating what I’m learning here to the Southwest. The environment there is increasing in temperature, and will be more and more unlivable, especially for low-income folks who can’t afford air conditioning, or unhoused populations and migrants in the Southwest. I’m thinking about how to use my resources and experience at this institution to give back to the area that raised me.”
 

Jordan Baker’s path to ministry began at Union University, a Christian college in Jackson, Tennessee. He had grown up in Memphis immersed in music and religion—his dad played guitar and sang in a non-denominational evangelical church, and his mom was involved in children’s ministries. Baker learned to play piano in middle school, and at Union he majored in music theory and composition. While in college, Baker discovered a passion for higher education as a reflection of the Kingdom of God.

“There was something about being at a small campus where you could walk outside on a spring day and see art students making pottery and English majors discussing whatever they’re reading in class. Everyone’s loving what they’re doing, and they’re all doing different things, but we’re also together in this unified place. I decided I wanted to be an academic.”

Set on a career in academia, Baker entered the University of Tennessee to pursue a master’s in musicology. In his thesis on medieval chant, he connected the rise of a modal theoretical structure with the rise of Roman Christianity as a cohesive identity.
“Music had a part to play in this, because there’s something about the way music gets in your memory. If you’re attending Mass, if you’re attending church services, that allows it to be a portable identity that you can carry with you in a way that’s very different from other markers of identity.”

Along the way, however, his response to a personal crisis planted a seed that would sprout years later. For his healing process he moved into Tyson House, a joint Lutheran and Episcopal campus ministry, where he was required to help with worship services. His participation in church activities extended beyond just setting up and running events with the two chaplains. At a graduation banquet, a student joked, “We really had three chaplains, because there was always Jordan that you could talk to.”

After completing his master’s degree, Baker realized that his questions were “a little bit bigger than music,” and he went on to complete a Ph.D. in analytic philosophy, focusing on the nature of human action and group agency. During his post-doc he began to think again about ministry. It was the spring semester of 2020, and classes and office hours had been forced onto Zoom because of the Covid pandemic. Baker found his students needed to discuss more than their coursework—some had lost family members in the pandemic, and social isolation was taking a toll. “As their professor, I could only go so far to help them because at some point we had to talk about grades or the quality of their writing. What they needed in that moment was someone who could holistically care for them. I came to the realization that I needed to explore the possibility of being ordained, of doing full-time ministry.”

He’s now an entranced (as in, “entered”) candidate for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Southeastern Synod of the Lutheran Church, which covers Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The next stage in the ordaining process is endorsement, which leads to a year-long parish internship under a mentor who will show him ropes of pastoral ministry.

He has always been drawn to the image of Christ as a teacher, and he now has faith that the callings of academia and ministry needn’t be in opposition. “I want to see what it would look like to be a pastor who takes the role of teacher very seriously, whether that’s working in a seminary or divinity school or being a pastor in a church.”
 

Margaret Witkofsky grew up in Ridgely, Maryland, a small town with “lots of cow farms and corn fields” on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. An annual festival celebrates the town’s status as the “Strawberry Capital of the World.”

An appreciation of nature came early to Witkofsky. Her father, who studied botany in college before becoming a psychology professor, was always pointing out trees and plants to her and her twin brother. “And being so close to the Chesapeake Bay,” she said, “all of my earliest science lessons were about water conservation and saving the bay. That definitely sparked an early interest in environmental issues.”

Worship was not a big part of her upbringing. “We were definitely the family that only goes to church on Christmas and Easter.”

That changed at Washington and Lee University, where she’d enrolled with the initial intention of pursuing a law career. A class on Hinduism, and another on spiritual practices in relation to people’s surroundings, led to a new major, religion, with a minor in law, justice, and society. Although she first approached religion as an object of scholarly interest, now, she says, “I definitely feel like my study of religion and ecology is more from a spiritual lens.”

She got accepted to law school in her senior year but decided that was no longer her “life track.” Instead, she took the advice of her advisor, a YDS alumna, to apply to divinity school.

At YDS, Margaret has pursued her interests in religion and ecology. Last summer she interned with the Urban Resources Initiative, “working in green spaces around New Haven.” Among them was the Botanical Garden of Healing, which commemorates victims of gun violence in New Haven going back to the 1970s. Bricks along a walkway bear their names and their ages when they died. “The space is like a remembrance and also healing. You walk along the path with all the names and at the end there’s this big tree of life inspiring hope.”

Witkofsky also co-chaired the 2026 Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology. The annual conference brought together more than 100 people from around the world and included academic talks, art exhibits, workshops, and rituals.

Her love of nature carries over into the poetry she began writing in college. A notebook is her constant companion, and she’s always writing. While an undergrad, thanks to a grant, she spent a summer alone in a cabin in Montana near Yellowstone National Park. She wrote poetry and took photos using her mother’s old film camera, culminating the summer with a presentation to her fellow Washington and Lee undergraduates.

She plans to spend this summer again as an intern with the Urban Resources Initiative, where she worked on the Garden of Healing. Then she’ll be looking for a job that blends nature and religion. “Working in this garden was so inspiring. And I’d hope to find a similar space using nature as healing.”

Austin Goodwin Andrews has spent each of the past three summers on archaeological digs in North Macedonia and in Italy’s Aeolian Islands.

Sometimes he’s down in the trenches, excavating potsherds, but mostly he’s figuring out what the artifacts are and how they were used. “Were they cook pots? Were they storage vessels? Were they transport vessels? Were they serving vessels? When were these produced? And critically, where were they produced?”

Both sites he studies date to Late Antiquity, from the fourth to seventh centuries, a time that covers the late Roman, early Byzantine, and early medieval periods. “In that period, we see the proliferation, legalization, and hegemonization of Christian practice as fully entrenched in Roman imperial system.”

Archaeology, he believes, opens a door to a broader history than what written chronicles provide. “I’m interested in the way that the material world can tell us something beyond—or in combination with—what written history tells us. When we’re studying the past, we should not just focus on the stories told by the elite and the literate.”

The archaeology bug bit Goodwin Andrews when he was in high school in a small town called Hamlet in the southern part of North Carolina. (“It’s two hours from anything anyone knows.”) A class in Latin got him reading about ancient Mediterranean art and religion, and archaeology. Then, during his freshman year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an older classmate who shared his religion and antiquities major suggested he go on an archaeological dig with a study abroad program. The next summer he made the first of three trips to Israel for fieldwork.

After graduation he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching English in a farming village in North Macedonia. On his return home he volunteered as an educator and guide at the Brooklyn Museum, then and spent several years working in various roles at the American Numismatic Society in New York.

In 2023 he started his studies at YDS, drawn by a strong cohort of faculty and researchers in Late Antiquity. After graduation, he’ll spend the summer at his two excavation sites again for fieldwork before starting a year-long internship with the curatorial team at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. Then he will return to Yale to start a Ph.D. in the Department of Religious Studies. His dissertation, he says, will look broadly at sensory religion in Late Antiquity.

“What are the small rituals that people are doing? What are the spaces that people are meeting in? Using different sources, we can imagine how they’re moving in that space, how often they’re going to that space, the kinds of sensory experiences that they’re having at a church, at a synagogue, at a temple, the incense that’s being burned, the oil lamps that are burning. What are those sensory experiences like and how do they highlight something new about an ancient group of people living their daily life? With material culture, we’re able to look a little bit more at daily life and to reconceptualize what’s happening with ancient religion beyond a footnote.”

In August of 2022, Andrea Barton Reeves began her studies at YDS with support from the School’s social justice scholarship. Five months later, she began her tenure as Connecticut’s Commissioner of the Department of Social Services. With the blessing of Gov. Ned Lamont, she pursued her degree while managing a department with a staff of 1,800 and a budget of $10 billion that provides services including cash, heating, and food assistance, health care, and child and family support to more than 1.2 million state residents. She also found time for her husband and son.

“I rarely missed a class,” she said. “Sometimes I didn’t sleep a lot, but I made it work.”

Why divinity school? By the time she became commissioner, she had run her own children and family law firm, had headed a non-profit serving people with intellectual disabilities, and had founded and led state agency administering paid family and medical leave. She’d also been named to the Hartford Business Journal’s lists of Power 25 in Healthcare, Top 25 Leaders in Business, and New Leaders to Watch. The state NAACP named her one of the 100 most influential Black people in Connecticut.

“Div school has been a calling for well over two decades,” said Reeves. “It was my need to have this very deep spiritual and theological understanding of the work that I believe I was called to do in the world.”

This understanding came into focus in a course with the Rev. William Barber on the intersection of morality and public policy. “If you are committing your life’s work to addressing the social deficits of our nation and around the world that cause people to be poor and hungry and unable to access the basics of humanity, that moral basis requires a structure for you to be able to do your work effectively. You have to understand that you are a minister, no matter what space you’re in and whatever title you have, and that you need to be strategic about the work that you do.”

Her path to her life’s work started before she was born, when her parents emigrated from Guyana. They settled in New Jersey, where Reeves and her two younger brothers were born. Her father was in medical school, and there wasn’t much money. “I remember going to school with a lunch that really wasn’t a lunch—little snack crackers and a piece of fruit.” When she was 16, her parents divorced and her mom, a psychiatric nurse, had to support three children with less than half the family income. That experience drew her to family law after majoring in English at Rutgers and getting her JD at New York Law School. “It was important for me to be a voice for kids, because I knew what that felt like.”

Now, having completed her studies a semester ahead of schedule, she spends her days in a variety of settings, like meetings with the governor and legislators, often about issues related to Medicaid or SNAP. She also meets with stakeholders, including recipients of those and other benefits.

Her studies at the Divinity School have provided the framework for what she calls the “moral obligation” of her work. “It’s not just about administering programs. It’s about making sure that those resources that we have make people’s lives better and to be very deliberate and thoughtful about how that happens and to be accountable when it doesn’t.”