Last summer, the divinity school broke ground for a new building just north of the iconic Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. The site: the school’s main parking lot. Workers got busy clearing the asphalt and preparing for the construction of a new 51-bed residence hall, the first new student housing at YDS since 1957. As Greg Sterling, the school’s dean, likes to put it, “You know the song ‘They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot’? Well, we unpaved a parking lot to put up paradise.”
You may be skeptical of the notion that any student housing could be paradise (a word that is laden with meaning at a divinity school, after all), but Sterling isn’t much exaggerating the scope of his dream for the project, which the school is calling the Living Village. Scheduled to open in the fall of 2025, the project is a statement that caring for creation should be a central part of religious faith.