"What the Fuck Would It Take?"
That's how historian and William Sloane Coffin biographer Warren Goldstein opens his report on the rise and fall and (maybe) rise of Yale Divinity School, in YDS' alumni magazine, no less. The question was posed by Phil Donohue 26 years ago. He was trying to provoke a disinterested Coffin into recognizing the growing strength of the Christian Right. But Coffin, for all his brilliance, never quite got it, and neither did Yale Div. Yale, a recent chaplain of the school tells Goldstein, "'sat out the culture wars and has been a victim of its own class stratification; it's seen the evangelical movement as a poor people's movement. Its refusal to engage [was] a function of perception of class, as well as of ignoring William James' -- who celebrated 'the varieties of religious experience' in his 1902 book of that name." But now, says a YDS grad who leads a growing liberal church in North Carolina, "the worm has turned.."
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That’s how historian and William Sloane Coffin biographer Warren Goldstein opens his report on the rise and fall and (maybe) rise of Yale Divinity School, in YDS’ alumni magazine, no less. The question was posed by Phil Donohue 26 years ago. He was trying to provoke a disinterested Coffin into recognizing the growing strength of the Christian Right. But Coffin, for all his brilliance, never quite got it, and neither did Yale Div. Yale, a recent chaplain of the school tells Goldstein, “‘sat out the culture wars and has been a victim of its own class stratification; it’s seen the evangelical movement as a poor people’s movement. Its refusal to engage [was] a function of perception of class, as well as of ignoring William James’ — who celebrated ‘the varieties of religious experience’ in his 1902 book of that name.” But now, says a YDS grad who leads a growing liberal church in North Carolina, “the worm has turned..”