A Spiritual Journey at Yale

The 1960s were a time of deep moral questions. This chapter takes the reader on a spiritual journey at Yale Divinity School. It began with intense intellectual inquiry directed at early scribes and later reformers who wrote down what they believed to be the central tenets of Christian faith, but it came to include a long-simmering concern with whether morality needs religion. As for the followers of many other religions, the experience of the divine became more important than creedal formulations about divinity. Yet it was a time when faith was strengthened and regrounded, and when many in seminary and elsewhere were influenced by the writing and teaching of Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that while we know a lot about what is right and what is to be revered in individual behavior, we have made very little progress in applying morality to the problems of our aggregate existence.