VDS Voices

Recognizing the significant suicidality, post-traumatic stress, depression and moral injury endured by active military and veteran populations, Vanderbilt Divinity School has partnered with Integrative Mental Health, a national program of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, to prepare chaplains for contemporary care challenges. “With our appropriate focus… Read More

…Our default ways of seeing are all too often complicit with cultural biases like racism, sexism, ableism, and trans- and homophobia. This isn’t necessarily intentional but reflects our own formation by the systems that gave rise to these biases. Ellen T. Armour, Seeing and Believing: Religion, Digital Visual Culture, and… Read More

Here is the beginning of  Professor Douglas Knight’s most recent article: Raised in a Baptist family that valued diversity and social justice, educated during the 1960s period of anti-war student unrest, Vanderbilt Divinity School professor emeritus reflects on higher education, critical thinking, and belief. When faced with expansive debates and… Read More

Check out this new article from GDR Ph.D. student Ludwig Noya: Abstract: Recent interpretations of the Sabbath rest concept in the Hebrew Bible tend to highlight its humanitarian aspect. However, in this paper, I aim to nuance this claim by attending to a rarely discussed Sabbath text in Nehemiah 13. Read More

Check out this new article co-authored by Priscila Silva and Joerg Rieger Abstract: The first generation of Latin American liberation theologies was marked by the methodological status of the preferential option for the poor. In the following generations, this commitment was further developed in the struggle for a new… Read More

Divinity School Commencement Celebration. Delivered by Dean Emilie Townes, Emerita May 12, 2023 each year, i am reminded that you and i (and countless others) are often called to ministry in the midst of the senselessness of our worlds now some folks would say that this is depressing a downer somewhat despairing… Read More

Excerpt from “Blacks and Jews, Again”, a New York Times opinion guest essay by Michael Eric Dyson: “. . . Ye, the hip-hop artist and fashion designer formerly known as Kanye West, has unleashed a rash of antisemitic tirades, and the Brooklyn Nets basketball superstar Kyrie Irving posted on social… Read More

Congratulations to two Vanderbilt Divinity School professors, Michael Eric Dyson and Peter Lake, for their promotions to University Distinguished Professors! Congratulations to Michael Eric Dyson on his promotion to University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies in the Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science and University Distinguished Professor… Read More

West Southern Pines School A reflection from our dean, Emilie M. Townes, for November 2022: When I was a little Black kid growing up in a very traditional Black transclass community in Durham, NC, and in my grandmother’s working class, Black community in West Southern Pines, NC, about 75 miles… Read More

A new book from Stephanie Budwey, an assistant professor of the history and practice of Christian worship and the arts, discusses the erasure of intersex people in the areas of science, law, culture, and theology due to the assumption that all humans are either ‘female’ or ‘male.’ Read More