Yale Divinity School

Yale Divinity School
Coat of arms of the school with the university's Urim V'Thummim motto under a cross and halo
Established	1822 (1822)
Type	Private
Parent institution	Yale University
Location	New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. Coordinates: 41°19′24″N 72°55′17″W / 41.32333°N 72.92139°W / 41.32333; -72.92139
Dean	Gregory E. Sterling
Academic staff	57
Students	392
Website	divinity.yale.edu

The Divinity School at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut is one of twelve graduate or professional schools within Yale University.

Congregationalist theological education was the motivation at the founding of Yale, and the professional school has its roots in a Theological Department established in 1822. The school had maintained its own campus, faculty, and degree program since 1869, and it has become more ecumenical beginning in the mid-19th century. Since the 1970s it has been affiliated with the Episcopal Berkeley Divinity School and has housed the Institute of Sacred Music, which offers separate degree programs.

Theological education was the earliest academic purpose of Yale University. When Yale College was founded in 1701, it was as a college of religious training for Congregationalist ministers in Connecticut Colony, designated in its charter as a school "wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences who through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State." A professorship of divinity was established in 1746. In 1817, the occupant of the divinity chair, Eleazar T. Fitch, supported a student request to endow a theological curriculum, and five years later a separate Yale Theological Seminary was founded by the Yale Corporation. In the same motion, Second Great Awakening theologian Nathaniel William Taylor was appointed to become the first Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology. Taylor was considered the "central figure" in the school's founding, and he was joined in 1826 by Josiah Willard Gibbs, Sr., a scholar of sacred languages and lexicographer Chauncey A. Goodrich in 1839. A dedicated student dormitory, Divinity College, was completed on the college's Old Campus in 1836, but the department had no permanent classrooms or offices until several years after the end of the American Civil War.