Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 7, 2008|Volume 36, Number 21|Two-Week Issue

Serene Jones

Divinity School professor to head
Union Theological Seminary

Serene Jones, the Titus Street Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School (YDS), has accepted an offer to serve as president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a school with a long history of ties to YDS and where Reinhold Niebuhr, one of YDS’s noted graduates, once taught.

Jones will assume her new position on July 1 at Union, which like YDS is ecumenical in orientation. She succeeds Union’s retiring president Joseph Hough, a 1959 graduate of YDS.

“Serene Jones will be greatly missed at Yale Divinity School and within the broader university community,” said Divinity Dean Harold Attridge. “She has been a vital member of the YDS faculty since 1991 as a teacher of theology, but her influence has extended far beyond the classroom.

“Serene has been an active participant in day-to-day life on Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, and she has been one of the primary links between YDS and Yale’s professional schools, particularly the Law School, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — where she has played significant roles in the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of African American Studies, and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program,” Attridge added.

David Callard, chair of Union’s board of trustees, said, “Dr. Jones’s exceptional leadership style and distinguished scholarship make her the ideal person to lead this vibrant theological institution, which has been home to notable scholars Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

Jones expressed excitement about taking the reins at Union but noted that she is leaving with fond feelings about her time at Yale — which has included not only 17 years as a teacher but the time she spent earning an M.Div. at YDS and a Ph.D. in theology at Yale’s Graduate School, as well as her early childhood years. Jones was born while her father was pursuing his own degree at YDS, and she grew up around the Yale campus as he completed work on his B.D. and, then, his Ph.D.

“I am thrilled to be at the helm of a institution of theological education as esteemed and historic as Union Theological Seminary,” said Jones. “I am very sad to be leaving Yale, however. My time here — now more than half my life — has been filled with countless treasured friendships and an ongoing sense of intellectual companionship that’s been as rich as it has been expansive.

“Yale Divinity School is a magical place for ministerial formation — no other place like it on earth. … I feel privileged to have benefited from Yale’s many resources over the years, and I will take a great deal of what I learned at Yale with me. After 26 years, Yale has seeped into my bones.”

In an interview published in the winter 2005 issue of Spectrum, Yale Divinity School’s alumni magazine, Jones described her teaching style this way: “What I spend most of my time doing is trying to engage and expand [students’] imaginations and hence their deepest desires. I teach and write to their imaginative universes — to the landscape of images, expectations and possibilities that form the dramatic mental worlds in which their thoughts unfold.”

Attridge added: “Clearly, Serene is one of the outstanding young theologians on the American theological landscape, and Union is fortunate to have her at the helm. We wish Serene the very best and look forward to continued interaction with her as she pursues new challenges at one of the nation’s great institutions of theological learning.”

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