You Tube Theology

In the thirty-sixth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Jennifer A. Herdt, the Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at Yale University Divinity School. Herdt opens by discussing how the focus of her research, particularly as focused on the German traditions of Wissenschaft and Bildung can serve as means by which faculty members and students can engage in common moral conversations. Such conversations are often hindered by specialization and reductionistic organizational structures and policies. Herdt contends the university is a place in which the cultivation of expertise is rightfully needed and highly valued. She also asserts, however, we need to create pathways between curricular disciplines as well as between those disciplines and the variety of co-curricular offerings. Those pathways then allow specialization to be cultivated in environments that can also fulfill their commitments to whole person education. Herdt transitions to sharing her experiences as an undergraduate and how a love for biology then also found expression in a love for theology—a love that found its fullest expression in Christian ethics. The most recent form of that expression, one that also draws upon insights from biology, is found, for example, in Herdt’s forthcoming The Great Wheel of Being: Ethics Beyond the Human. Herdt explores how she weaves together her commitments as a teacher, a scholar, and an educational leader into a coherent understanding of the academic vocation and then closes by exploring the ways Christian ethicists and the Church can be of greater service to one another in the years to come.