Sunday, September 11, 2011

* Yale Names




Sacred (and Profane ?) 


Names for 


 New Colleges at Yale




theantiyale 23 hours, 27 minutes ago

From the posts:
Josiah Willard Gibbs
James Dwight Dana
Clarence Thomas
Edward Alexander Bouchet, Ph.D
William Sloane Coffin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Walter Camp
George (H.W.) (W.) Bush
Robert Phelan Langlands
Herman Husband
Amistad
Douglas Clyde Macintosh
From the article:
Christine “Chris” Ernst
Henry Louis Gates
Sonia Sotomayor
Expect this list when presented to Woodbridge Hall to receive benign neglect and intransigent equivocation in response, the heartbeats of effective administrators.
PK
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observer 18 hours, 40 minutes ago

Surely Cotton Mather should be on your list!
This fire and brimstone divine was as responsible as any man for Yale's existence. Admittedly a Harvard graduate (as were all of the conservative clergymen among the founders) Cotton Mather swore revenge when his alma mater refused to choose him as successor to his dotty daddy, Increase Mather, ousted as president of Harvard in 1701. Mather then encouraged other clergymen (including his cousin, Samuel Mather), to found a new, more godly school in Connecticut.
When the "Collegiate School" seemed likely to go under, it was Cotton Mather who rode to the rescue - persuading an exiled robber baron named Eli Yale to help the place stave off bankruptcy in exchange for naming it after him. Mather flattered the old reprobate by assuring him that "your munificence might easily obtain for you such a commemoration and perpetuation of your valuable name, which would indeed be much better than an Egyptian pyramid."
The Cotton Mather legacy persists, even down to the present day, when we can imagine that President Levin utilizes the same flattering tactic in soliciting large gifts for the endowment!
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theantiyale 18 hours, 9 minutes ago

And that little cottony oedipal battle would ultimately result in the legacy of Unitarian liberalism (and of Ralph Waldo Emerson) at Harvard and of Trinitarian orthodoxy at Yale (until christianity was dethroned as the university religion a few years ago).
BTW, in case Mr. Hughes (aka terryhughes) missed it, here is my reply:
I have not had time to respond to your comments directly. You seem a civilized fellow Mr. Hughes, so I will take the time.
Also, you write with a poison pen, which I admire.
Regardless of the intellectual subtlety of his thought, the intricacy of his theological crocheting, I am evaluating Edwards on his contribution to humankind. It has been a decidedly cruel contribution. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the devil, eternal damnation, and hell exist. If you wish to kowtow to a sacred text, the Old Testament had an afterlife in an underworld called Sheol (the grave, pit, or abyss) but it was a decidedly neutral place; folks simply stumbled around like drunks in a dark barroom. (I had the luxury of taking the late Marvin Pope's seminar on Sheol at Yale.)
Hell, eternal punishment and suffering in an inferno, is a delight imagined by christian theologians. Lovely idea.
You write with verve and intellectual acuity. I cannot imagine why someone like that would wish to surrender his or her destiny and fate to the lugubrious imaginings of Reward/Punishment theologians. That is a device used to keep humanity from murdering, raping and pillaging itself.
Try the photo-tropism theology of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Or stay in your dark hole if you wish.
Plato let us know that there is sunlight out there.
Paul D. Keane
M. Div. '80
M.A., M.Ed.
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observer 16 hours, 14 minutes ago

to theantiyale:
It sounds,poor fellow, as if you attended the wrong divinity school some years ago, and have regretted it ever since!
Of course Harvard's run of 9 consecutive Unitarian presidents is long over, and most Unitarians (of who I am admittedly one by birth) no longer much bother with God - let alone the Devil.
Most of them, I dare say, are less concerned with the theological ramblings in Emerson's Divinity School Address than they are with Paul Krugman's latest political fulminations in the NY Times.
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theantiyale 15 hours, 45 minutes ago

Nooooo. I attended the right divinity school and have never regretted it, nor my friendship with the author of Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther as he lived out the final years of his eighties at that school.link text
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theantiyale 15 hours, 17 minutes ago

PS
My parents named me after a guy they knew at the divinity school. I never gave the idea of attending YDS at minute's thought until I was 30 and it was thrust upon me by Fate. I have never used the M. Div. degree for any professional advancement. It is simply something I went through to discover the truth, an inconvenient one for posters here:
The truth is that no one KNOWS the truth and that's the truth.
PK

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