From June 27 to 29, more than 100 scholars from around the world gathered at Yale Divinity School for the annual conference of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission(link is external). The meeting was co-sponsored by YDS, the Overseas Ministries Study Center, and the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

The gathering was the 29^th meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh Group, which annually alternates venues between New Haven and Edinburgh. The meeting provides opportunities for senior and early-career scholars to present their current research while creating a collegial environment for graduate students, some presenting in an academic setting for the first time. The conference also provides a space for networking as future projects, including publications and conference panels, are sometimes planned during meals and hallway conversations.

The theme of the 2019 conference was “Diversity and Difference in Custom, Belief, and Practice in the History of Missions and World Christianity.” Thirty-nine papers, two plenaries, one book panel, and a documentary film screening comprised the schedule.

The first plenary was chaired by Chloë Starr, Associate Professor of Asian Christianity and Theology at YDS. Following a warm welcome by YDS Dean Greg Sterling, the opening lecture, “Naming ‘World Christianity’: The Yale-Edinburgh Conference in Historical Perspective,”(link is external) was given by Dana Robert ‘84 Ph.D., Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission at Boston University.

The second plenary, chaired by Divinity Librarian Stephen Crocco, was highlighted by the Day Associates Lecture. Delivered by Joel Carpenter, Professor and Director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity at Calvin College, the lecture explored “‘To be Agents of a Life-Giving Transformation:’ Christian Higher Education in Africa.”(link is external) Giving a formal response was Andrew Walls, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh and co-founder of the Yale-Edinburgh Group.

This year’s conference marked the first meeting since the death of Yale-Edinburgh co-founder Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at YDS. Several presenters remembered Dr. Sanneh in their presentations, and his family was present to receive a gift notebook that included personal messages about Sanneh from colleagues and organizations around the world. Martha Smalley of the Divinity Library prepared a pop-up exhibit showcasing several dozen photographs and publications of Dr. Sanneh.In addition, Sanneh’s seminal paper on “Religious Agnostics and Cultural Believers: Contemporary Sounds on the Lost Trails of Christendom” —which he presented at the inaugural Yale-Edinburgh Group meeting in 1992—was discussed during the conference’s book panel.

On June 20 President Peter Salovey received an honorary degree for his pioneering scholarship on emotional intelligence from Vytautas Magnus University, a leading public university with a focus on the liberal arts, located in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Salovey’s trip included meetings with university leaders, lectures, and visits to significant sites in Lithuania.

“It is a tremendous honor to receive an honorary degree from Vytautas Magnus University, one of the great centers of liberal arts education and scholarship in Eastern Europe,” Salovey said. “This trip is especially meaningful for me because many generations of my family — going back to the 18th century at least — lived, worked, and studied in present-day Lithuania and Belarus.”

Read Salovey’s remarks at the honorary degree ceremony.

Salovey attended the opening of an exhibit at the Valdas Adamkus Presidential Library titled “The History of Kaunus Soloveitchik Family,” which focuses on his family’s deep roots in the region. The exhibit traces the Soloveitchiks’ leadership in the city’s Jewish community; their contributions to Lithuanian culture, politics, and economy; and their activities around the world. The Soloveitchik rabbinical dynasty is considered one of the most historically significant in modern Judaism. In 1803, Salovey’s ancestor Hayyim Volozhin founded the Volozhin yeshiva, located in what is today Belarus. The yeshiva became one of the most prominent and influential centers of Jewish scholarship. Other family members were leading rabbinical scholars throughout the 19th century. Salovey’s grandfather changed his surname to Salovey when he emigrated to the United States from Jerusalem in the early 20th century.

Salovey attends “The History of Kaunus Soloveitchik Family.” Left to right: Ineta Dabašinskienė, vice rector of Vytautas Magnus University; Salovey; former President of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus; Vytautas Magnus University Rector Juozas Augutis.

As part of his trip, Salovey met with other university leaders and scholars from Eastern Europe. He participated in the forum “Reimagining the Future of the University: Traditions and Innovations” at Vytautas Magnus University, and he delivered a lecture on “Emotional Intelligence in the Lab, Workplace and Classroom” at Vilnius University, the oldest and largest university in Lithuania.

“Yale is committed to working collaboratively with international partners to solve global challenges and prepare students to lead and serve in a rapidly changing world,” Salovey said. “This visit was a wonderful opportunity for me to discuss with scholars and educators from Lithuania the unique role universities play in incubating transformative ideas, in encouraging social mobility, in bolstering the economy, and in bringing together the best minds across cultures, national borders, political differences, and socioeconomic divides.”

Esther F. arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 — a period when the camp’s crematoriums were operating at full capacity. Esther, a physician, was held for five days before being transported to Guben, a labor camp in Germany where she was assigned to care for Jewish factory workers.

At Guben, a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in eastern Germany (present-day Poland), a female Nazi officer instructed Esther to produce a list of medical supplies she needed. Mentally and physically exhausted, Esther struggled to compose a list of necessities, including aspirin, iodine, cotton, and alcohol. Upon reviewing the list, the officer asked Esther whether she required any additional supplies.

“She came and she says to me, ‘That’s all you ask right now?’” Esther said in a video testimonial recorded when she was 83 years old. Her testimony is part of Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, a collection of more than 4,400 interviews recorded with survivors.

Esther’s account sheds light on the dynamics between the Nazis’ pursuit of two different yet overlapping initiatives: the exploitation of the Jewish labor force and the extermination of European Jewry, said Sari J. Siegel ’06 B.A., the Geoffrey H. Hartman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fortunoff Archive.

The fact that the Nazi officer appeared prepared to provide medical supplies beyond those Esther had requested offers insight into the value that the Nazis accorded to their Jewish slave-labor force, said Siegel, whose dissertation examined the recruitment and experiences of Jewish prisoner-physicians in Nazi camps.

 “Her experience echoes my findings related to Jewish prisoner-physicians within the industrial sub-camps of Auschwitz,” said Siegel. “Surviving doctors report that on a variety of occasions, S.S. medical orderlies or doctors obtained requested medical equipment or medications. The importance of the Jewish doctors to the [Germans’] industrial program is clear from their transfers from Birkenau to the sub-camps and from one sub-camp to another.”

The Hartman Fellowship was established in 2016 as part of a wider effort to draw scholars into the archive’s collection. It is named in honor of the late Geoffrey H. Hartman, Yale Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature and longtime faculty adviser to the archive. As part of the fellowship, Siegel is producing a critical edition of Esther’s testimony featuring an annotated transcript and an introductory essay. She presented her research at a symposium on May 3 at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, which was part of a series of events this year marking the archive’s 40th anniversary.

The symposium also featured a presentation by Ion Popa, a joint research fellow with the Fortunoff Archive and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, who is studying testimonies of Jews who converted to Christianity before and during the Holocaust. Popa, whose research interests focus on Jewish-Christian relations in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, is producing a critical edition of the video testimony of Hans Frei, a former professor at the Yale Divinity School, who was born in Germany and converted to Christianity as a child after the Nazis ascended to power.

“Our hope is that our fellows, after leaving here, will serve as ambassadors for the collection as they continue to use it in their research and teaching at the institutions they call home,” said Stephen Naron, the archive’s director. “The critical editions are meant to unlock testimony, make them accessible to a broader readership, and encourage both scholarly and educational use of these resources at various levels.”

A doctor in the Lodz ghetto

Esther was born in 1908 in Lodz, a city in central Poland. Her family kept a kosher household and observed Shabbat. Growing up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and attending a Jewish school, Esther experienced little anti-Semitism as a child, she reported.

In 1926, she traveled to France for medical training because Poland’s numerus clausus (“closed number”) system severely restricted the number of Jews who could attend the country’s medical schools. After earning her medical degree, Esther returned to Lodz in 1933 and worked at a children’s hospital before taking a job as a doctor for a workers union. She married the principal of a Jewish school shortly before the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. She last saw her husband when he left to serve as an officer in the Polish Army. He was soon captured, sent to the Wlodawa ghetto, and later killed at the Sobibor extermination camp, Siegel said.

Esther survived four and a half years of cold, hunger, and fear in the Lodz ghetto, also called the Litzmannstadt ghetto. She worked in a hospital and for the ghetto’s emergency medical service, caring for the injured and sick. 

There are references in Esther’s testimony about official measures intended to preserve the lives of ghetto doctors — specifically orders to perimeter guards not to shoot people wearing a medical insignia, and efforts to transfer additional doctors from the Warsaw ghetto. This suggests “that doctors had value to German officials as possible preservers of their labor force,” Siegel noted.

“These are small clues that draw attention to a larger fact,” the researcher said. “By pointing this out, I’m in no way negating the horrific circumstances under which Jews lived in the Lodz ghetto … but there was something there that [German officials] wanted to do, and I see that as preserving doctors’ lives, and, in some cases, allowing medication to enter the ghetto and providing minimal supplies to keep workers alive.”

Supporting the labor force was not the ghetto doctors’ only function, Siegel said.

Jewish doctors also served to minimize the risk of transmission of epidemics from the ghetto inhabitants to the populations beyond the ghetto’s boundaries,” she explained.

Extrapolating from the findings of her dissertation, which concerned the recruitment of Jewish doctors for work in forced labor camps in the same region during the same period, Siegel concluded that German officials’ desire for ghetto doctors to help maintain the Jewish labor force — to whatever limited extent they could — outweighed their desire for the doctors to help protect public health outside the ghetto.

The Germans shut down the ghetto in August 1944, a decision that was “a key flashpoint between the German officials most intent on extermination and those more invested in harnessing Jewish labor power for financial gain and/or for the benefit of the German war effort,” Siegel said.

At Auschwitz, Esther’s mother immediately was sent to the gas chamber. Esther was taken to a recently established transit camp within Auschwitz-Birkenau and subsequently transported to Guben.

Her transfer to Guben to care for Jewish women who worked in a factory that produced radio equipment for German aircraft demonstrated a clear interest on the part of the Nazis in preserving their source of slave labor, said Siegel.

“The camp’s location within the Reich-proper draws further attention to the importance of the Jewish labor force as the Jews were brought back into territory that was previously declared to be — and was meant to stay — Judenrein, cleansed of Jews,” Siegel said.

Coercion, resistance

Running through Esther’s testimony are painful reminders that some Jewish functionaries held privileged positions and performed tasks that, one way or another, helped the Nazis achieve their goals. The anguish and complexity of that history is given voice through Esther, who, for example, refuses to pass judgment on Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Polish-Jewish businessman whom the Nazis appointed Judenälteste, the “Elder of the Jews,” and thereby made him responsible for implementing German policies and maintaining order in the ghetto. 

“History can judge this,” Esther said. “I will not say what was right and what was wrong. There [were] a lot of abuses and a lot of things that shouldn’t have happened, but as you say, it is self-preservation. I am not going into psychology right now. … I don’t want to be the judge of all this.”

At the same time, Esther states that her fellow ghetto doctors neither abused their patients nor collaborated with the Germans.

“Perhaps she was not aware or no longer recalls, but there were ghetto doctors who, under coercion, assisted Nazis in mass murder,” Siegel said.

Nazi officials required Jewish doctors to perform medical examinations on people on deportation lists to determine whether they would be sent to either a forced labor camp or Chelmno, an extermination camp located about 30 miles northwest of Lodz, she explained. She pointed to the former Lodz Ghetto doctor Arnold Mostowicz, whose memoir addresses this dilemma. Further emphasizing the power imbalance, Siegel said that Mostowicz “and the other doctors who were coerced into carrying out this process, had to decide who would be exempt from the transports, and in doing so, they had to determine who would live and who would die.”

In her testimony, Esther discusses an act of resistance she took to protect her patients from the Nazis. She kept two sets of records: one that recorded patients’ actual condition, which she kept hidden, and another that concealed the degree of their illness, which she would provide to a German doctor who oversaw her work.   

“The majority had TB [tuberculosis] and I didn’t know if he should know it,” Esther said.

The deception potentially saved people’s lives because German health officials may have dispatched tuberculosis patients to their deaths, Siegel noted.

Liberation

Esther’s incarceration at Guben ended in February 1945 when the camp was evacuated as the Red Army drove deeper into Germany. She was transferred in an uncovered truck through snow and freezing cold to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, where she was assigned to medical work. She fell ill with typhus about two weeks after her arrival and was still recovering when the British army liberated the camp on April 15, 1945.

After her liberation, Esther was moved to a displaced-persons camp in nearby army barracks. Once her health was restored, she tended to her fellow survivors’ medical needs. Unwilling to return to Poland, she volunteered to join a group of displaced persons traveling to Sweden for rehabilitation, according to her testimony.  

Esther continued treating her fellow displaced persons in Sweden. A Jewish doctor in Stockholm invited her to work in his forensic medicine lab. She began a correspondence with her late husband’s best friend, who lived in New York City and had lost his family in the Lodz ghetto. He visited her in Sweden and they were married soon after. In May 1947, Esther joined him in New York, where she learned English and established a medical practice in pediatrics.

She recorded her testimony on Oct. 9, 1991 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

“I know, not too many, but I know some survivors who want to forget the whole story, and they say, “I don’t want to think of it. I’ve had enough,’” she said. “I have the opposite compulsion.”

She explained that many survivors were nearing the end of their lives and that it was important to share their experiences for posterity for their children and grandchildren. 

“They should not try to forget,” she said of her fellow survivors. “They should remember.”

The internationally-renowned Yale Schola Cantorum (Schola), a chamber choir made up of students from across all of Yale University’s departments and professional schools, and Juilliard415, the period-instrument orchestra of Juilliard’s famous historical performance program will tour Scandinavia May 24–June 1 with public performances in Copenhagen, Lund, Västerås, Helsinki, and Oslo.

Schola performs sacred music from the sixteenth century to the present day in concert settings and choral services around the world. The ensemble is sponsored by Yale Institute of Sacred Music and conducted by David Hill; Masaaki Suzuki is principal guest conductor. In addition to performing regularly in New Haven and New York, the ensemble records and tours nationally and internationally. Schola’s 2018 recordings on the Hyperion label featuring Palestrina’s Missa Confitebor tibi Domine and Fauré’s Requiem have garnered enthusiastic reviews. On tour, Schola Cantorum has given performances in England, Hungary, France, China, South Korea, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Japan, Singapore, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, India, and Spain.

Principal conductor David Hill will lead Schola and Juilliard415 in performances of Josef Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Paweł Łukaszewski’s Ascensio Domini, recently premiered in New Haven and New York. Johann Christian Bach’s Grand Overture (Symphony) in D major, Op. 18, No. 4 opens the concert.

One of the finest Polish composers specializing in sacred and choral music, Paweł Łukaszewski (link is external)crafted Ascensio Domini on commission from the Institute of Sacred Music. The composer visited Yale in May to coach Schola and Juilliard415 for their performance in New Haven at Woolsey Hall.

David Hill’s long and distinguished career as one of the leading conductors in Europe has included appointments as chief conductor of the BBC Singers, musical director of the Bach Choir, and previous engagements as Master of Music at Westminster and Winchester Cathedrals, among others. With over one hundred recordings to his credit, Hill has performed virtually every style and period in the choral repertoire and was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2019 for his services to music. He has been on the Yale faculty since 2013.

Schola kicks off their tour with a Friday, May 24 performance in the Gustafs Church in Copenhagen. On Sunday, May 26 they will sing for an 11AM service at Lund Cathedral. Concert performances on May 27 in Västerås Cathedral and May 30 in Helsinki’s Rock Church follow. The tour’s final performance takes place Saturday, June 1 in the Oslo Domkirke. Visit the Scandinavia tour page for complete details.

Politicians and powerbrokers in Hungary use a variety of illicit election strategies to secure people’s votes, including making access to public benefits contingent on supporting preferred candidates, according to a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Isabela Mares.

Mares and co-author Lauren Young, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California-Davis, documented the prevalence of multiple forms of electoral clientelism — quid pro quo exchanges of votes for some agreed upon behavior by a politician — in Hungary’s 2014 parliamentary elections.

The study, published in the journal Comparative Politics, is the first to document electoral clientelism in Hungary, a member of NATO and the European Union. 

“Until now, we didn’t know whether clientelism existed in countries in the European Union,” said Mares, a professor of political science. “These are countries that are supposed to have free and fair elections. The existence of these illicit practices in Hungary is extremely important.”

Research on clientelism generally has focused on documenting vote buying — the exchange of private money or gifts for votes — in developing countries in Latin America and Africa, Mares said.   

Mares and Young identified new types of clientelism, and fine-tuned a methodology for measuring and documenting multiple forms of the practice.

“We show that vote buying is just one of many forms of clientelism in Hungary,” she said. “The most important forms involve the use of state resources.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who won power in 2010, established a workfare program that provides jobs to hundreds of thousands of people that pay twice as much as the country’s minimum wage. Local mayors administer the program and control distribution of the benefits, Mares explained.

“The benefits are conditioned on political support,” she said. “In deindustrialized areas of Hungary, where jobs are very scarce, politicians are using the workfare program — many people’s only source of income — to condition electoral support.”

The workfare program drives two forms of clientelism: One in which a positive inducement — access to the program’s benefits — is exchanged for votes, and another in which benefits are threatened to coerce political support, Mares noted. 

“Coercion of voters is something we thought only happened in the 19^th century, but we have found that it persists in contemporary elections in established democracies,” she said. “It is the most objectionable form of clientelism because the voter loses autonomy and has little choice but to comply.”

Overall, Mares and Young documented four types of clientelism in Hungary: vote buying, the provision of public benefits in exchange for votes, coercion through threatening receipt of benefits, and economic coercion involving threats from non-state actors, such as moneylenders and employers.

They ran surveys in 93 villages in three Hungarian counties using “list experiments,” which were developed to elicit unbiased answers from people about sensitive political attitudes, such as racism or anti-Semitism. In these survey-based experiments, respondents are presented a list of items and asked how many — as opposed to which — are true. The control group was given a questionnaire with only non-sensitive items. The treatment group received the same list of non-sensitive items with an additional item measuring sensitive behavior, such as whether they expected a favor from the mayor if they voted for the right candidate.

The researchers found that 5-7% of respondents reported having experienced one of the four clientelism strategies. By comparison, studies have shown that 5-7% of voters in Argentina and 10-12% in Venezuela reported getting vote-buying offers.  

The researchers posit that the blend of clientelistic strategies differs across localities depending on a number of factors. These include the long-term incumbency of the mayor, whether the mayor belongs to the nationally incumbent party, and demographic and economic characteristics of the locality. In localities with large populations of residents who are ineligible for the workfare program, coercive forms of clientelism are more likely, especially if there is also a large group of very poor residents who are eligible for the workfare benefits. By contrast, vote buying does not appear to be at all targeted. 

Mares and Young suggest that politicians and political brokers take advantage of resentments between poor people who receive workfare benefits and those who do not. For example, a politician might threaten to reduce workfare benefits, thereby capturing the support of those whose livelihoods depend on them while also signaling to those opposed to the program a willingness to cut benefits or punish beneficiaries deemed unworthy, the researchers explained. These signals are important because in general, voters do not like politicians who use clientelism. However, when politicians use clientelism in a way that aligns with people’s policy preferences, they view it less negatively, Mares said.

This ‘poor-versus-poor’ conflict is an important, yet overlooked, dimension of political conflict in deindustrialized communities.

“Politicians use coercive strategies because they can secure the votes of beneficiary recipients without getting punished by their own supporters since they are signaling that they are opposed to the very poor,” Mares said. “In Hungary, there is political conflict over which groups are ‘deserving’ of welfare benefits, and politicians can use coercion to signal that they believe that the very poor and members of minority groups are lazy and untrustworthy. This ‘poor-versus-poor’ conflict is an important, yet overlooked, dimension of political conflict in deindustrialized communities.”

The ability to use the workfare program to coerce electoral support has played a role in the enduring success of Orban’s Fidesz party, which won 133 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly in the 2014 elections and secured its two-thirds majority in the 2018 elections.  

“The dynamics we uncovered explain how Fidesz politicians win election after election,” she said. “The party controls the mayors and they control the distribution of benefits.”

Mares emphasized the need for election monitors in Hungary and elsewhere to adopt more robust methodological approaches including list-experiments and deploying longer-term monitors to a much wider sample of rural communities, to detect multiple types of electoral clientelism.

“Understanding the extent of political clientelism is important to understanding democratic erosion in Hungary and other Eastern European countries,” she said. “I hope our research informs the work of election monitors and scholars working in other parts of the globe.”

On November 30, the MacMillan Center, in conjunction with Queen’s University Belfast, hosted a conference commemorating and reflecting on twenty years of the Good Friday Agreement, titled “Twenty Years of Peace: Progress and Possibilities in Northern Ireland.” Organized by Professor Bonnie Weir, Yale University, and Professor Richard English, Queen’s University Belfast, the conference brought together diplomats, non-profit leaders, politicians, and journalists from Northern Ireland and the United States to reflect on how Northern Ireland has changed since the momentous peace agreement was reached twenty years ago. Representing various negotiating partners and all five of Northern Ireland’s major political parties, the speakers provided insightful comments on the greatest achievements of the Northern Irish peace process and started to chart a path through the country’s ongoing political division.

Professor Weir opened the conference by welcoming participants and remarking that the conference’s goal was not only to celebrate the Good Friday Agreement but also to turn an eye to Northern Ireland’s future in light of Brexit and the political stalemate between the region’s two major parties—Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)—that has caused Northern Ireland’s regional parliament to be unable to meet since the Winter of 2017. Navigating political divisions and the persistent sectarianism that remains the defining force of Northern Irish politics was a major point of discussion throughout the day.

The conference consisted of three panels and one academic seminar, with expert discussants present throughout the day to pose questions to the panelists. The day’s first panel, “Making Peace: Past, Present, and Future”, was chaired by Professor Richard English, a Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast and expert in Northern Ireland’s civil conflict—popularly termed ‘The Troubles’—and paramilitary groups in the region. The panel featured three of the most influential negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement: former Irish Taoiseach Professor Bertie Ahern, former US Senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine), and General John de Chastelain, who has served as Chair of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning in Northern Ireland. Panelists shared memories from the peace process, reflected on the Agreement’s greatest successes, and evaluated how the peace agreement that they helped secure has held up over time and how it will be challenged in the future. Senator Mitchell noted the challenges that Brexit has ignited in the region, hoping that the final Brexit agreement will enable the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland to continue their cooperative relationship. General de Chastelain and others recalled the difficult process of getting paramilitaries to the negotiating table and argued that giving youth a sense of purpose, hope, and status in their community was the best way to minimize the potential of paramilitary activity returning in the future.

Chaired by Jonathan Powell, the Founder of Inter Mediate and Chief of Staff to British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Good Friday negotiations, the second panel focused on “Politics: Setbacks and Successes from 1998-2018” and hosted a spirited discussion on community divisions and reconciliation. Speakers included Peter Robinson, the former First Minister of Northern Ireland and member of the Democratic Unionist Party, Peter Sheridan, the Chief Executive of Cooperation Ireland, and Monica McWilliams, Emeritus Professor at Ulster University’s Transitional Justice Institute and the representative of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition at the peace talks. While all panelists recognized that more work was needed to reconcile Northern Ireland’s different unionist and nationalist communities, they also celebrated the successes of the peace agreement. Peter Robinson noted that while a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Northern Ireland was once viewed as impossible, it was viewed as inevitable once the Good Friday Agreement had been reached, a framing that undersells the hard work and difficult compromises made by all parties to the negotiations. Robinson and Sheridan both celebrated the Good Friday Agreement’s greatest success was stopping the conflict, which had once been seen as intractable, resulting in thousands of people being alive and well today that otherwise would have been killed or injured. Panelists also recognized the importance of policing reform, though the topic sparked some disagreement about how sufficient the reform actually was.

The final panel, chaired by Sterling Professor of Political Science Ian Shapiro, featured representatives of all of Northern Ireland’s major political parties—the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), Sinn Fein, Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and Alliance—as well as the Northern Ireland Assembly’s one independent MLA and Justice Minister, Claire Sugden. Together, they discussed the political landscape in Northern Ireland and gave unique insight into the current situation.

The academic panel, led by Professor Weir, featured four academic presentations related to Northern Ireland and sectarianism. Kieran McEvoy, Professor of Law and Transitional Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, spoke on the role that apologies for paramilitary and state violence during the Troubles has played in giving communities a sense of healing and closure. McEvoy’s research in the region suggests that citizens of Northern Ireland place a high value on unequivocal and unconditional apologies for violence, especially when civilians were involved. Emma Sky, Director of Yale’s World Fellows Program, drew a comparison between sectarianism in Northern Ireland and Iraq, noting how coalition forces establishing an ethnic basis for governmental representation in Iraq made ethnicity the key dividing line in the country’s politics. Jonathan Powell, who has participated in peace negotiations around the world, shared the lessons he has learned, including an observation that it is necessary for governments to go back on their claims that they would ‘never negotiate with terrorists’ if they want to bring peace. Professor Richard English gave an account of the IRA’s political transformation and how its decision to turn away from violence drove the peace process.

The “Twenty Years of Peace” conference was generously supported by the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, Yale’s Office of the Vice President for Global Strategy, and Queen’s University Belfast.

Jan-Lüder Hagens is Director of International Student Exchange Programs at Yale Divinity School as well as Director of the School’s Visiting Fellows Program. YDS interviewed him about his work and these international dimensions of life on the Quad.

YDS: A big part of your work is overseeing international exchanges. Tell us about those programs. What opportunities does YDS offer to our students to study abroad?

JLH: We currently support student exchange programs with eight universities abroad, all of which have distinct features that appeal to different student applicants from YDS. At Cambridge, Westcott House offers the opportunity to study and live in a unique Anglican theological college and its liturgical community. Our three German partner universities (Heidelberg, Tübingen, and Freiburg) are theologically first-rate and among the most famous in Germany; they have 600-year traditions and sit in picture-perfect historic towns. With Copenhagen, we have an informal exchange arrangement that dramatically reduces tuition fees for students from either institution. This coming Fall, we will start an exchange with Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel’s premier academic institution. In Hong Kong, we collaborate with the Divinity School of Chung Chi College, the only theological education institution operating within a Chinese public university. And in Singapore, our students attend Trinity Theological College, which offers a specific Southeast Asian perspective and is a gateway into all of Southeast Asia. For the future, we envision additional exchange programs with universities in South America and Africa.

YDS: How many YDS students study abroad, and how many international students come to YDS?

JLH: Each year, we select about ten students from YDS and enable them to study abroad, at our academic partner institutions in Cambridge, Heidelberg, Tübingen, Freiburg, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, or Singapore. The other way around, we welcome about ten students from these institutions to YDS—English and Germans, Danes and Israelis, Chinese and Singaporeans. It is a win-win.

YDS: So those programs are about students – but you also head the YDS Visiting Fellows Program. Who are these Visiting Fellows?

JLH: Yes, each year Yale Divinity School appoints as Visiting Fellows about 10 or 12 distinguished professors, ministers, priests, and other well-known professionals who have research projects in the fields of theology and religion that necessitate work with specific YDS Library holdings. Most of these individuals are from abroad, often from China (because the YDS Library has superb holdings of special interest to Chinese scholars), Korea, Japan, or Europe. We do what we can to make these guests feel welcome and at home, and provide a bit of social life, with monthly lunches and lectures. YDS also has a specialized program headed by Doreen Generoso that invites younger researchers who are in the process of completing their dissertations (and most of whom are from abroad) to come here and work under the guidance of a YDS faculty member.

YDS: How does YDS benefit from the Visiting Fellows Program?

JLH: These distinguished researchers bring their knowledge and skills with them from all over the world and share their expertise with us. All of these people are superb professionals who have gone through competitive application processes and received grants from their home countries, home institutions, or foundations. We open up our Library to them, with its first-rate research possibilities, and they in turn connect us to cutting-edge theological research that happens in other parts of the world. They associate with our faculty and students here at YDS, attend and deliver lectures, and start lunch conversations in the Refectory. And when they go back to their home countries and publish their books, they put us on the world map of theological research.

YDS: So, how international is YDS? Can you give us some numbers?

JLH: Between 2008 and 2018, the number of international students at YDS has steadily risen, from 40 then to 66 this year, which means that now 18% of our students at YDS are non-U.S. citizens. But don’t forget—the global character of YDS is obvious not only from these international students, Visiting Fellows, and Ph.D. Researchers, but also when you look at the faculty and staff. I know we have professors from Australia, Canada, Croatia, Gambia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, the U.K., and probably many other countries.   

YDS: Why is it important for YDS to have these international dimensions? How does it affect our students’ experiences?

JLH: Regardless of whether a student is preparing for an academic career or parish ministry, or yet another field, study abroad often is a life-changing experience. College and graduate school are the ideal contexts and the ideal period in most people’s life for such an experience, a time when one is most able to learn, to benefit, and also to give in the fullest and most generous measure. After YDS, an opportunity like this may never come again. In my six years of sending and receiving more than a hundred students, 99 percent were enthusiastic about their study abroad experiences, and ended up richer in mind and spirit, with new insights in their fields of theological study, new ideas for their post-graduate careers, new friends in another country and often another language, and new dimensions to their faith. 

With regard to what happens right here in YDS classrooms and within campus life, ask any American student or any YDS faculty member if the international students are a plus or not. Or just imagine YDS without these students from other countries. They bring different perspectives into the classroom and are very visible and active on campus. They play an important part not only in their own YDS International Student Fellowship, which is headed by YDS students themselves and which very much welcomes U.S.-American students, but they also contribute to our community at large. They make everything so much richer, more multi-faceted and complex, livelier, just more fun.

YDS: How does your work relate to the greater mission of YDS?

JLH: Christianity is a universal religion and not reserved for specific nations, peoples, ethnic groups, or races. It does not make sense to limit ourselves to a domestic scenario. In fact, even for the sake of our own U.S.-American questions, we may want to cast a wider look and get help from those with other perspectives, just as we hope we can help them. Such an international orientation is not gratuitous or optional; it is at the core of what YDS stands for and endeavors. Two demands that are essential to Christianity are love and justice, and we have to learn how to follow and apply them across borders and despite different passports. 

YDS: More of a personal question: How did you end up in the United States after being born and raised in Germany?

JLH: Your question is right on topic, because I first came to the U.S. as a high school exchange student in the mid-1970s. In college and graduate school, I kept going back and forth between the U.S. and Germany, but eventually completed my doctorate in the U.S. Finally, I fell in love with a theological ethicist from the U.S. and decided to live here and help others go abroad.