October 22, 2024 | By Zeki Tan MY ‘25

Rowan Williams is the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He taught theology at Oxford and Cambridge and served as the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 2013 to 2020. Dr. Williams is also a poet and translator of poetry; he published his most recent edition of Collected Poems in 2022. In February 2024 he delivered the Taylor Lectures at the Yale Divinity School. I interviewed Dr. Williams while he was in New Haven to discuss his reflections on writing poetry, intellectual life, and how both enrich and are enriched by religious belief. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

October 16, 2023 | Hannah Turner BK ‘23+1

The rise of social media has broken the monopoly of cable television. With just a cheap smartphone and a stable Internet connection, we create our own show. We put ourselves in a dome where we are the main character and our life is consumed by people across the world. We strive to be like Truman, forgetting that he was trapped.

February 18, 2023 | By Karis Ryu YDS’23

Like many superhero fans, I bounded over to the nearest movie theater within a week of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s release in November. A film of pain, hope, and power, I appreciated its muted volume, both auditory and visual, and how Ryan Coogler’s vision clearly included space for grief, both on and off screen. Grief and rage are integral to the story’s central message of healing and renewal: for Shuri, Wakanda, and the world they live in.

March 7, 2022 | By Daniel Yen TD ‘22

While the sighs in Schumann’s music help us to understand what human love feels like, I believe the gospel accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion suggest that the experience of exhalation also helps us to better appreciate the love of God. 

January 20, 2022 | By Sharla Moody BK ‘22

Water surges past the Statue of Liberty’s waist, empties into the crowded rush hour streets of Manhattan. Cars, trucks, and buses surf on the wall of filthy water bearing down on terrified bystanders. The sky erupts with hail the size of basketballs, indiscriminately falling on people frantically running to take shelter. Enormous tornados engulf entire skyscrapers in Los Angeles, spitting rubble down onto screaming bystanders, the carnage raining down beyond any Old Testament judgment.

January 20, 2022 | By Vienna Scott BF ‘21

I was vaguely aware of astrology in high school but, my real introduction occurred in my freshman year at Yale. As far as I was concerned, Leo was an actor and Cancer was a disease. But when a classmate offhandedly mentioned that there hasn’t been a Pisces president since 1897 in a seminar and the professor didn’t guffaw, I realized I needed to study up on all things above the stratosphere.

December 31, 2021 | By Sharla Moody BK ‘22

The science fiction of the first half of the twentieth century appears much more optimistic than what we see today. This optimistic sci-fi can perhaps be best exemplified by Hanna-Barbera’s 1962-1963 cartoon The Jetsons, which imagines what life might be like in the year 2062. The Jetsons drive a flying car, live in an ultra modern city built in Earth’s atmosphere, and exist as a happy nuclear family.

December 31, 2021 | by Amelia Dilworth BR’23

The Pruitt-Igoe housing projects sink into the ground one broken window at a time, sections of buildings falling in waves like rows of wounded soldiers faltering to their knees before collapsing in the rubble. Smoke rises from the ground, the same color as the crumbling gray walls. Apartments lay in the rubble ripped open like carcasses. Half-exploded buildings kneel in the remains of their brothers, awaiting destruction. 

This is St. Louis, Missouri. America is bombing its own city. 

December 31, 2021 | Shi Wen Yeo MC ‘23

The famous English poet John Donne is said to have been so afraid of and obsessed about death that he, on multiple occasions, rehearsed his death by lying still in his hearse and having someone paint the dead likeness of him. Indeed, he was a poet of the English Renaissance, characterised by his polemic attitudes—in his youth, he wrote many famous erotic love poems yet moved to somber sermons in adulthood, and he even converted from the “salvation through works” Catholicism to “faith and works” Anglicanism to become an important preacher in the Church of England. Ostensibly, he was a troubled figure, full of personal vacillations and characterised by contradictions—not unlike many Christians today.

December 31, 2021 | By Shayley Martin DC ‘22

In books and movies, immortality is generally a bad thing. We watch characters strive for it only to discover that life goes sour if prolonged. Even aside from practical issues like overpopulation and resource depletion, there’s a prevailing idea that human nature can’t stomach living forever. The end of a Netflix series called The Good Place captures this well: the occupants of paradise become so bored with the afterlife’s never-ending stream of pleasures that they rejoice when finally offered a chance to vanish from existence. The show concludes that fleetingness gives life its meaning.