News

As this year draws to a close, I find myself reflecting with profound gratitude on all that the Divinity School community has carried and created together. It has been a year marked by genuine joy and real sorrow, by celebration and remembrance, by exacting inquiry and sustaining connections.

This was the year we launched Swift 100, our centennial celebration marking one hundred years of Swift Hall. Through exhibitions, research projects, lectures, and collective storytelling, we have extolled the building’s legacy on campus and across Chicago. This remarkable space has shaped generations of scholarship, ministry, and public engagement, and will continue to ground the Divinity School in the century ahead.

We also marked an important academic milestone with the start of the Wolf Seminars, a new initiative supporting faculty and student research at the intersections of science, religion, technology, and public life, an area of inquiry that will help define the Div School’s forward trajectory.

At the same time, we mourned the losses of several beloved faculty members whose teaching, mentorship, and humanity have shaped this community in ways we continue to feel. Their memories remain a blessing, and their work lives on in our classrooms, our scholarship, and our shared commitments.

And we celebrated. We congratulated our graduates across every degree program, who now carry the School’s mission into classrooms, congregations, nonprofits, hospitals, museums, and communities across the globe. We welcomed a new cohort of students, each bringing the curiosity, discipline, and longing for inquiry that renew the intellectual and spiritual life of Swift Hall. We also welcomed new faculty, instructors, and postdoctoral fellows whose presence and expertise expand and strengthen our academic community.

Thank you for all you have contributed this year: your questions, your teaching and learning, your generosity, and your presence. May the coming season bring renewal, rest, and surprising forms of wisdom. And may we enter it, together, with the courage to learn, to argue, to care, and to build anew.

Cheers to this vibrant community,

James T. Robinson 

Dean and Nathan Cummings Professor 

University of Chicago Divinity School