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“Perhaps the most unique tradition of the Divinity School is its eagerness to experiment, to rest rather lightly on its immediate past traditions…” J. Brauer, Criterion (Winter 1967)

“The space always wins” is a familiar refrain in the practice labs of the Ritual and Speaking course, the first in a sequence of three courses in the Arts of Religious Leadership and Practice for second-year Masters of Divinity students. A sermon, dharma talk, khutba, or teaching that is bathed in the blues and reds of Bond Chapel’s stained glass takes on a quiet, meditative tone, while the same performance from the podium in Swift 106—with hearers installed in its vintage wooden writing desks—takes on an instructional aspect. When speaking from a moveable pulpit in the sunlit Common Room, with its colorful portrait of Wendy Doniger and her dog looking on, the same presenter becomes animated, moves away from the lectern, and invites audience interaction.

Words matter, of course, as do the speaker’s intention and careful preparation. But eloquent wordsmithing and conscientious presentation are insufficient to fully command the attention and enliven the imagination of hearers whose bodies respond to space and light, color and sound, hard and soft, spaciousness and containment. Skeptical student speakers are quickly converted, as windows and walls either amplify or stifle their best efforts to move or enlighten their hearers: “the space always wins.”

The phrase came to mind once again a few weeks ago, as I descended the wide staircase from my fourth-floor office to the lobby of Swift Hall, the space recently cleared, cleaned, and readied for the building’s 100th anniversary observances, emptied of everything except for a simple (and slogan-free) “Swift 100” banner hanging from the wall opposite the entryway. The lobby is a commanding space, with its high ceiling and stately chandelier, but at first glance, it seems to have no assigned purpose. There is no reception desk to check one’s identification, no cozy clutch of chairs for lingering or chatting—just empty space traversed by students, staff, and faculty, as well as visitors seeking out the basement coffee shop. Clusters of students briefly converge, exchanging banter or revisiting an argument from a previous class before continuing toward other pursuits; people linger by the elevator, waiting for a lift to a classroom discussion or an office conversation; a steady trickle of humanity ebbs and flows up and down the stairs, on their way to engage in Swift Hall’s discourse around humanity’s big questions or to launch themselves back into the world beyond our doors.

Sometimes, most notably after visiting one of the University’s newest buildings, their glossy glass window walls exuding cosmopolitan confidence, or when attending an event at one of Hyde Park’s other theological schools with their “smart” classrooms, colorful art installations, indoor waterfalls, and sunny atrium cafés, I have briefly fallen prey to bouts of real-estate envy and wished for a brighter, easier, more comfortable building than our 1920s forebears could have imagined or would have desired. But during my recent stairway descent, as the empty lobby came into view, it occurred to me that “empty” might be a misnomer.

Perhaps this “empty” space is better described as a uniquely open space, where bodies are in motion, conversations and ideas are sparked by chance convergences, and the boundaries between “inside” and “outside” are constantly being renegotiated as doors onto the main quadrangle open and close. “The space always wins,” and in our case, Swift Hall’s open lobby space, its wide hallways, unadorned walls, vaulted ceilings, and understated classrooms do not constrain thought, nor do they dictate a single meaning or purpose for the citizens of Swift; rather, their spaciousness engenders energy, allows for unexpected intersections, invites experimentation, and attunes our bodies and minds to the constant in-breaking of possibility.

I first entered the doors of Swift Hall as a master’s student forty-seven years ago. Although my vocational path took me away from Chicago for nearly two decades before I returned to direct and teach in the MDiv program in 2002, it remains the case that I have enjoyed a longer relationship with this building than any other in my life. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the space is still winning: unexpected intersections, eager experimentation, and abundant possibilities present themselves in my classrooms and office hours each week.

While the countenance of our building remains virtually unchanged—the lobby is still wide open—today’s Divinity School community is substantially different from the one I joined as a student in 1978. Faculty and students bring an ever more complex tapestry of backgrounds, experiences, commitments, and disciplines to our community’s study of religion. With each incoming cohort of students, the MDiv program continues to adapt and evolve from its sturdy beginnings, in a curriculum that prepared scholarly ministers for Protestant denominations. The program’s historic commitment to conversation that demands thoroughgoing correlation between thought and practice today welcomes students from many religious traditions with various professional aspirations, alongside those newly drawn to the study and practice of religion as an untapped source of intellectual vitality, moral imagination, and personal and societal transformation.

Often, when the Divinity School community has gathered in the Common Room for a rousing discussion of a colleague’s challenging new book; or a student-led zazen exercise in the ritual class, sitting cross-legged on cushions; or a faculty meeting, colleagues fidgeting through an IT team’s presentation on the academic uses of AI, my eyes meet the gaze of one of our black-robed forebears and founders upon the wood-paneled walls. I wonder what they would be thinking were they to overhear these proceedings. Would they be dismayed by the decentering of their Protestant worldview? Would they conclude with despair that we have confused relevance with relativity, or compromised scholarly objectivity with our attentiveness to subjectivity and the ever-present urgency of public engagement?

Our ancestors’ inscrutable expressions should not be read as disengagement or disapproval; their own writings suggest they would be moved by our contemporary tensions, as they experienced and embraced them in their own time. Similar questions animated their fascination with religion, its scholarship, and leadership. These deep concerns about the nature, capacity, and limitations of human learning and living are, and must remain, close to the bone, regardless of what lens one uses or what ends we intend, as we study such unwieldy and unyielding human phenomena and are changed by what we discover there. As a young faculty member wrote about his work at the Divinity School in an anniversary issue of Criterion published in 1967, “…the crucial issues of our day impel one to participation beyond what might be justified by one’s professional interests traditionally conceived” (Al Pitcher, Criterion, 1967).

Over the years, my communications with Divinity School alums suggest that our Chicago diaspora holds those same concerns to be self-evident and variously hopes that our teaching and learning have not abandoned the discipline of critical engagement; that our professional training has not forsaken religious leadership; that our location at the heart of the University has not isolated our teaching from the suffering of the world; and that the noise of political disputation hasn’t compromised our willingness to listen, think, and speak slowly, deeply, and distinctively. 

Yet again, the tension implicit in these inquiries and critiques is precisely the school’s genius: while the particular methods, topics, traditions, and practices may shift with time and the tides, the very bones of our building—and the spirits of our ancestors who inhabited it before us—insist that we hold open space for the continual recognition and renegotiation of the limits and possibilities for the scholarship and practice of religion. This space, imbued with the spirit of iteration, is vital not just for our own benefit or that of our human communities but for the flourishing of our planet.

This academic year, in the fourth-floor MDiv suite, began with a challenging but joyful clearing of the space, as a larger-than-usual entering cohort of twenty-four students required reconfiguring the seminar table in the classroom that hosts the first-year colloquium. A cabinet housing outdated technology made room for a sleeker, smaller upgrade, and a bookcase that stored hymnals from the last century was relocated to make space for an extension to our table so that the colloquium—that is, “the conversation”—could begin its work, preparing this newest evolution of our MDiv program for lives of engaged learning, open-ended questioning, and reflective, responsive, experimental practice.

Our now larger table hosts a gathering of students whose religious, cultural, and political interests and vocational aspirations range widely, but whose common goal, like those of generations past and, we have every reason to believe, those who will come after us, is to hold space for serious inquiry that at once honors and investigates our situatedness and seeks to transcend it: to imagine what yet lies beyond the limitations of our own preoccupations, and to hold, with open eyes, hearts, and minds, the space for “knowledge to grow, that life might be enhanced.”

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: 

• “Our Better Angels”: Reflections on My Years in Swift Hall by Willemien Otten, Dorothy Grant MacLear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity
• "The Divinity School and the Hebrew Bible: Past, Present, and Future" by Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible