Coons: I Will Bring Yale Divinity School Values to Senate

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Coons: I Will Bring Yale Divinity School Values to Senate

By Jeffrey Lord on 9.27.10 @ 6:09AM

Serving in the United States Senate would be a "great way for me to apply the principles and values that were honed at YDS." --Delaware Democrat and U.S. Senate nominee Chris Coons, to the Yale Divinity School Notes from the Quad, September, 2010

Wow.

Chris Coons, the supposedly sure-thing Democratic opponent of Delaware Republican U.S. Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell, gave an interview published this month in Notes from the Quad, a publication of the Yale Divinity School (YDS) -- the school where Coons spent the early 1990s earning a Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.) specializing in ethics, graduating in 1994.

Topic?

Coons repeatedly expressed his determination to bring what he calls Yale Divinity School "values" to the U.S. Senate and public life in general. He wants, he says, to "put the educational and faith-formation experience of YDS into practice in the world." Coons says he has always been interested in "values-based leadership" and "enjoys the challenge of integrating across the practical and the values based." He sees his function as a public official as engaging in a "values formation role" and says he intends to use elected office as a chance to "apply the principles and values that were honed at YDS." After listing the issues he would face in the U.S. Senate he says that making the "tough choices…is all about values-based leadership."

So.

If you've spent two or three years in a significant institution of learning like the Yale Divinity School getting a Master's degree in Religion -- and boast that when elected to the United States Senate you intend to bring the values you learned at that institution to Washington and the world, then the question becomes, in the case of Chris Coons:

What values does Yale Divinity School teach?

Values are transmitted by a university in at least three ways: courses, assigned reading, and last but certainly not least through the leadership and professors of the school. Which makes the following three questions about the Yale Divinity School values Chris Coons insists he will bring to Washington very important questions. They are:

• What kind of values are taught in Yale Divinity School courses?

• What kind of values are found in the books Yale Divinity School assigns as required reading to its students?

• What kind of values are role modeled by the professors or leaders of Yale Divinity School through their own writings and publications?

So. Are you sitting down? Sure? Good. We begin.

Yale Divinity School Courses and Required Reading

• Witchcraft and Witch Hunting: Specifically listed as REL 717: Witchcraft and Witch Hunting, the "REL" presumably stands for "Religion." Apparently Christine O'Donnell's main offense when it comes to dabbling in witchcraft in high school on a date is some sort of Ruling Class snobbery that she didn't go to Yale Divinity School, where witchcraft has been quite officially part of the school's curriculum. The very same school from which Chris Coons insists he has taken his values.

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Not to get too non-Ruling Class here, but, like, cool! What do you study at Yale Divinity School when you are learning the values behind witchcraft as officially assigned on the Witchcraft reading list? (As opposed, of course, to non-Ruling Class girls doing the teenage-rebellion thing in high school.)

Well, apparently Witchcraft for the Ruling Class (graduate school division) consists in re-classifying witchcraft as -- don't you just love this? -- multiculturalism. That's right. Multiculturalism. Ahhhh but of course! The multicultural perspective on witchcraft! So what about the reading on witchcraft? If only Christine O'Donnell had just gotten a heads up on the Yale Divinity School-approved reading list for witchcraft! For example, let's peer into one of the assigned Yale Divinity School reading texts on the subject: Witches of the Atlantic World: An Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook.

What is this book all about? Well, Amazon.com tells us in its "Product Description" section that this bit of assigned reading from the Yale Divinity School, the precise Yale Divinity School from which Chris Coons proudly tells us he gets his values -- values he wants to bring to Washington -- that "this unique anthology is the first to provide a multicultural perspective on witchcraft…."

So in other words, Christine O'Donnell's real mistake when she mentioned a rebellious teenage-date while on Bill Maher's show over a decade ago was that she didn't blush and gush: "Ohhhhh Bill, witchcraft is sooooooooo multicultural."

Of course, not being a member of the Ruling Class like the Ruling Class Hollywood Bill, who has demonstrated his sophistication by smartly declaiming on The Conan O'Brien Show that Americans are "stupid" -- Christine O'Donnell was made to sound clueless. When in fact she just didn't understand how smart and sophisticated -- how Yale -- her nano-second high school-rebellion date with a witchcraft guy really was. And to think Maher took video advantage of this Country Class Lass on her visit to Hollywood when across the continent in staid New Haven in 1994, Chris Coons was getting a Master's Degree from Hogwarts --sorry -- the Yale Divinity School.

Yale Divinity School, the school that quite officially teaches witchcraft values -- make that multicultural witchcraft values -- in a course labeled "RELIGION 786." Or, as they might say at Hogwarts, Witchcraft 101.

Two questions: Is Bill Maher really Lord Voldemort? Is Chris Coons Draco Malfoy without the hair?

But let us not be Bewitched (sorry, Samantha). There's more than studying Witchcraft going on at Yale Divinity, the place from which Chris Coons says he gets his values. There is, for example:

• Queer Worship. You read that right. The formal name for this course is REL 786, Liturgy and Gender (Queer Worship). Queer Worship, you see, stands for…stands for…well, let's just say the course description says in the wonderfully baroque style of academia that the course offers students like Mr. Coons once was "the opportunity to reflect critically on how ….queer theories and theologies are impacting how Christian worship is performed and reflected upon."

Uh-huh.

So, what does one do if absorbing the values of Queer Worship? When one tires of reading up on the multicultural wonders of witchcraft, of course. If one is intent on becoming a United States Senator from Delaware, and transmitting the values of Queer Worship as you guide the ship of state -- what do you read?

Well, the official Yale Divinity School reading list -- the same one that presents witchcraft as an example of multiculturalism -- suggests (OK, mandates; this is the school's official reading list) Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism is a great place to start. And Queer Globalizations? What values are to be found there? A check over at Amazon shows such interesting chapters and sections as "The Wily Homosexual" "Queer Values in a Global Economy" "Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant and the Queering of Bretton Woods," "Stealth Bombers of Desire," and, um, more of exactly the kind of values Chris Coons promises (or is that threatens?) to bring to the United States Senate.

• Feminist/Womanist/Gendered Theologies:This course is listed as "REL 749." It is designed, the course description says, "to formulate a robust theological understanding of today's theopolitical issues" by "using feminist, womanist, and ethnic gendered theologies." Womanist theology? That would be? A religious movement focusing on how exactly to liberate -- there's that pesky Marxist word again -- African women in America. Drawn from feminist and liberation theology, there appears to be not a word of Witchcraft 101 or Queer Worship in this course.

Mandatory YDS reading for this gem? Since this course includes but is certainly not limited to liberating African women in America, can you guess what leads the reading list? Why, what better book to have on your shelf in the U.S. Senate if you're Chris Coons than a tome on Liberation Theology, Feminist Division? (Presuming you've already gotten the Witchcraft and Queer Worship collection in hand.) The Marxism-as-Christianity philosophy that Mr. Coons himself favored when hustling over to South Africa to volunteer for the Liberation Theology crowd that is the South African Council of Churches. Liberation Theology, remember, originated in Latin America -- and sure enough the first book on the mandatory reading list is the classic (?) Mujerista Theology by Ada Maria Asisi-Diaz. Mujerista theology brings it all together. Feminist theology and Latin American liberation theology nicely stirred so that when Coons is assigned to, say, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, Delaware voters can rest assured the values Coons learned at Yale Divinity School are shared with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

• Introduction to Christian Ethics II:Yet another opportunity here in "REL 715" for Coons to study up on his favorites. Black Liberation Theology guru James Cone is mandatory reading here. Values taught in the reading for a class on Christianity? In God of the Oppressed Cone salutes the values of Marx in a chapter called "Marx and the Sociology of Knowledge" while also musing about "Jesus is Black and the "Meaning of Liberation."