Other meanings of University of Chicago Divinity School
THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
The University of Chicago Divinity School is the University of Chicago’s school for theological and religious studies. Founded in the early 1890s as part of the new university, it combines historical, textual, philosophical, social-scientific, and constructive approaches to religion rather than representing a single denomination.1
The Divinity School emerged with the University of Chicago in the 1890s and inherited a strong connection to Baptist philanthropy while developing a broader academic mission.1 The university’s founding was supported by John D. Rockefeller, and the school became part of a research university designed to place advanced scholarship at the center of higher education.2
Its institutional identity is academic rather than confessional. The school studies Christianity and other religious traditions through multiple methods, including theology, religious ethics, history of religions, anthropology, sociology, and the interpretation of sacred texts. That arrangement allows students preparing for ministry to work alongside students pursuing research, teaching, public scholarship, or careers beyond religious institutions.
The school’s programs connect professional theological education with doctoral research in the academic study of religion.1 The Master of Divinity is oriented toward ministry and religious leadership, while the Master of Arts and doctoral programs support concentrated study, research languages, and advanced disciplinary training. The curriculum is organized through areas such as theological studies, history of Christianity, religion and literature, philosophy of religions, and social scientific approaches to religion.
Graduate work is notably interdisciplinary. Students may draw on the resources of the wider University of Chicago, including the Humanities Division, social sciences, law, public policy, and the university library system. The school’s location in Hyde Park also places formal study in proximity to Chicago’s varied religious communities and to the city’s wider history of immigration, race, labor, and urban reform.
The Divinity School has been shaped by scholars whose work crossed conventional boundaries between theology and the academic study of religion. Its intellectual history includes major contributions to Christian theology, the history of religions, ethics, the study of myth, and the interpretation of religious texts. Paul Tillich, who taught at the University of Chicago late in his career, became especially influential through his account of theology as a critical interpretation of culture and existence.3
Other prominent figures associated with the school include Mircea Eliade, Bernard McGinn, David Tracy, Wendy Doniger, and Bruce Lincoln. Their subjects range from mysticism and medieval Christianity to comparative religion, religious symbols, mythology, power, and ideology. The resulting legacy is less a single school of thought than a durable culture of argument across theology, history, literature, philosophy, and the social sciences.
The school’s distinctive feature is the way it treats theology and religious studies as related but not identical enterprises. Confessional questions, historical criticism, comparative analysis, and social theory can appear in the same intellectual setting without being reduced to one method or religious standpoint.
A less visible part of its work is the role of archives, language study, and specialized textual research. Doctoral fields often require engagement with original-language sources and with material preserved in libraries, manuscript collections, and scholarly editions. The school has also supported public-facing conversations about religion through lectures, publications, and partnerships across the university. Its history therefore extends beyond famous professors: it includes ministers, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, classicists, and students whose work has carried academic theology into congregations, classrooms, publishing, museums, and civic debate.
The school’s degree offerings, faculty affiliations, and administrative structures can change; the official Divinity School website is the current reference for admissions, programs, and personnel.
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