First off, let me apologize for the scarcity of posts lately. I just finished up my first full week at Yale University as a freshman, and thus I’ve been incredibly busy. I’ll be trying to post at least a minimum of once a week though, so don’t tune out completely.

However, the delay in posting has not been mentally barren; rather it has provided me with much to ponder and write about. Thus, I present some scattered thoughts on my first week at Yale.

1. My first Sunday (August 30), I attended a morning service at the University Church at Battell Chapel, which is only a few hundred feet away from my dorm room. I loved it. The service was ecumenically Christian, drawing on multiple Christian traditions from around the world, with a rich liturgy and diversity of music and prayer. I felt  connected to the worldwide Body of Christ, while still being keenly aware of the particularity of being part of a Christian community in the context of the university. The University Church exists and thrives in the middle of this tension: it is both expansively global and self-consciously contextual, uniting the immediate and the distant, the past and present, with an eye towards the future and a vision for the whole world.

2. Yale is a wonderful place to discuss ideas. I am already profiting from being around people who are eager to examine and debate, people who value my (sometimes unorthodox) perspectives even when their own opinions differ. I feel accepted here in a remarkable way: no one is going to reject me because I don’t tow the line, no one is going to say that I don’t belong just because I don’t agree. (This has been my experience in the community as a whole, but I sense it to be true also in the University Church — a wonderful change from my last year in Augusta.) I feel free to be open about the way that my politics are drawn from my faith, and this gives me a unique voice in the ongoing political discourse that thrives here.

3. Returning to the subject of church: I finally received communion again, at the University Church both today and last week. This was the first time I’d received the sacrament since last summer, at the Youth Theological Initiative at Candler. This was somehow appropriate: for the past year, between YTI and Yale, I was adrift, lacking any real faith community to serve as a spiritual base. That was not fun. But partaking of the Eucharist at Yale seemed to me to signify a new beginning: that I am finally at least in the process of finding a community in which to live for Christ.

4. Today, I finally filled out the necessary form in order to register to vote. I decided to register in Connecticut, rather than Georgia, because for the next four years I’ll be much more interested in the local politics of New Haven than in those of Augusta. In addition, I rather hesitantly made the decision to register as a Democrat. I despise the two-party system (which has destroyed much of American democracy); but because Connecticut is dependably blue, the only way to have a meaningful say in who goes to Washington is to vote in the Democratic primaries. Because primary elections in this state are closed, it is necessary to register with a party in order to vote in them. (It’s quite possible that in the general elections I’ll be voting for third-party candidates — but I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.)

5. A final note on the University Church: Last month I described various criteria I would be using in searching for a new church. Remarkably, to at least some degree, the University Church fulfills all of them. This is more than I could have hoped for; clearly God is at work in my life at Yale.

6. Sometime this coming week, I plan to obtain my official New Haven resident’s card. These cards, suitable as a form of identification in almost all official capacities, are provided by the city to any resident, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. In common with several of my new friends here, my primary purpose in getting the card is to express solidarity with residents who are at risk because of the way the American immigration system operates. I believe that these cards have theological and ethical import for Christians, because of our call to solidarity with the oppressed and our own position as a “resident alien” in all the kingdoms of the world.

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