The Divinity School at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina is one of ten graduate or professional schools within Duke University. It is also one of thirteen seminaries founded and supported by the United Methodist Church. It has 39 full-time and 18 part-time faculty and over 500 full-time students. The current dean of The Divinity School is Elaine Heath, who assumed the deanship on July 1, 2016. Former deans include the prominent New Testament scholar Richard B. Hays who stepped down in 2015, and L. Gregory Jones.HistoryThe Divinity School was founded in 1926 as the first graduate school at Duke, following a large endowment by James B. Duke, a tobacco magnate, in 1924. The Divinity School carries on from the original founding of Trinity College at the site in 1859, which provided free training for Methodist preachers in exchange for support from the church. Though the school is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, it is also ecumenical in outlook and has both faculty and students from a variety of denominations.The Divinity School building was recently renovated and also expanded. The Hugh A. Westbrook Building, which opened in 2005, is 53000sqft. It also contains the 315-seat Bishop W. Kenneth Goodson Chapel with 55ft-high ceilings, office space, a bookstore, cafe, outdoor patio, and a 177-seat lecture hall.The school is perhaps most noted in American theological circles for serving as a fountainhead of postliberalism or narrative theology, a movement originating in the 1960s and 1970s at Yale Divinity School. This is thanks in part to the presence of Stanley Hauerwas, often considered one of the leading exponents of postliberal and narrative approaches to theology. Time Magazine named Hauerwas "America's Best Theologian" in 2001.
