With the new residential tower at 122nd and Claremont underway, construction seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. The Burke Library staff thought now would be an appropriate time to highlight the past and present of Union’s physical campus. Now on view on level L1 of the Burke Library, “The Construction and Evolution […]
Category: Union Theological Seminary History
Union Seminary Quarterly Review (USQR) Archive
The online archive of the Union Seminary Quarterly Review is now openly available in Academic Commons, thanks to our Circulation staff and team of students working at the Burke Library, as well as our colleagues in the Digital Scholarship unit of the Libraries. The USQR, founded in 1939 as “a platform for inspired and […]
Belonging As a Latinx Seminarian
Seminary was an unexpected “next-step” for my life. My recent Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) experience has pulled me towards exploring the world of theology at Union (UTS) as a first-year Divinity student. As I was reading through the UTS Student Digest newsletter, I saw a job that contained the words “Justo Gonzalez” and “Hispanic […]
Alone in the Stacks
The stacks at the Burke felt like a respite from the hectic outside world- every class period, every meeting I was in, every personal interaction started with a sly smile- each “how are you?” was performative in the way that everyone knows: that such a simple question cannot be answered in the midst of […]
Sweet-talking catalogs: an amusing error, and tips to make your way around CLIO
If you were interested in the history of Union Theological Seminary, where the Burke Library is located, you might be led to the title The Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York : its design and another decade of its history, by George Lewis Prentiss, published in 1899. On our catalog CLIO, you […]
Mapping the Holy Land: a New Exhibit, by Jeffrey Wayno
Visitors at the Burke Library may have noticed our new exhibit, Mapping the Holy Land, which showcases two items from our special collections—one from the rare book collection, one from the archives—to highlight how scholars of the past have thought about, and visualized, one of the most historic and contentious areas of our world. The […]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Microfiche: the Nachlass Collection
“Microfiche is cool” is a sentence one rarely hears any more, in the Internet age. Yet I am constantly reminded of the astonishing efficiency of microformatting, when researchers ask to see the collection of primary-source materials of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—noted German theologian, pastor, and anti-Nazi dissident, and onetime student at Union Theological Seminary—preserved on microfiche, collectively […]
Never Enough Singing!
Never Enough Singing is the title of the Festschrift published in 2011 on the occasion of Seth Kasten’s retirement from the Burke Library. It is among the items featured in the inaugural exhibit in the Seth Kasten Memorial Exhibit Case. Seth (1945-2017) was a reference librarian at the Burke for more than 35 years. In […]
Queering the Archives at Union Theological Seminary
Students in the course Christian Ethics 223, “Queering Ethics,” taught by Prof. Sarah Azaransky at Union Theological Seminary, visited the Burke Library on Wednesday, March 6th, to discuss queer frameworks of power, authority, and queer subjecthood in relation to archives. The class and I delved into hands-on archival inquiry with the papers of emilie m. […]
Color Our Collections at the Burke Library
For the second year in a row, the Burke Library participated in a worldwide weeklong initiative to spread awareness and engagement with Special Collections known as Color Our Collections. In this series of events, initiated by the New York Academy of Medicine, libraries and museums around the world upload black-and-white versions of images in their […]