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 […]
“Summa contra gentiles” and its Readers
UTS Manuscripts Student Series Post 2 of 4, by Valerie Wilson (MA candidate, Medieval and Renaissance Studies)* The script of the Burke Library’s UTS MS 005, a manuscript of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles within the Burke’s Van Ess Collection, is one of its most baffling features. The manuscript comes from the Benedictine monastery of […]
St. Eustace and Unexpected Emptiness in a Fifteenth-Century Book of Hours
UTS Manuscripts Student Series Post 1 of 4, by Eleanor Stern (Barnard College 2019)* Inside of UTS MS 051, a fifteenth-century French book of hours believed to have belonged to King Henry III, now housed at the Burke Library, I expected to find certain kinds of illuminations. Most books of hours begin with a […]
The Burke Library Goes International
One of the great joys of working at an educational institution is the chance to meet and interact with students, teachers, and researchers from all over the world. At the Burke, that kind of interaction usually takes place when people come to visit us in New York City. But recently I had the distinct pleasure […]
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 […]
On the Virtues of Small Books
From Jeffrey Michael Wayno, Collection Services Librarian, the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary As a librarian, I have a rather awkward confession to make: I’ve been having a difficult time finishing a book. A few months back, in the midst of my yearly summer reading binge, I started Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, […]
The Seth Kasten Memorial Exhibit Case
Recent visitors to the Burke may have noticed something new on the first floor. This week, thanks to the generosity of the friends and family of Seth E. Kasten, a new exhibit case has been installed on the first floor, just opposite the circulation desk. Seth was a librarian at the Burke Library at Union […]
“Spirit of ’68” Part II: Research in the Administrative Files
By Jake Hearen, Student Research Assistant for the “Spirit of ’68” Exhibit (Posted c/o Carolyn Bratnober, Public Services Librarian) I came to Union a bit behind the power curve. My formal involvement within a theological framework is relatively new. I had not heard of James Cone until I visited in the spring; I promise his […]
“Spirit of ’68” Part I: Building an Exhibit…
The year 1968 has been memorialized recently with a slough of exhibits, events, new books, and other testimonials marking the 50th anniversaries of that year’s revolutionary upheavals, movements, and protests — Union Theological Seminary of course has a long history of resistance activism, and librarians at the Burke thought that Union should have its own […]