Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, nondenominational, coeducational Christian seminary; opened 1836, chartered 1839. Originally Presbyterian, Union Theological Seminary has been free of denominational control since the early 1890s. It shares cooperative educational programs with Columbia Univ., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, General Theological Seminary, and other institutions. The seminary's Burke Library, the preeminent theological library in the Western Hemisphere, contains over 1 million volumes, including a number of special collections, and is part of the Columbia Univ. library system. Union Theological Seminary was a major contributor to the revival of Protestant theology in the 1930s and 1940s; through the work of such distinguished faculty as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr it played important roles in the ecumenical movement and the development of Neo-orthodoxy.
See R. T. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York (1987).
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