Starting next fall, the newly established Chaplaincy Fellows program will train 24 members of the class of 2014 to facilitate interfaith conversation, reflection, and support in the residential colleges. Heading the effort is Nathaniel Deluca, the Program Coordinator for the University Chaplain’s Office, a yoga instructor, and a 10-year veteran of the Lutheran Outdoor Ministry, as well as a 2006 graduate of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  The Herald sat down with Deluca to explore these roles and his thoughts about the place of faith and spirituality on the Yale campus.

YH: You’re the Program Coordinator at the Chaplain’s office and you have an MA in archaeology; was that was your primary interest?
ND: It was an academic interest, for the most part. The things that I was interested in are things that are somewhat unanswerable and inscrutable about human history. So I decided okay, I guess if the field isn’t progressing as fast as my questions are, then that’s going to be a lot of frustration in my life. I was really into dinosaurs and stuff when I was a kid. So the dream died when I was 26. I learned a lot about other things that I’m better at than digging square holes in the ground.

YH: Does your role as program coordinator engage you with the city of New Haven?
ND: One of my favorite things to do is to bring the students out. Sometimes it’s only a quarter of a mile or a half a mile away. Things change very quickly. I think that’s one of my favorite things to do: open students’ eyes up. We bring people into decrepit homes, and then we’re only there a few hours, but they see the process of turning a decrepit home that might be owned by a slumlord into a new, clean, up-to-code house that’s affordable, that’s below market value. We show students how much work there is to do, but that it can be done.

YH: So I’ve read about you being a member of the knitting community at Yale. Do you still knit?
ND: I still knit. I like knitting—I actually made these shoes. I don’t know how much you want to examine my shoes but here, you can look. My father’s an artist. He’s also a craftsman, so I inherited some need to create. I also grew up being made to feel really guilty about watching TV, so if I’m knitting while I’m watching TV, it’s productive! When it gets cold, I’m like, let me just find some yarn.

YH: And how is yoga involved with what you do?
ND: It’s very important to me. It’s sort of my current world-view. I’m a yoga instructor, and I have an orthodox approach to yoga, which is about reuniting with the cosmic consciousness, as opposed to getting a yoga butt, whatever that is. I hope I can add a voice to an ancient practice that has nothing to do with what kind of pants you’re wearing or what kind of weird position you can contort yourself into. And offering it freely—for me it’s more about karma and offering that gift to people.

YH: The Chaplaincy Fellows Program you’re organizing—what motivated that?
ND: This has been a dream of the chaplain for a long time. This is an important time of nascent adulthood and figuring out who you want to be as a person, in your life.  You’re saying, “What kind of person do I want to be when I grow up?”—whenever that is. We want to provide an opportunity for people to discuss those issues and those motivations outside of the prevailing ethos of debate and critique and argument that is necessarily part of a liberal academic tradition. We want to create spaces that are a little more tender and nurturing for people. It’s important that it’s part of the ethos of the university, that people have a place where they can be a little bit doubtful of themselves, I guess, and not have to seem like everything’s figured out at 19.

YH: With the assumption that kids coming to college lose some sense of religious affiliation, leaving their parents and the structures of home, do you ever see the opposite, people coming in and finding their faith in college?
ND: Oh absolutely. I think it’s an incorrect assumption, because I know a lot of people choose Yale because of its very vibrant religious communities. On the other hand, this is a time when people are choosing what kind of person they want to be, so they might look at the faith of their parents, the faith of their childhood and family, and say that’s not my truth, that’s not my path. I don’t have to tell you that within your short life span this is a time of extraordinary and unprecedented exposure to things you’ve never seen before, never heard of before, never experienced before. And in a suite of eight people there might be eight different religions. It’s not out of the question, and you learn to live with people in a curious and respectful way about what their day looks like. I think that’s one of the best things about Yale, you have no idea who’s going to be in your suite. It’s a crash course in humanity.

YH: Do you think that Yale should require some form of religious study?
ND: It’s hard to say. I’m not a proponent of requirements. I think there are so many things that make a whole person. I do think that people should in their time here at Yale gain a basic religious literacy if that helps them be respectful of their future coworkers and friends and girlfriends and boyfriends. The most important thing that I think we can empower students to do is know how to respectfully engage people in meaningful conversations about their faith or their beliefs, or their journey or their path or whatever it is. I think that’s one of the things people shut down about, because they don’t want to offend. That’s the most important thing: empowering people to ask and to want to engage with others and to want to know. So I don’t think you have to take a world religion class to know how to do that.

YH: Is there anything you’d like to see change about attitudes toward faith on this campus?
ND: One of the things I hear frequently from students is they feel like they can’t bring up their religious or spiritual beliefs and practices in the classroom, that it’s something that’s useless evidence in people’s conversations. I would like to see people feel and have the ethos on campus that this really is an essential part of being, that it’s something that is okay to talk about and not discarded as something irrelevant in the classroom.

­­—This interview was condensed by the author