The Master of Divinity degree curriculum is designed to challenge and support students in an on-going process of developing their individual and unique gifts for service in the liberal religious community. It provides a foundation of basic preparation for ministry centered in the following values:

• Liberal religious heritage: The ability of students to read themselves deeply, passionately, and critically into the story of liberal religion, especially Unitarian Universalism, as part of the larger human story.

• Excellence in ministerial practices: The ability to demonstrate a significant understanding of and progress in the basic arts and skills of ministry: leadership and administrative skills, worship leadership, religious education, preaching, pastoral care, and prophetic ministry in the larger community.

• Intellectual capacities: The capacities that will open for students the fields of intellectual discourse, allowing them to make significant contributions to the cause of liberal religion. These capacities are characterized as "response-abilities:" the ability to affect creative, rigorous, wise, and compassionate responses to other people, other congregations and institutions, and the world.

• Moral vision grounded in an engagement with a diverse world: A deeply moral engagement with the world, celebrating its rich diversity, and confronting its problems of oppression, injustice, poverty, and environmental degradation.

• Personal readiness: Personal self-awareness, resilience, humor, good judgment, ethical and moral integrity, a well-tested seriousness of intent, and the ability to balance personal needs with the needs of ministry.

• Spiritual depth: A spiritual depth united with disciplines that aim to preserve and increase that depth as they encounter the challenges and distractions of a ministerial life.

• Interdependence: An understanding of and an engagement with the church as a covenant community, the nature and importance of the congregation as a learning institution engaged in the larger culture, and the practice of collaborative leadership.