Talk:Doctor of Divinity

site promotion
This line was removed by me.

"The Universal Life Church offers these degrees to anyone for $29.00."

Is this a promotion for a factory mill? 70.177.68.209 20:28, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

would it violate any copyrights if i uploaded mine? ReverendG 04:10, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

only for Christianity?
what do u have to do get one? i want one. tell me if u know what to do to get one. (Sadartha 07:22, 28 February 2007 (UTC))

Highest degree?
Quiz: identify the self-contradictory phrases in this two-sentence excerpt:

"There is no system of "higher degrees" in the U.S., so the highest earned degrees in academic Theology are the Ph.D., Th.D. or S.T.D.. Professional degrees in applied Theology include the D.B.S., D.Th.P. and the highest degree--the D.Min.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.68.134.1 (talk) 14:23, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Also, the D.Min is not the highest degree. A D.Min is a pastoral degree and a Ph.D or Th.D. are Professional Degrees. The D.Min. is really more of a Continuing Ed. degree where the Ph.D. and Th.D. allows one to teach in a University. —Preceding unsigned comment added by AlcesV (talk • contribs) 01:34, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The phrase "higher doctorates" refers to an entire tier of degrees that don't exist in the US system. Their non-existence has no bearing on whether one (lower) doctorate is considered superior to another. I don't know the specifics of the DMin in relation to the rest of the US systems though. Timrollpickering (talk) 00:43, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Teaching authority in the Catholic Church
A substantial part of this article deals not with the D.D., but with Catholic doctrine on teaching authority. I suggest that the entire text beginning with the discussion of Holy Orders should be deleted. Or, at the very least, it should be put in a separate section clearly indicating that this relates only to the Catholic Church. I feel reluctant to delete so much from an already too-short article, which is the only reason that I did not "be bold" and delete it, but if I do not hear of any alternative in a reasonable time, I will go ahead. TomS TDotO (talk) 10:48, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

re Leagle
An editor removed the only ref in the article, a which linked to Leagle.com, with the comment "diploma mill". The ref was to text in the court decision ''Universal Life Church, Inc. vs. United States, 372 F. Supp. 770, 776 (E.D. Cal 1974)''. My take on this is:
 * Leagle.com isn't a diploma mill as far as I can tell. They are a commercial site though. Their web site says "Leagle, Inc. is a leading provider of copies of primary caselaw from all Federal courts and all State higher courts."
 * There are several other sources for the quote, but the ones I found either are diploma mills, or are not online, or are in a format (Microsoft Word) that we don't want to use. (Online links should be to HTML or PDF (or video), if possible.)
 * All of these sites seem to list the text of the court decision correctly, so we can probably use any of them I suppose, but Leagle.com seems to be the best I could find.
 * At any rate, using another source would be preferable to no source I would think. Herostratus (talk) 16:10, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

January 2015
An editor is wanting to make some edits to this article and is insisting, so let's talk this through. Here's what's on the table.

There're three enties: Martin Luther King, a Mimi Haddad who received a degree in 2013 from Palmmer Seminary (a C-list instiution, to be frank), and a note that St Andrews website shows a list of people they gave DDs to 2007-2014.
 * Including a "List of recipient of honorary doctoral degrees" section

I'm against this. There's hella people have got an honorary DD. In fact you can get one on the internet for fifteen bucks. Either it's gonna get out of hand pretty quick or it's going to be a random cherry-picked list. If we want to contain it, we could limit it to people with a Wikipedia article -- which is what I sort of did, keeping the ref to Dr King (but as a not in another section) and removing the other two. I don't see Dr King and Mimi Haddad as being in the same league and I wonder if there's a promotion of Mimi Haddad in play here.

I cut the lede down to one sentence and put the rest in an "Contrast with other religious degrees" section, my thinking being that's it confusing for the lede of an article titled "Doctor of Divinity" to spend most of its words describing degrees that aren't DD degrees. It needs to be addressed for clarity at some point, sure, but not undifferentiated in the lede.
 * Removing the "Contrast with other religious degrees"

Other editor doesn't agree. It's arguable.

It only describes one book so "Books" is maybe not a good title for the section until such time as more books are added. Not even sure thus material belongs, but it'd be a start for "history of the term DD" section; but not too happy with the form of the material of the section, and formulations such as "It's an interesting subject which allows us to deepen a number of points. There are pdf files about these dialogs to see." Other editor does not agree. Herostratus (talk) 01:36, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
 * "Books" section

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Honorary DD in the UK
Wasn't the DD degree also in the UK formerly (until the 20th century) a purely honorary thing, similar to the situation in the US today? Conferred automatically on Bishops and other higher clerical ranks? There is something like that in the back of my head, but I can't find the information anywhere.--Oudeís talk 08:00, 18 August 2020 (UTC)