← Return to David Yeagley’s Interests

Yeagley’s immediate family is protestant. However, the Comanche Indian ancestry was once Catholic, beginning with the young captive Bad Eagle. He was “converted” to Spanish Catholicism down in Old Mexico where he was taken. This was probably around 1855. The Indian family remained Catholic until the 1950’s, when the extended family, with few exceptions, all became American Protestant, specifically Seventh-Day Adventist. The Adventist denomination is one of the more dramatically non-Catholic, original American protestant denominations. (Adventism, contrary to popular belief, is not cultic, nor to be associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, or Christian Scientists. These are the other three major American originals, which are neither Catholic nor Protestant, but, like modern Adventism, all began in American in the mid-19th century.)

Yeagley was born an Adventist, and has been a life long student of the scriptures, both Old and New Testaments. His childhood was spent in normal activities, particularly baseball. It wasn’t until his adolescence that Yeagley began serious study of the Bible. This coincided with his intense interest in music and piano performance, and with his near-death experience with cancer. The community of classical musicians, however, provided no social environment friendly to naïve notions of belief in the Bible. On the contrary, Yeagley found his religious ideas ridiculed and derided by those who idolized the great musicians of classical Europe. Yet Yeagley’s great talent made his believes critically important to his future. Essentially, Yealgey found that Beethoven and God were separate entities. There was no mistaken concept, in Yeagley’s mind, that the works of man were on a par with the works of God. Yeagley was no idolater.

This phenomenological, philosophical rift between religion and music lasted throughout Yeagley’s music education. He finally found himself studying religion formally at Yale Divinity School, from which he earned the Master of Divinity, the three-year professional minister’s degree. At Yale, however, Yeagley was exposed to radical liberalism, the social gospel, and to a general environment which eschewed fundamentalism, and any such Christianity as would take, for example, the first six chapters of Genesis literally, or even seriously. Yeagley continued to study aspects of religion at Emory University, from which he earned a two-year Master of Arts. He began studying Judaism under Rabbi David Blumenthal (who studied with Jacob Neusner, at Brown).

Dr. Yeagley has written many works on religious subjects. Those that have been published pertain to ancient Jewish-Persian relations beginning in the late eighth century BCE. Dr. Yeagley has published numerous works in Persian Heritage Magazine (www.persian-heritage.com), and presented academic papers at the international Iranian Studies Conference held in Bethesda, Maryland (2000 and 2002).

In 1999, Dr. Yeagley went on a two-week lecture tour of Iran, speaking at the University of Tehran and Ferdowsi University in Masshad. He also visited Neshabur, home of the mystics, Toos, and Torbat-e Heydariyeh, and a remote country farm. The travelogue of this tripe is published, serially, in Persian Heritage. It’s called “Pearl of Great Price.”

Dr. Yeagley expects soon to have a major academic paper, “David & Darius” published in HUMATA (an elite Zoroastrian journal published in Newton, MA), and in Rahavard, the largest Persian (Farsi) journal in America (published in Los Angeles).

← Return to David Yeagley’s Interests

Posted by David Yeagley · January 14, 2009 · 12:57 pm CT ·