The Rev. Pauli Murray was a path-breaking poet, activist, attorney, professor, and Episcopal priest whose legacy of human rights work continues to reverberate. In this lecture series, Dr. McCray will use the example of Murray to explore the role of risk-taking in Christian spirituality. After highlighting some of the virtues, friendships, and four-legged companions that helped Murray risk well and rest well, we will consider some implications for spiritual life today in three separate lectures.
- Lecture 1: Pauli & the Picket Sign
- Lecture 2: Pauli & the Pen
- Lecture 3: Pauli & the Pulpit
About Donyelle McCray
Donyelle McCray serves as associate professor of homiletics at Yale Divinity School. A teacher, writer, and Episcopal layperson, her scholarship focuses on ways African American women and lay people use the sermon to play, remember, invent, and disrupt. She is the author of The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher, a forthcoming volume on sermon genre, Is it a Sermon?: Genre Fluidity and Ancestral Wisdom in African American Preaching, and she is currently writing a book on the preaching and spirituality of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. Before becoming a homiletics professor, McCray served as an attorney focusing on wills, trusts, and estates.This work raised existential questions that led her to seminary and then into ministry as a hospice chaplain. Human finitude, compassion, and interdependence remain central theological concerns in her scholarship.
