Donyelle McCray

Spirituality, Theology

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Donyelle McCray, an assistant professor at Yale University, studies homiletics and Christian spirituality. Her focus is on African American preaching, sermon genre, and modes of authority. In her work, the sermon occupies the shoreline between sacred and profane speech and holds emancipatory potential within Christian liturgies and beyond them. She writes about the ways African American women and lay people use the sermon to play, remember, invent, and disrupt. Her recent book, The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher, offers a homiletical reading of Julian’s life and ministry and attends to the relationship between preaching, embodiment, and authority. Her current research examines the preaching and spirituality of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. She is also working on a documentary film as part of the Louisville Institute’s Clergy-Scholar Research team on Race, Church, and Theological Practices.

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Festival Years: 2018

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