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 (2019) and a volume on sermon genre, Is it a Sermon?: Art, Activism, and Genre Fluidity in African American Preaching (Fall 2024). She is currently writing a book on the preaching and spirituality of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. Before becoming a homiletics professor, Donyelle 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.
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Books
Is It a Sermon? Art, Activism, and Genre Fluidity in African American Preaching (Westminster John Knox Press, 2024, forthcoming)
A Surprising God: Advent Meditations for a New World (co-authored with Thomas G. Long, Westminster John Knox Press, 2021)
The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Press, 2019)
