Must Reads: Episode 32 with Donyelle McCray, featuring Is It a Sermon?"

by Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence on Thursday, June 5, 2025

Dr. Alyce McKenzie sat down with Dr. Donyelle McCray to discuss McCray’s book, Is It a Sermon? Art, Activism, and Genre Fluidity in African American Preaching.  In her book, Dr. McCray challenges the notion that a sermon is a message preached from the pulpit by an ordained clergyman. Dr. McKenzie and Dr. McCray explore how this view can eliminate too many voices, particularly women’s voices. Dr. McCray contends that there are other proclamatory impulses that are let out in other forms, and her book explores this idea.

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, Nd 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 let her to seminary and then into ministry as a hospital chaplain. Human finitude, compassion, and interdependence remain central theological concerns of her scholarship.