Is It a Sermon?

Donyelle C. McCray is Associate Professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School. Her scholarship focuses on the ways African American women and laypeople use sermons to play, remember, invent, and disrupt. She is the author of The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher, co-author of A Surprising God: Advent Devotions for an Uncertain Time, and is researching the preaching and spirituality of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. In a forthcoming documentary film and transmedia project, she collaborates with artists on theological responses to gentrification. Before becoming a homiletics professor, McCray served as an estate planning attorney. Existential questions emerged that led her to seminary and to ministry as a hospice chaplain. Consolation, compassion, and interdependence continue to be core themes in her scholarship.

"Donyelle McCray leads readers to the shorelines of homiletics to discover fresh preaching pearls from ancestral wisdom. This wisdom stretches the human imagination as wide as the work of the Holy Spirit to reveal the fluidity of sermon genres. Like the Pentecostal dynamite power of the Spirit, McCray blows up myopic paradigms of what a sermon is and challenges us to see the Spirit of proclamation poured out on all genres, from singing to quilting. This groundbreaking book will not only ignite a critical conversation about multivocality in the field of homiletics; it will change the field for years to come."—Luke A. Powery, Dean, Duke University Chapel and author, Becoming Human: The Holy Spirit and the Rhetoric of Race "Donyelle McCray blurs the boundaries of traditional preaching and invites readers to experience the lives and art of several historical and contemporary figures as expressions of proclamation. While appreciating aspects of the traditional 30-minute oration, she reminds us that the Holy Spirit is the source of the church’s preaching and invites us to become attuned to the Spirit’s proclamation outside as well as inside church walls. Not content with abstractions, Is it a Sermon? highlights specific rhetorical strategies African American musicians, visual and literary artists, and dancers have used to convey spiritual wisdom."—Alyce M. McKenzie, Le Van Professor of Preaching and Worship, Director of the Center for Preaching Excellence, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University