Asked to describe the deep influence of Black sacred music on American culture, Braxton Shelley, a minister, musician, and musicologist at Yale, invoked the words of the 19th-century Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. In the early 1890s, Dvořák, then the...
While serving at the forefront of the civil and women’s rights movements, Pauli Murray ’65 J.S.D., ’79 Hon. D.Div. endured many defeats and setbacks. But she maintained hope and lived to see — as she once put it — her “lost causes found.”
Murray’s legacy...
Members of the Yale and New Haven communities gathered this week to confer degrees on the Rev. James W.C. Pennington and the Rev. Alexander Crummell, two Black men who studied theology at the university during the mid-19th century but were barred from...
Nearly two decades ago, the poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. Doctors told Wiman, who was 39 at the time, that he likely had five years to live.
In the ensuing 19 years, Wiman, the former editor of Poetry magazine, has...