Yale University has faced criticism because one of its residential colleges is named after a slaveowner and defender of the peculiar institution.
But it hit the trifecta with the name it chose to adorn its newest residential college: a black female Episcopalian.
Religion News Service reports that Anna Pauline Murray, the first “saint” in the liberal denomination that is bleeding congregants,
was also a civil rights activist who helped shape the legal argument for the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling and a women’s rights activist who co-founded the National Organization for Women. She received an advanced law degree from Yale in 1965 and an honorary doctorate in divinity from the university in 1979.
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The news service says Episcopal saints are “more like role models” than objects of veneration:
Murray was ordained a priest in 1977 at the age of 66 and celebrated her first Holy Eucharist at the same Chapel Hill, N.C., parish where her grandmother, a slave, had been baptized. The denomination honors Murray every July 1.
The university is also naming a new residential college after Ben Franklin, apparently because the benefactor behind the $250 million donation for the new buildings considers the Founding Father a “personal hero.”
There’s no explanation for why Yale chose Murray, though, other than the obvious one: She’s not a white male conservative.
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