The Rev. Robert Greiner
June. The Rev. Robert Charles Greiner was ordained to the diaconate and began his blessed tenure with us. After joining our Building Commission, he began photographing our building’s features and posting his photos of it and parish activities to our Facebook page.
Kevin Neel began his six-year tenure as organist and director of our parish choir.
Kevin Neel playing our Rogers organ
April 4. The New York Times reported that Pauli Murray‘s family home in Raleigh NC had been named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
As part of the Pauli Murray Project a memorial mural painted on the brick wall of a former tobacco warehouse in Durham NC shows her flanked by panels that read:
As an Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray used the pulpit to find the “spirit of love and reconciliation” as expressed in her ministry as the “goal of human wholeness”. — Karla Holloway
It may be that when historians look back on 20th century America, all roads will lead to Pauli Murray. Civil rights, feminism, religion, literature, law, sexuality — no matter what the subject, there is Pauli. — Historian Susan Ware
Pauli Murray taught us that our lives are not defined by our race or our gender but by our striving to make the world a better place than when we found it. — Elnora J. Shields, Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project
Pauli Murray mural (detail) on tobacco warehouse in Durham NC
See also:
Dorothy A. Brown, 1963 (image credit: NQ, Boston Globe)
March 20. Dorothy Addams Brown died in Gloucester MA. She had been born on 29 May 1923 to parishioners Harriet Addams Young (1886-1952) and Lawrence Allyn Brown (1876-1937) and baptized here. She resided for many year at 434 Marlborough St. with her brother Lawrence, Jr.. She served on our vestry (1962-4 & 1969-74) and our Finance & Budget and Long-Range Planning committees. She was a generous benefactor until her death at the age of 90. She credited William Wolbach, President of the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Co., for hiring her as a clerk in 1944, when she graduated from Vassar. She became the bank’s first woman trust officer and then Vice President. Mary Meier of The Boston Globe (May 16, 1963) wrote an article about her entitled, “Banks Rarely Give Women Key Role.” When Dottie retired as chair of the New England Group of the National Association of Bank Women in 1965, she was the only senior investment officer in the Association.
Last issue of Voices was published with a farewell letter from its editor Margo Risk.
March. With support from the Lilly Foundation, our rector Pamela Werntz left on her sabbatical pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland, several sites in the Holy Land, and Ste. Maxime, France, where she sought inspiration from Mary Magdalene. The Rev. Susan Ackley became our Sabbatical Priest/Artist in Residence.
The Rev. Susan Ackley, our Sabbatical Priest/Artist-in-Residence, and participants in “Words Are Not Enough” carry prayer flags down Newbury Street to the Boston Marathon bombing memorial site in Copley Square.
Photo credit: UNC. Carolina Digital Library and Archives via WikiCommons.
The 77th General Convention of The Episcopal Church resolved to add The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline Murray to Holy Women, Holy Men and the Calendar of the Church Year, which now commemorates her life on the day of her death, July 1.
Murray attended Emmanuel in the early 1970s and served on our vestry (1973-75). In her autobiography (1987) , she credits former Rector Al Kershaw with encouraging her to leave her faculty position at Brandeis University and pursue ordination in The Episcopal Church. In 1977, at the age of sixty-six, she became The Church’s first African-American-woman priest.
See also
Our webmaster Matt Griffing
Sept. Working with Michael Scanlon and members of the Communication Commission, Matthew Griffing redesigned our website by adapting a WordPress theme. Joy Howard wrote the text of its ‘hub’ pages (seen in the horizontal purple menu bar above). Parish Historian Mary Chitty wrote many history pages (under Mission). Elizabeth Richardson launched blogs for our rector’s sermons and this timeline and created web versions of Mary’s building guide and Michael Shea‘s brochure Lindsey Chapel: Its History & Architecture.
March 7.The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz was installed as 12th rector with the Rt. Rev. Thomas M. Shaw presiding. See The Musical Intelligencer‘s interview with John Harbison, in which he discusses the history of Emmanuel Music, its founder Craig Smith, The Rev. Alvin L. Kershaw, Pam’s musical background, and her dedication to our music program.
Our vestry called The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz to be our twelfth rector.
The Rt. Rev. Gayle Harris blessed our new garden.
Brett Cook and others in Durham NC completed the installation of Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life, which includes five murals picturing The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. Installed at 117 S. Buchanan Blvd. is “Soul Roots” with an inscription from Proud Shoes: “It had taken me almost a lifetime to discover that true emancipation lies in the acceptance of the whole past, in deriving strength from all my roots, in facing up to the degradation as well as the dignity of my ancestors”.
August 16. Parish Historian Mary Chitty created an online catalog of almost 600 works in our archives and from our defunct parish library, some of which are still floating about. Her tags can be selected to find, for example, books by and about our rectors or digitized by Google Books. See Our Virtual Library for more about how to search it.
Nov. 14. Craig Smith, our music director and founder of Emmanuel Music, died. Richard Dyer wrote an obituary for Emmanuel Music.
Piano-collector Hu Youyi purchased our Casavant organ and shipped it to the Organ Art Center on Gulangyu Island, Fujian Province, China, where it was restored by Rieger Orgelbau and installed in a concert hall (above) in 2017. See also the record for Opus 700 in the Pipe Organ Database.