Bill Murry--a great humanist voice--is stilledEdd Doerr
1 August 2017
UUA Humanists mailing list
Humanists@lists.uua.org
http://lists.uua.org/mailman/listinfo/humanistsWilliam R. (Bill) Murry died on July 8 at age 84. Bill was one of the major voices for humanism in recent decades. With a Ph.D. from Drew University he was minister of the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Maryland (one of our largest) for 17 years before becoming president and dean of the largest UU minister grad school, Meadville Lombard, in Chicago, in 1997, where he served for seven years.
In addition to being an eloquent and outspoken humanist in the predominantly humanist Unitarian Universalist tradition, Bill was active on a range of social justice issues -- family planning, hospice care, affordable housing, religious liberty, church-state separation. Bill was a leader in the UUHumanist Association and at the 2017 UUA General Assembly received the "Lifetime Achievement Award for Extraordinary Contributions to Religious Humanism and Unitarian Universalism." He was also a member of the board of Americans for Religious Liberty.
Among his books is
Becoming More Fully Human: Religious Humanism as a Way of Life (2011) and in 2017,
Humanist Voices in Unitarian Universalism, which he co-edited with Kendyl Gibbons (and in which Bill had me write a chapter).
It was my privilege to have known and worked with Bill. In the last year or so he arranged for me lecture a couple of times in Maryland. He will be missed.
Edd Doerr
Locked
