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mahatmakanejeeves

(56,886 posts)
Fri Mar 6, 2015, 12:04 PM Mar 2015

Malcolm Boyd, Episcopal priest and champion of civil and gay rights, dies at 91

Malcolm Boyd, Episcopal priest and champion of civil and gay rights, dies at 91

Religion
By Mary Rourke March 4

The Rev. Malcolm Boyd, the Episcopal priest whose book “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” took prayer out of church onto the city streets in a slangy vernacular not found in Sunday missals and who later was one of the first Christian ministers to declare he was gay, died Feb. 27 in Los Angeles. He was 91. ... The cause was complications of pneumonia, said a spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

Rev. Boyd delivered riffs on life’s grittier problems — the white racists afraid of integration, or teenage girls who get pregnant — with a candor that was rarely heard from a priest leading a community at prayer. ... He wrote more than two dozen books, many of them about people who did not fit the blue-sky ideal. But none of his prayers for them were as raw and urgent as those in the 1965 collection that sold a half-million copies.

“ ‘Are You Running With Me, Jesus?’ is a classic of spiritual writing for its generation,” said the Rev. Robert Raines, a former director of the Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor, Pa. ... “It tells about the underbelly of society, which Malcolm knew something about,” Raines told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. “His was a Christian faith lived out in bars and on the streets. His prayers came out of the realization that God is not only in church. God is in the painful situations of your life.”
....

Rev. Boyd’s flair for drama kept him in the spotlight from his earliest years as a clergyman. In the segregated South of 1961, he was among the first white ministers to work the voter registration drives. Later in the decade, when religious institutions were criticized as self-serving or irrelevant, he delivered his “prayer poems” from nightclub stages and at the Newport Jazz Festival with guitarist Charlie Byrd. ... But he took his boldest step in 1976, when he announced that he was gay. At the time, most Christian churches condemned what they referred to as the homosexual lifestyle, which he was living.
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