Murray, Nelson Honored by Divinity School

A Baptist minister in Lynn, Mass., and the chaplain of Brown University received alumni awards from the Divinity School yesterday.

The Rev. Walter R. Murray Jr., MDiv '86, will receive the School's First Decade Award. He is the minister of Zion Baptist Church in Lynn, and chairman of the board of directors of Jericho Corp., a nonprofit housing development organization in Roxbury. He has been recognized by the Massachusetts Council of Churches, Gov. William Weld, and the state legislature for his ecumenical leadership against violence in the city of Lynn, as well as for his contributions to the community and his commitment to ministry.

He has also served as director of Inroads/Boston Inc., an organization that recruits minority high school and college students for summer internships, and as a member of the Divinity School's Alumni Council. The First Decade Award was established in 1989 to recognize a Divinity School graduate from the past 10 years "whose vocation confirms our hope that God is present as justice, peace, and beauty, and whose achievement inspires our striving for truth, compassion, and service."

The Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson, MDiv '80, will receive the School's Rabbi Martin Katzenstein Award. She has been University Chaplain at Brown University in Providence, R.I., since 1990, when she was the first women to be named to a university chaplaincy at an Ivy League school. Ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1980, she has also served as Dean of the Chapel at Mount Holyoke College and director of the Office of Religious Activities and Chaplaincy Services at Vassar College.

The Katzenstein Award was established in 1979 to recognize a Divinity School graduate who exhibits "a passionate and helpful interest in the lives of other people, an informed and realistic faithfulness, an embodiment of the idea that love is not so much a way of feeling as a way of acting, and a reliable sense of humor." The award honors the memory of Rabbi Martin Katzenstein, ThM '58, who died in 1970 while he was the School's acting dean of students.