Professor Emerita, Religion, Spirituality, and Society
Kay is Professor Emerita of Ethics who also taught courses for African American Studies. She is a Roothbert Fellow. She served as Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students from 1993–2000. She was awarded the Dirk Andrew Phibbs Memorial Award, secured a John Lantz fellowship to study the Rwandan genocide, and was selected to participate in the Seminar for Executive Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She held various leadership positions in the Society for Christian Ethics and the Justice Studies Association. Her research interrogates oppression theories, virtue ethics, and the moral psychology of wrongdoers. She has worked with the university’s Race & Pedagogy Institute since 2003.
Her monograph, Murdering Myths: The Story Behind the Death Penalty (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), challenges America’s deep-seated allegiance to a retributive narrative that justifies violence as a means of justice. Drawing on interviews with death row prisoners and families who lost loved ones to murder, she shows how this destructive story dehumanizes victims and perpetrators by embroiling them in non-human habits of being. She uplifts those family members who tell a different story based on accountability, civic trust, and the conviction that no human deserves harm.
Her latest work, a collection of poems about caregiving, Where Language Cannot Go, is forthcoming from Cyberwit Publishing.
Selected Publications
“Jews as Oppressed and Oppressor: Doing Ethics at the Intersections of Classism, Racism, and Antisemitism.” In Judaism, Race, and Ethics. Edited by Jonathan K. Crane. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020.
“Middle Agents as Marginalized: How the Rwanda Genocide Challenges Ethics from the Margin.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. 33:2 (2013): 21–40.
“The Exodus and Racism: Paradoxes for Jewish Liberation.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. 28:2 (2008): 23–50.
“Is Restitution Possible for Murder? Surviving Family Members Speak.” In Wounds That Do Not Bind: Victim-Based Perspectives on the Death Penalty. Edited by James Acker and David Karp. 2nd ed. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007 (2006), pp. 323–348.
“Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation: Story-Telling for Healing, as Witness, and in Public Policy.” In Handbook of Restorative Justice: A Global Perspective. Edited by Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft. New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 230–245.
“In the Shadow of the Execution Chamber: Affirming Wholeness in a Broken Place.” In Practice What You Preach: Virtues, Ethics, and Power in the Lives of Pastoral Ministers and Their Congregations. Edited by James Keenan, S.J., and Joseph Kotva, Jr. Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 1999, pp. 115–127.
“Getting Egypt out of the People: Aquinas’s Contributions to Liberation.” In Aquinas and Empowerment: Classical Ethics for Ordinary Lives. Edited by G. Simon Harak, S.J. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996, pp. 1–46.
“Politics without Human Nature? Reconstructing a Common Humanity.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 9:1 (Winter 1994): 21–52.