Announcing Spring Wyant Lecture
February 16, 2010
The Wyant Lecture Series features speakers in the Humanities, History and the Arts.
Dead Man Walking - The Journey Continues
Featuring: Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 :: 4:30 p.m.
Janet M. Daley Library Lecture Hall, Emmanuel College
Register online »
Reception and book signing to follow
Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ a native of Louisiana, is known internationally for her tireless work against the death penalty. A member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, she spent her first 24 years teaching religion to junior high school students and working within her community as religious education director and later as formation director. She then moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans and began working at Hope House, a center that assists public housing residents. During this time, she was asked to correspond with a death row inmate and became his spiritual adviser. Concerned with the plight of murder victims' families, she founded "Survive," which provides counseling and support for grieving families. Following this experience, in 1993 she wrote Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. The book became a best seller, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and spawned an Oscar-winning movie and an internationally acclaimed opera.
Since 1984, Sister Helen has divided her time between campaigning against the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. This experience raised her concerns that some of those executed were not guilty, which inspired her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, released in 2004. Today Sister Helen works with the Death Penalty Discourse Center, the Moratorium Campaign and the Dead Man Walking Play Project. She is presently at work on another book - River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey to Death Row.
