Donald Grayston, instructor in religious studies and humanities at SFU, was an inspirational intellectual, peace activist and community-builder. A retired Anglican parish priest, Grayston—who died on October 23, 2017— taught in SFU’s Department of Humanities from 1989 to 2004, serving for the last three years as the director of its Institute for the Humanities.

During his academic career, Grayston published on pilgrimage, marriage, the Holocaust and had a research specialization on the progressive Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, serving as a past president of both the Thomas Merton Society of Canada and the International Thomas Merton Society. In addition to his scholarly contributions, Grayston was director and co-director of the Pacific Jubilee Program in Spiritual Formation and Spiritual Direction , which he co-founded with Jack Gorsuch in 1988. Grayston was also a past chair of Building Bridges Vancouver, a public education program that ran from 2008-2015 with the mandate to be a peaceful, non-partisan, non-secretarian public forum for dialogue and information concerning the conflict in Israel-Palestine.

Read more about Donald Grayston:

• Grayston’s personal website and blog
• Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences biography of Grayston on the FASS Time Capsule
• SFU Continuing Studies instructor biography, SFU Continuing Studies
• “Donald Grayston: Peace-maker, peace disturber, RIP,” by Douglas Todd in the Vancouver Sun