Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
They say all roads lead to home, but they never say how long that journey might take. For Debra Dean Murphy, it took a couple decades for her to find her way back to West Virginia.
A 1980 graduate of Pocahontas County High School, Murphy attended West Virginia Wesleyan College where she earned a degree in biology with a minor in English. After graduation, she got married and her husband, Jim, moved to Durham, North Carolina.
Murphy found jobs using her biology degree while her husband attended Duke Divinity School. It was during this time that Murphy found her calling.
“Duke kind of spurred my own imagination,” she said. “We had our first child, Drew, when my husband was in school there and then when Drew was a couple years old, I went to Duke Divinity School and got a master’s in theological studies.”
Murphy went on to a doctoral program at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. The family moved to the area and Jim worked in the church as Murphy continued her education and entered her new phase – a teaching career.
“When we moved back to North Carolina, I taught at Duke Divinity School for a couple of years,” she said. “I also taught at Meredith College. But we had two young children [Drew and Sean Patrick] and my looking for full-time employment didn’t always jive with when my husband was moving to a new church.”
That’s when West Virginia Wesleyan College came calling. Murphy had been asked by the dean of her alma mater to teach there a few times, but things didn’t line up properly until 2009, when the boys were grown and starting their lives in North Carolina.
So, the couple moved again – this time back to West Virginia and Murphy took a faculty position in the Philosophy and Religion department.
“We don’t have a lot of students who major in religion or philosophy, but I do teach a lot of students because we’re a liberal arts college and students take courses from a wide range of disciplines,” she said. “In my seventeen years, a few of our religious studies majors have gone on to places like Princeton and Duke and Vanderbilt, so it’s been a program that’s prepared students well and that’s something we’re proud of.”
Murphy has also had students who had a similar experience to hers – planning a degree in one thing and then changing to another after taking a few classes.
“That happened to me, too,” she said. “I landed on biology because I took a couple intro courses and really loved it. I have had students decide to major in religion or philosophy because they took a class or two and thought, ‘I’m really interested in this.’”
In her 17 years of teaching at Wesleyan, Murphy said she has seen changes in her students and the types of students who take religious studies courses. Obviously, there are those who want to learn more about their own religion or the religions of the world, but there are also students who are trying to re-learn a tradition they may have experienced in a negative way in their childhood.
“I think one of the things that strikes me about many of the students I teach is that they’ve been wounded by religion – Christianity for the most part,” Murphy said. “A lot of those students have given up on it.”
“There are students whose conservative churches in rural Appalachia conveyed to them that they are not valuable as they are, so these students – rightly so, in my view – extricate themselves from that kind of situation,” she continued. “I’m sympathetic to their pain but I also want them to see that the Christianity they’ve rejected is not the whole religion.”
Murphy has seen a lot of students, who had given up on the Christianity they knew, come to her classes to learn what they were missing or to learn a new perspective.
“I’ve seen them sort of come to the realization of, ‘oh, this is a bigger religion than I thought; what I’ve had was a distortion of it,’” she said. “That’s gratifying as a teacher, that they can find something of value and also find that they are valued.”
As a teacher, Murphy said her goal is to make sure all her students see their worth in this world.
In recent years, she’s seen an increasingly number of “COVID era” students who often struggle with being prepared for college because of the educational isolation they experienced during their formative years.
“I’ve seen this happen over the last few years since the pandemic, as all colleges and universities have” she said. “And increasing levels of anxiety accompany this.”
“So anything we can do, that I can do, in my classes to let people know that they are seen, they are of value, they have dignity and worth, simply as the beloved child of God they are, that’s really how I see my work,” she added.
Murphy doesn’t just give assignments and grades; she strives to give her students perspective and a feeling of self-worth.
“Wesleyan is a small community and we’re very student oriented, so I hope we communicate that to our students,” she said. “I think at our best, we do.”
In addition to teaching, Murphy is also the founder and co-director of the Center for Restorative Justice (CRJ) based at the college. Restorative Justice focuses on persons who have been harmed and those who have caused harm and seeks restoration where it can be found.
“Restorative justice says if a person causes harm of any kind, they should absolutely be held accountable. That can look a lot of different ways, but, when possible, restoration should be the goal, not throwing people away,” she said. Restorative justice is complex and needs nuanced in a lot of ways, especially if you’re talking about the criminal justice system.
“I think of restorative justice as a way of living in the world such that you are trying to bring health and healing to situations and relationships and communities and yourself,” she added.
Murphy is also on the board of the West Virginia Restorative Justice Project (WVRJP) which works with communities all around the state and has even done some work in Pocahontas County. The contexts for these efforts range from K-12 education, addiction and recovery, juvenile justice, and organizations of all kinds who want to function in restorative ways.
“Almost every person we’ve worked with [the CRJ and the WVRJP] has experienced trauma in their lives – often in childhood,” she said. “Our work is to be in community with them, to accompany them as they take responsibility for any harm they’ve done, or work through harm they have experienced, and to show them their worth.
“We’ve seen lives change,” she continued. “It’s been miraculous in a lot of ways. It’s never perfect. There is failure at times, but we also get to see these friends restored to themselves and their communities. It’s very moving.”
