William F. May ’48

Bill died Oct. 27, 2023, two days after his 96th birthday.

He came to Princeton from Houston and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 with a degree in history and humanities. He served as president of Whig Hall and the Debate Panel, and was a member of Prospect Club.

An ordained Presbyterian minister, Bill earned a B.D. from Yale Divinity School in 1952 and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale in 1962. He became a professor and chair of the religion department at Smith College. In 1966, he founded and chaired the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. He was appointed Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University in 1980.

Further renown came to Bill at Southern Methodist University, where he held the first Maguire University Chair of Ethics and was founding director of the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, a position he held from 1985 to 2001. He also received several postdoctoral fellowships, including one from the Guggenheim Foundation.

A founding fellow of the Hastings Center and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Bill is recalled as a prolific and introspective writer whose publications include The Physician’s Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics and The Patient’s Ordeal.

Bill is survived by children Catherine May Maletta, Theodore, Elisabeth May Kelley, and David ’80.