This July, I celebrated my eighth wedding anniversary with my husband, Jon, reflecting on a wedding day that easily stands on its own as one of my happiest – but perhaps made even more special by getting married in Duke Chapel.
With its sweeping Gothic buttresses, center aisle that stretches half the length of Wallace Wade stadium and wooden pews that could seat more than 1,400, it’s hard not to feel that one is part of something bigger than one’s own wedding day.
“I don’t know how to put it into words,” Joy Crowder Slusser R.N.’59, told me for this story. Slusser got married at the Chapel on June 3, 1954, to her then-high school sweetheart, the late Todd Bradfield B.S.M.E.’60. “You just feel like you’re absorbed by it almost. It’s very special.”
A similar feeling often is shared by the Duke Chapel couples – an estimated more than 6,000 and counting over the decades since 1933 when the inaugural nuptials took place in the iconic space. On April 8 of that year, Marion Noell Lyon, great-granddaughter of Washington Duke, married WWII Army pilot John Walker Sessums Jr. in a late evening event filled with candlelight, the serenade of a 100-member choir and a near garden of white roses, lilies and ferns that the Durham Herald-Sun called in “perfect harmony with the Gothic splendor.”
Decades later, each Duke Chapel wedding looks a little bit different, but many couples find similar threads weaving their collective stories together.
NJ Potter Goodwin ’13 and Cliff Goodwin ’09, who met at Duke and now live in San Mateo, California, were married by the same officiant who married my husband and me – the Rev. Debra Brazzel, former associate dean and acting dean of the Chapel.
“Rev. Deb just had such a beautiful spirit about her,” NJ said. Our shared officiant showed genuine care and thoughtfulness in getting to know me, Jon, NJ and Cliff as she prepared each couple for the marriage journey that would begin in Duke Chapel.
Shared experiences like this are very common among couples, in part because of the coordinated services the Chapel provides. As part of a $3,900 fee, couples can receive recommendations for licensed officiants, a wedding coordinator for the ceremony rehearsal and wedding day, the Chapel organist who will play the couple’s choice of the famed 1976 Flentrop or 1932 Aeolian organs, a digital recording of the wedding and more.
“There's a team effort,” said the Rev. Leslie Ballew Rahman M.Div.’23, a chaplain and a wedding director at Duke Chapel, who also married her husband, Moss Rahman, at the Chapel on Oct. 18. 2025.
But the shared experiences among Chapel couples over the years also is about being part of a unique tradition that connects the Duke community, she said.
“Every time I send a couple down the aisle, I almost have a flashback to when I walked down the aisle,” Rahman said, “I feel like I'm holding hands, like we did it.”
Marrying in the Chapel requires a specific affiliation with the university: At least one person in the soon-to-married couple – or one of their parents or grandparents – must either be a Duke alum; a current, full-time Duke student; a current, full-time Duke employee; or a current member of the Board of Trustees. In addition, faculty and staff who retired from Duke after 15 or more years of continuous service – and their children and grandchildren – may also book a Chapel wedding.
To reserve, couples fill out an online form to request preferred dates no more than one year in advance and no less than three months before their ideal wedding date.
If couples have their hearts set on a specific date, then paying attention to the first business day of the month is important. That’s because at 8:30 a.m. on that day, the Chapel will release dates that are available that same month a year away.
While requests are online now, they were in-person for the majority of the years since Chapel weddings commenced.
When Sandra Hernandez Noonan and Mike Noonan – both class of 2004 and now living in New York City – were planning their wedding in 2011, it was tradition to “tent” on the Chapel lawn to ensure they got the date they wanted.
That’s exactly what Sandra and her future mother-in-law did exactly a year from the hoped-for date. Flying into Durham, they picked up camping chairs on the way from the airport and arrived on the Chapel lawn at 10 p.m. The pair felt elated with their plan, envisioning being first in line when the Chapel doors swung open the next morning.
But when they got there, Sandra said her heart sank.
“There was already another person there,” she said.
Worst of all, Sandra found out that the other couple wanted her identical date.
The Chapel offers multiple reservation slots throughout the year, with an afternoon and evening option on Saturdays year-round and an additional afternoon and evening option on Fridays and Sundays from mid-May to mid-August.
But a night of bonding and camping out on the Chapel lawn luckily led to good news. Sandra “calmly approached” the other couple and discovered they had their eyes on a different time on their shared date.
“By the time the Chapel opened and I put in my name for our wedding, I was delirious, but happy,” Sandra said.
Like the Noonans, getting married in the Chapel was the only choice for Chuck Bunn ’73 of Spring Hope, North Carolina, who will celebrate 50 years of marriage with his wife Cathy Barnes Bunn this November.
Chuck grew up in a long line of Duke alumni, including grandfather Charles Settle Bunn ’17, father Charles Ivy Bunn ’39, and mother Florence Craig Bunn ’47, along with several aunts and uncles.
“Duke had been ‘home,’” he said.
Their 6 p.m. Chapel wedding on November 20, 1976, was unconventional but perfect in storied Duke way, the Bunns said.
Back then, it was common to have a small reception at the Chapel following the ceremony, but when they discovered another wedding was scheduled after theirs, they had to pivot. Instead, the couple held a pre-wedding reception the day before, leaving room for a serendipitous wedding day activity: There was a Duke-UNC football game in Chapel Hill, and the Bunns invited the entire wedding party to join them at the game just hours before their wedding.
As the game was winding down with Duke in the lead just before 6 p.m., Chuck and Cathy left to make it back to Durham and to the Chapel. But by the time they reached their car, Duke had lost by one point.
Although losing in sports, the Bunns won in love that day.
They made it to the Chapel, threw on their wedding clothes quickly in the Chapel’s dressing rooms and began the ceremony just shy of 6 p.m.
“It was perfect,” Cathy said, “I would do it again. We all had a good time even though Duke lost. And then I got married to my best friend. I mean, what could have made a better day?”
Rishonda Thomas M.P.P.’16 never thought getting married in Duke Chapel would be logistically possible. She and her fiancé Cory Puffett were living in the Washington, D.C., area during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the long-term planning hurdles of that time seemed like they could get in the way.
“When the Chapel wrote back saying that they had our exact dates, it felt kind of like serendipity,” said Thomas, who was married in 2022.
The Chapel held a special place for Thomas not only because she earned her master of public policy at the Sanford School. She spent her childhood summers in Durham visiting her maternal grandmother, now 89, which meant it would be easy for her grandmother to attend the ceremony.
Add to that, the Chapel’s chief designer was Julian Francis Abele, a prominent African American architect whose role was largely unpublicized in the segregated South. Abele was the designer for both of Duke’s west and east campuses, including its most iconic buildings. In the 1980s, a group of Duke students worked to bring Abele’s contributions into the spotlight, and Thomas was a student at Duke when the university dedicated the West Campus quad as Abele Quad in the architect’s honor in 2016.
“It was really special to celebrate in that space,” Thomas said. “Everything started to make sense and fall into place.”
In addition, planning the details of her wedding with the Chapel staff was a fun process, Thomas said.
For her ceremony, Thomas included her professor Lynn Holmes, an adjunct professor at the Sanford School with whom Thomas had co-created a mentoring program for Sanford students and who had recently earned a master of divinity from Duke Divinity School and was ordained.
When it came to planning music for the ceremony, Thomas had a special request for the chapel organist, who serves as each couple’s music director for the day. She asked if he would swap the traditional processional music – Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” – for “Throne Room” from “Star Wars,” a nod to her “Star Wars”-loving husband. The songs start the same before pivoting into their own distinct sounds.
Without skipping a beat, the organist said he was game.
"We can play whatever,” Thomas said he told her. “Just give us the sheet music."
Thomas was thrilled.
“A few beats in, the guests started to realize, oh, this is ‘Star Wars,’” Thomas recalls.
The sanctuary filled with smiles and laughter as the couple walked down the aisle.
Following the ceremony, couples take part in another special tradition part of Chapel weddings by signing the official Duke University Chapel Wedding Register, which is held in the University Archives for generations to come.
It takes many weddings to turn to a fresh page of the Register – and many years to fill an entire book.
But if you request to view the bound books – three archived for weddings from 1933 to 2024 and a fourth still being penned in Duke Chapel as weddings continue this summer – you will find a library of love.
Going to the Chapel
