College is a place for studying, forming friendships, cheering for sports teams—and for some students it’s also a time of exploration into meaning, identity, and belief. That is where “Say the Thing” comes in. It is an initiative from Duke Chapel and Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics to creatively engage students—about 40% of whom don’t identify with a traditional religion—with life's enduring questions. In this episode, we hear from the head of Say the Thing, the Chapel's Rev. Leah Torrey—along with two students in the program—about how they use art, poetry, and great writers to help students better understand themselves and their place in the world.

For about sixty years, the United in Praise student group has performed gospel and praise music in services, concerts, and ceremonies on campus and in the Durham community. The group traces its roots to the mid-Sixties when Black students joined with a local church to form the Modern Black Mass Choir. In the decades since, the group has adopted its current name and become recognized as an official student group but they have kept to their mission of giving glory to God with their music. In this episode, student leaders from United in Praise, along with the group's staff adviser, talk about how their music witnesses to their faith, forms community, and passes on a valuable legacy.

As part of Duke University, Duke Chapel is located in Durham, North Carolina. It’s a home city that has much to celebrate as a growing community with a vibrant cultural scene as well as a reputation for technological innovation. But, like most cities, Durham wrestles with homelessness, economic inequality, a history of racial injustice, mental health care, and other challenges. Duke Chapel seeks to do its part in addressing these issues by partnering with nonprofits—many of them faith-based—who work for the welfare of Durham. In this episode, we speak with leaders from three of those community partners—DurhamCares, Durham Congregations in Action, and Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham—about faith-based community service. The guests are:

* The Rev. Reynolds Chapman, executive director of DurhamCares

* The Rev. Breana van Velzen, executive director of Durham Congregations in Action

* The Rev. Ben Haas, director of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham

Growing out of Duke’s centennial celebration, a new project collects oral histories from Black alumni of the four universities designated for support by James B. Duke’s 1924 indenture of trust—Duke, Davidson, Furman, and Johnson C. Smith. The Rev. Dr. M. Keith Daniel led a research team to collect dozens of interviews with members of Black families who began, and continued, legacies at the Duke Endowment schools in the decades after Duke and other predominantly white schools began to desegregate. Himself a graduate of Duke three times over, Rev. Dr. Daniel was program manager for Duke’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the first five Black undergraduates to attend the school. The title Dr. Daniel has given to the project—Counting It All Joy—comes from a biblical passage that speaks of joy, trials, faith, and patience. In this episode, he describes the pride, pain, and providence he found in the “Counting It All Joy” oral history project.

After serving more than twenty-eight years as a custodian at Duke Chapel, Oscar Dantzler is retiring. His approach mixing hands-on cleaning with warm welcomes to people of all kinds landed him a spot in the 2009 documentary Philosopher Kings. In 2016, he received Duke’s highest honor for distinguished service, the University Medal, for his caretaking of Duke’s Chapel and its students. In this episode, we take one final tour of Duke Chapel with Oscar Dantzler to get a sense of the work and wisdom that made him such a widely known figure on campus, and beyond, for nearly three decades.

During a recent Duke Chapel Sunday morning worship service, Chapel organist Chad Fothergill opened the service with a late-seventeenth-century French composition, accompanied the choir in a chant he composed, swapped melodic phrases with a colleague playing a second organ, and then closed the service by playing seven minutes of improvised music. That is a taste of the versatility Fothergill brings to his role, which includes arranging hymns, selecting compositions, accompanying the choir, guiding the congregation through the liturgy, and more. In this episode, Fothergill plays examples of his approach to service music in this discussion of the artistry of a church organist.

The audience filled the pews of Duke Chapel for this year’s William Preston Few Lecture on October 9. In this episode of Sounds of Faith, we listen to that public conversation on “Faith, Sports, and Leadership” with Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski. “I believe in God,” Coach K says in the discussion with Duke Chapel Dean Luke Powery. “My path in that belief was the Catholic faith. It’s been a strong part of who I am…. One thing about faith is you are never alone.”

Music, and especially the spirituals, is an important part of Duke Chapel Dean Luke Powery’s preaching, scholarship, and Christian faith. A Baptist minister and professor of homiletics at Duke’s Divinity School, Dean Powery says the Spirituals “are musical memorabilia created on the anvil of misery in the crucible of inhumane slavery,” that have become “a wellspring of wisdom quite distinct from so many other sources of knowledge at a university.” In this episode, he listens to recordings of spirituals—and sings himself!—explaining how "the spirituals connect with the human condition of hope, of healing, of suffering, of joy and spontaneity."

Dr. Robert Parkins’s career at Duke has spanned five decades, and the music in his recent farewell recital spanned three centuries. A professor of the practice of music and university organist at Duke, Dr. Parkins performed on all three of the Duke Chapel’s main organs, employing each for the musical era to which it is best suited. In this episode, Dr. Parkins reflects on his forty-seven years of service at Duke and gives a brief survey of 300 years of organ music history, as heard through the pieces in his final recital.

TRANSCRIPT

James Todd:

Welcome to Sounds of Faith, a podcast exploring traditions of faith, sacred music, and spoken word here at Duke University Chapel.

Dr. Robert Parkins performed Eugene Gigout's piece Toccata at Duke Chapel in 2009 at the rededication recital for the Kathleen Upton Byrns McClendon Organ. Professor of the practice of music and university organist at Duke, Dr. Parkins performed the same piece again this month at the culmination of his farewell recital.

Parkins' career at Duke has spanned five decades, and the music in his final recital spanned three centuries. He performed on all three of the chapel's main organs, employing each one for the musical era to which it is best suited. I'm James Todd, communications manager here at Duke Chapel, and I'm here with Dr. Robert Parkins to reflect on his 47 years of service at Duke, and also learn something about 300 years of organ music history, as heard through the pieces at his farewell recital.

Dr. Parkins, let's start at the beginning. The first piece you played at your recital was Medio Registro Alto by the Spanish composer Francisco Peraza. It dates to the 16th century, and I want to listen to that piece as you performed it on the organ in the side chapel of Duke Chapel, the Brombaugh organ, which has a historically appropriate tuning system called meantone that's different than modern tuning. So, could you explain how that type of tuning works in this piece?

Robert Parkins:

Well, when you speak of modern organs, basically you're talking about 19th and 20th century instruments that tend to be in what we call equal temperament. And that is that on a modern piano, for example, every half step is exactly the same as every other half step. Every perfect fifth, from, say, C to G, is going to be the same as every perfect fifth, no matter what key you're in at the time.

Now, the early instruments, and the early organs in particular, were not tuned in equal temperament until much later than the 17th centuries. And some meantone organs existed even into the early 19th century in some places and beyond that. And meantone temperament was the rule for 16th and 17th century organs. And it means that you're giving up a lot of intervals and chords and keys that would be easily transferable on modern instruments with equal temperament. But what you gain is that the major chords, the major triads, and specifically the major thirds, that are usable, and there are eight of those that are usable in a quarter-comma meantone temperament, are perfectly consonant. They're perfectly consonant, just like the octaves are on the piano. No other interval on the piano is perfectly consonant. Everything is tempered. It's either pushed or pulled in one direction or another to make all 12 notes fit into the 12 note octave.

And so you get really pure consonances, but it also makes the dissonances a lot harsher and more dramatic, which is all part of the system. So, it brings this early music, even the very simple things that would sound like a keyboard version of, say, a Renaissance motet or Mass movement, and that's the way a lot of keyboard music developed at that point, when you come to the end, to the final cadence, and it's a major chord, it sounds so relaxed and so smooth and so in tune. But then when you run into, say, a chromatic scale, you can hear that all the half steps are not quite the same. Or a dissonant chord that needs to be resolved is going t

In a world of political, cultural, and religious divisions, Professor John Inazu makes the case for a public discourse characterized by what he calls “confident pluralism.” Dr. Inazu spoke at Duke Chapel on March 27 for the Chapel’s inaugural Pluralism Lecture with a talk entitled “Pluralism, Particularity, and Possibility.” An expert on the First Amendment, Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. Immediately after his lecture, Inazu sat down for a public conversation with Duke Chapel Dean Luke Powery, which is featured in this episode.