Migrating Giants: Digital Memory and Dislocation in Preaching Formation

When the Rev. Dr. Samuel Proctor stepped into the Duke Chapel pulpit on March 4, 1973, he was already a man of formidable reputation. He had recently been appointed as pastor at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church after serving as president of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University. It is no surprise that Duke’s president greets Dr. Proctor on the Chapel steps that morning. The preacher is already an academic and religious giant. His sermon, “Personhood in the Computer Age,” is a reflection on Galatians’ call to Christian freedom in the context of an increasingly digitized culture. The sermon expresses Dr. Proctor’s ambivalence about data that is leveraged to implement broad swaths of social policy, or worse, categorize and quantify a human being. He is no Luddite, just a careful reader of the context. With stately precision, he describes how computers have been used to regulate human behavior, remove contextual nuance through averages and means, and obscure the “hard questions” behind the data. Who compiled the numbers? What environmental factors were taken into consideration? And critically: Why was the data compiled in the first place? Proctor speaks about freedom and personhood as critical theological and sociological categories, noting the “mischievous uses of data” behind IQ tests that purport to show African American intellectual inferiority or the “Moynihan Report’s” truncated analysis of the black family. As expected, the sermon is a rhetorical tour-de-force—and a prophetic one given this pulpit’s location at the heart of a southern research university. But it is a particularly sobering sermon for me, as I am listening to Dr. Proctor’s voice on my smart phone some fifty years later. I am the faculty advisor to the Duke University Chapel Recordings Digital Repository, a joint project between the Chapel, Duke Library, Duke Divinity School, and the Lilly Endowment. The collaboration has allowed for the digitization and preservation of over fifty years (1946–2002) of Duke Chapel’s sermonic treasures. The project’s goal is a pedagogical website named Living Tradition that curates the collection for use in homiletic classrooms far and wide. In other words, I am hearing Dr. Proctor’s sermon as digitized data in a computerized age, and his “hard questions” resonate. How will this archive be used—particularly in the classroom? Will it be used like the data he describes in his sermon: to regulate human behavior and remove contextual nuance? Jacqueline Jones Royster, a contemporary Afro-feminist rhetorician, notes her complicated relationship with rhetorical history given its “deeply entrenched habit of standing in one place (that is, in territories deemed Western)... and shaping inquiries with a particular set of interests