Oral History on Pneumatology December 6, 2013 (Transcription)

Abstract

As a professor at the Divinity School Turner has taught pneumatology courses every academic year since Dean Thomas Langford, over thirty years ago, appointed him to the faculty and bequeathed to him his own course on ‘The Person and Works of the Holy Spirit.’ This collection includes over two hundred recorded interview hours of Turner enumerating his pneumatological thought and applying it to aspects of everyday life. To this will be added recorded interviews of Turner rendering pneumatological commentary on several hundred pages of Duke archival documents from the presidency of John Kilgo through the desegregation era of the 1960s and early 1970s—letters, sermons, and papers from the hands of such notables as Robert Cushman, Waldo Beach, Thomas Langford, and Frederick Herzog and already collected from months of archival research. Turner’s commentary illustrates how pneumatology can be taken into the historical archives for a particular ‘inner read’ of history that suggests ways the Spirit can be freshly tapped to heal strife and reshape everyday life.