African Americans write new hymn for Duke Chapel
3/27/2000 By United Methodist News Service Two distinguished African Americans have collaborated to write a hymn that was premiered Sunday, March 26, at the Duke University Chapel, Durham, N.C.
Commissioned by the chapel, "The Song of Reconciliation" was written by retired Duke professor C. Eric Lincoln and organist David Hurd of New York City's General Theological Seminary.
The hymn is the third to be commissioned by the Duke Chapel, but the first to feature a new text and tune. New hymns commissioned in 1988 and 1992 presented new lyrics sung to familiar tunes.
The commissioning was made possible by the Waldo Beach Hymnody Endowment, named after a professor emeritus of the Duke Divinity School and avid author and composer of hymns who resides in Durham. In addition to the new hymns, the Beach endowment has enabled the chapel to sponsor three hymn-writing competitions.
To create the new hymn, the ministers and musicians of Duke Chapel sought to team a well-known author with a well-known composer, according to David Arcus, the chapel's organist. Interested in themes stemming from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, the group considered it important to have two African-American writers collaborate on the project.
Lincoln is William Rand Kenan professor emeritus of religion and culture at Duke, a United Methodist-related university. He has received critical praise for his fiction writing and remains in demand as a guest speaker nearly seven years after stepping down from his faculty post. Lincoln is the author of several scholarly works, novels and poetry collections, and is considered a leading figure in the emergence of black church studies and the sociology of religion.
Hurd, a professor at the General Theological Seminary, has won international awards in organ performance and is in frequent demand as an organ recitalist. He also served briefly as organist at the Duke Chapel in the early 1970s.
Lincoln, who resides in Durham, said he enjoyed the back-and-forth collaboration with Hurd. He has written several hymns, one of which appears in the United Methodist Hymnal, but he said this was the first time he has collaborated with a composer by e-mail and telephone.
"I do it as a kind of hobby," Lincoln said of his hymn writing. "But this hymn was very important to me. I was trying to get people to reach across dichotomies, to reach across differences and to try to understand each other."
The second verse of the new hymn reflects that sense of hope and expectancy:
"Walls of hatred may divide us,
"Bitter fruits of sect and race,
"But the God who walks beside us
"Folds us all in one embrace.
"Let forgiveness be our prayer,
"Friend and foe will meet us there,
"Let us praise the Lord together, reconciled."
While the new hymn will inevitably be linked to King, its aim is beyond any single figure, Lincoln said.
"I have tried to write a universal sermon that doesn't just apply to King," he said. "It applies to all people of good will."
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*Information for this story was provided by Blake Dickinson of the Duke University News Service, (919) 668-6114.
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