Buck Kester's vigorous style outdoes his successor
Neale compares her father's tenure at the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen to that of his successor. Her father's style was more dramatic, less intellectual, and better connected to southerners in need.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Nancy Kester Neale, August 6, 1983. Interview F-0036. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- DALLAS BLANCHARD:
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Back to the fellowship itself, what do you see as the differences of the
fellowship under your father as compaired to under Nell?
- NANCY KESTER NEALE:
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Again, I was not immediately involved very direct. I was off in my own
direction at the time. My sense of that is the difference in style.
Again that was the more intellectual group, or intellectualizing group.
They had not been out in the corn fields so much or been threatened with
guns or ropes. And that sort of did things once they had experienced it,
or had not lost their pulpits at that point, which a number of people
had. But it was a little bit more intellectual style, a little bit less
of a fervor I think and drive. But then early on the organizaitonal
development you need that kind of drive. So I don't know that
it was inappropiate or less useful for the life of the organization at
that time. It was different. It was real different. For me being used to
and confortable with the old style with a lot of preachers and a lot of
vim and vigor and a lot of lay people who were conserned and interested
and active and groups who would get into it from the south, it seemed
kind of a cooling off period to me. But that could have been just simply
somehow a group that sort of distanced themselves a little bit or seemed
a little more distant. But that is just an impression I got.