Pike’s Chapel Talks

What's in the collection?

The collection presented here contains 480 items from the "chapel talks" subset of the Pike Special Collection. They span more than five decades of his career. In 110 cases, the item includes a recording and a full transcript. A further 249 provide complete talks (166 with transcript only and 83 with recording only). In the remaining cases, there is only a partial transcript or the notes for a talk—either type-written or in Dr. Pike's inscrutable handwriting.

The collected letters, addresses, and papers of Ken Pike are held as a special collection in the SIL International Language and Culture Archives in Dallas, Texas. A full description of the holdings is found on the SIL website: Pike Special Collection. Due to the personal nature of much of the material, access to the entire collection is restricted and by appointment only. However, this subset of the materials—his chapel talks—was performed before a general SIL audience or a church audience and thus we now make them accessible to that same audience.

Finding an item in the collection

The items are stored in a hierarchy of Google Drive folders organized by decade and year. Click on one of the folders to the right to see the year folders for that decade, or click on the link below the index box to open the top-level folder. Within the folder for a year, you will find all the items for that year listed in chronological order. Each file name begins with the date in YYYY-MM-DD format.

Browsing the collection

There are four finding aids to make it easier for you to browse the collection.

Consult the Alphabetical Listing for a complete list of the talks that are available; they are listed by alphabetical order of title. If there is a page count in the penultimate column, that means there is a PDF document for the talk; the Transcript column indicates whether it is a Complete transcription, a Partial transcription, a set of type-written Notes for a talk, or just Hand-written notes. If there is a duration in the final column, then there is an MP3 recording of the talk. The date in the first column is the key to finding the files. To find a file, click on the folder for the right decade to open it. Then open the right year and you will find the files listed in date order.

Consult the Category Listing for a complete list of the talks listed by category. It has the same columns as the above listing, except that the listing is sorted first by Category and then by Date within each category. The categories are as follows:

• • Chapel — A one-off chapel talk to an SIL audience

  • Chapel series — One of the chapel talks given at the Oklahoma SIL as part of Pike's recurring series of chapel talks

• Church group — A talk or sermon given to a church group

• College group — A talk given to a college group

• History — A talk about the history of SIL and Wycliffe or given on a historic occasion

• Paper — An essay or a working paper not identified as a talk

• Report — A report about a trip

• Technical — An academic presentation of lecture. (A few of these slipped in; we can add more if there is interest.)

Consult the Chronological Listing for a complete list of the talks listed in chronological order. The columns and instructions are as above.

Consult the Index by Scripture References to see if Pike had something to say about a particular passage. Compilation of this index is still in progress. It is complete through 1963. For 1964 and beyond, the only Scripture references that have been indexed so far are the ones named in the Title.

Searching the collection

In theory, the collection is searchable (both for words in document titles and for words within the PDF documents) using the Google search box with the Location set to "Pike's Chapel Talks". (Click the down arrow at the end of the folder name in the breadcrumbs and select "Search within Pike's Chapel Talks".) While this works well for the Owner of the files, the results for non-Owners leave out most of the results. We are trying to discover how to fix this. If search is not finding files that you know should match, you can at least simulate a search within titles by opening the Chronological Listing or the Alphabetical Listing and searching within it.

Acknowledgments

Our deepest thanks go to Vurnell Cobbey, curator of the Pike Special Collection, who has spent many years compiling and organizing the Pike materials. This online collection of the chapel talks, would not be a reality without the further contributions of Bob Chaney, Heidi Coombs, Linda Simons, and Joan Spanne.