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Colonialism and imperialism continue to impact the personal and social identities of North American preachers and listeners. In Decolonizing Preaching, Sarah Travis argues that sermons have a role in shaping the identity and ethics of listeners by helping them formulate responses to empire and colonization. Travis employs postcolonial theories to provide important insights for the practice of preaching today. She also turns to the social doctrine of the Trinity to offer a vision of the divine/human community that effectively deconstructs colonizing discourse. This book offers preachers and other practical theologians a gentle introduction to colonial history, postcolonial theories, and Social Trinitarian theology, while equipping them with tools to decolonize preaching and strategies for preventing, resisting, and responding to colonizing discourse. Travis effectively casts a vision of a "perichoretic space" in which preacher and listener encounter the living God-in-Trinity and are transformed, reconciled, and sent out to others in the church and beyond.
The real question for homiletics in our increasingly postmodern, post-Christian contexts is not how we are going to prevent preaching from dying, but how we are going to help it die a good death. Preaching was not made to live. At most, preaching is a witness, a sign, a crimson X marking a demolition site. The church has developed sophisticated technologies in modernity to give preaching the semblance of life, belying the truth: preaching was born under a death sentence. It was born to die. Only when preaching embraces its own death is it able to live. This book, then, is a bold homiletical manifesto against preaching in support of preaching, and beyond preaching to the entire worship experience. It troubles modern homiletical theologies in light of the trouble always already at work within preaching. Hereby, it supports a way of preaching--and teaching preaching--that moves counter to the "wisdom of this world." It aims to joins in God‘s self-revealed counterlogic of superabundance that saturates and thereby breaks open worldly systems of thought and practice. The purpose of this book is to expose preaching to its own death-to help it embrace its death-so that it can discover what eternal and abundant life might look and feels like.
Preaching the Manifold Grace of God is a two-volume work describing theologies of preaching from the historical and contemporary periods. Volume 1 focuses on historical theological families: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Anglican/Episcopal, Wesleyan, Baptist, African American, Stone-Campbell, Friends, and Pentecostal. Volume 2 focuses on families that are evangelical, liberal, neo-orthodox, postliberal, existential, radical orthodox, deconstructionist, Black liberation, womanist, Latinx liberation, Mujerista, Asian American, Asian American feminist, LGBTQAI, Indigenous, postcolonial, and process. In each case, the author describes the circumstances in which the theological family emerged, describes the purposes and characteristics of preaching from that perspective, and assesses the strengths and limitations of the approach.
This book examines the impact of white racialization in homiletics. The first section, Racial Hegemony, interrogates the white, colonial bias of Euro-American homiletical practice, pedagogy, and theory with particular attention to the intersection of preaching and racialization. The second section, Resistance and Possibilities, contributes diverse critical homiletical approaches emerging in conversation with racially-minoritized scholarship and racially subjugated knowledge and practice. By reading this book, preachers and professors of preaching will encounter alternative, non-dominant homiletical pathways toward a more just future for the church and the world.
Teaching preaching, like preaching itself, is a noble endeavor. After nearly four decades of teaching, Richard Lischer has sent legions of preachers across the world to preach gospel. This volume pays tribute to his faith-filled life of preaching and teaching. The contributors, some of whom were taught by Lischer, have received many laurels themselves, so readers will find in these pages wisdom for preaching from many quarters. Some authors include sermons with helpful commentary about the preaching exercise; some offer essays to illuminate the task of sermon writing; all acknowledge the influence of Richard Lischer on their preaching and teaching endeavors.
What if adolescents aren't bored with preaching? What if they have and are interacting with preaching in complex, various ways that have escaped the attention of adult listeners and preachers? What if their own preaching informed the ways adults think about Christian faith and theories/practices of preaching? While much recent discussion in preaching revolves around underrepresented groups, the relationship between adolescent youth and preaching remains largely unexplored. Youthful Preaching brings youth into contemporary conversations about preaching by listening to their voices and by advocating for communities of faith and practice to seek ways to reimagine, renew, and strengthen the relationships between youth, adults, and preaching.
How can postcolonial approaches make a difference in preaching Jesus? The many postcolonial approaches used in this book will help preachers reinterpret the stories, metaphors, and characters in the Bible and create new images of Jesus rooted in his historical identity as a colonized person. Preaching Jesus with new images that are totally different from the traditional colonial ones, not only challenges listeners to reconsider their individual and communal identities as followers of Jesus, but also provides them with theological and ethical guidance for living out those identities in daily life. Ultimately, preaching Jesus through postcolonial approaches is a prophetic ministry that awakens listeners and their communities to seek reconciliation between colonized and colonizers, and suggests a common ground of faith and hope for the life-enhancing future of all people living in the twenty-first century. The five chapters of this book employ diverse postcolonial hermeneutical and homiletical methods across a broad disciplinary spectrum. This range includes intersectional and interdisciplinary studies with historical, literary, and cultural approaches, in dialogue with phenomenological philosophy, a postcolonial practical theological method, postcolonial feminist interpretation, postcolonial biblical hermeneutics, and postcolonial intertextuality. All these approaches invite the colonized and their descendants to be conversation partners and reflect their lived experiences in the reimagining the identity of Jesus. Moreover, the theological and homiletical insights gained through such postcolonial approaches will help preachers invite their listeners into a partnership with the triune God in order to participate in God’s reconciling work. The postcolonial approaches used in this book contest the dominance of traditional assumptions and practices of preaching Jesus, and propose a new homiletical paradigm that makes it possible for Christian preaching to contribute to the transformation of our present world into a life lived together in justice and peace, with the new images of Jesus as postcolonial self, postcolonial song, postcolonial child, postcolonial body, and postcolonial friend.
Why is preaching so often bad? Why is worship so often dull? Why do Sunday mornings so often fail to help the folks in the pews live a faithful life from week to week? And what can be done about it? Many will tell us that there are easy and purchasable fixes. More technology. Less tradition. Virtual worship. Thinking big. The land and the farm model for us a different path. As Mark Rigg shows in this concise introduction to Wendell Berry, the themes that have illuminated the Kentucky farmer’s essays, fiction, and poetry for fifty years have a great deal to say to the church. They offer an agrarian model of church where the focus is on the local, the tangible, and the communal. Out of such a model emerges a new approach to preaching. Both congregation members and preachers themselves will find themselves called to turn away from sermons that echo the promises of an individualistic consumer culture and to proclaim instead Jesus Christ in the midst of the local community.
Few vocations share more in common with preaching than stand-up comedy. Each profession demands attention to the speaker’s bodily and facial gestures, tone and inflection, timing, and thoughtful engagement with contemporary contexts. Furthermore, both preaching and stand-up arise out of creative tension with homiletic or comedic traditions, respectively. Every time the preacher steps into the pulpit or the comedian steps onto the stage, they must measure their words and gestures against their audience’s expectations and assumptions. They participate in a kind of dance that is at once choreographed and open to improvisation. It is these and similar commonalities between preaching and stand-up comedy that this book engages. Stand-Up Preaching does not aim to help preachers tell better jokes. The focus of this book is far more expansive. Given the recent popularity of comedy specials, preachers have greater access to a broad array of emerging comics who showcase fresh comedic styles and variations on comedic traditions. Coupled with the perennial Def Comedy Jams on HBO, preachers also have ready access to the work of classic comics who have exhibited great storytelling and stage presence. This book will offer readers tools to discern what is homiletically significant in historical and contemporary stand-up routines, equipping them with fresh ways to riff off of their respective preaching traditions, and nuanced ways to engage issues of contemporary sociopolitical importance.
Preaching from Inside the Story is a book that seeks to carve out an understanding of narrative preaching in an age where there is little agreement about its nature and practice. Capitalizing on the works of Craddock and Lowry, it seeks to find an expanded palette upon which the preacher may engage the larger canvas of narrative preaching. This book will engage the mind by introducing neuroscientific understandings of creativity; build upon the foundations of the philosophy of stories by engaging Aristotle’s foundational understanding of narrative; and renew the Lowry Loop by expanding this seminal work and how it should be understood in our current culture. Preaching from Inside the Story breaks new ground by encouraging preachers to move inside stories and tell them from the inside out providing a positive effect, thereby affording non-narrative preachers to connect with storytelling principles. Ultimately, it is filled with examples of how to do narrative in a very practical way. However, in showing these practical examples, the reader is involved in a deep analysis of those narrative sermons and how they fit into an overall narrative understanding of preaching. In the final analysis, it invites the reader to take a fresh journey into narrative preaching.