Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2011
Publication Source
Sermons from Mind and Heart: Struggling to Preach Theologically
Abstract
One does not flip through a car manual and mistake it for poetry. Nor does one pick up the Sunday comics and mistake them for a Physicians' Desk Reference. That is because native speakers seldom make mistakes of genre when reading ordinary English texts. Yet pick up a collection of sermons, and one may feel at a loss: What is going on here? What am I to make of these sentences? What sort of genre is this? What am I, as a reader, to expect (or not to expect) from a sermon, especially from a printed sermon? Should I expect entertainment, like the comics? Instruction, like the car manual? Inspiration, like the poem? Information, like the Desk Reference?
Ordinary living is generally adequate for schooling readers for shifting effortlessly from novels to phone books to newspapers and back again. But unlike bygone eras inhabited by our grandparents and great-grandparents, ordinary living today may not sufficiently equip us to read sermons as sermons. Our aim in this foreword is to help you, the reader, to understand the genre of "sermon" in general and to locate this particular batch of sermons in the life of First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio, in the year 2010.
What, then, is a sermon? As tempting as it is to approach a sermon as one might an op-ed piece or a longish blog, we claim that it is mistaken to do so. A sermon is a performative speech act that brings an occasioned but ongoing conversation to bear upon a canonical text. This definition is only as clear as are its terms. So in this essay, let us unpack them one at a time.
Inclusive pages
xi-xix
ISBN/ISSN
978-1-61097-263-5
Document Version
Published Version
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, Rodney Wallace Kennedy.
Publisher
Wipf and Stock Publishers
Place of Publication
Eugene, OR
eCommons Citation
Kallenberg, Brad and Trollinger, William Vance, "Foreword to 'Sermons from Mind and Heart: Struggling to Preach Theologically'" (2011). Religious Studies Faculty Publications. 84.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub/84
Included in
Catholic Studies Commons, Christianity Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Other Religion Commons, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons
Comments
The foreword has been made available in this repository with the permission of the publisher; documentation of it is on file.
Citation information for the book: Kennedy, Rodney Wallace. Sermons from Mind and Heart: Struggling to Preach Theologically. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2011.