Homiletic

This companion volume to Elements of Rite offers a methodical approach to the homily. It gives step-by-step instructions for preparing, constructing, and delivering a homily that not merely instructs but evangelizes.

Organic form theory of Romanticism helps writers, artists, and preachers free themselves from potentially limiting norms and rules of form. Organic Homiletic: Samuel T. Coleridge, Henry G. Davis, and the New Homiletic will inspire preachers to express their individual voices and create their own authentic forms by offering preachers innovative methods to creatively imitate, blend, and mix a wide variety of sermon forms. The book is a motivator for preachers to intuitively discover sermon content in the rhetorical context of a given preaching situation, and to develop that content utilizing organic form in the process of sermon preparation. Organic Homiletic is a must-read for seminarians, experienced preachers, creative writers, and artists - all those who seek to be fresh, authentic, creative, liberated, and organic.

Buttrick presents a complete homiletic that focuses on how sermons form in consciousness and how the language of preaching functions in the communal consciousness of a congregation. His "phenomenological" approach marks a sharp departure from older homiletics.

"The major shift in the study and practice of preaching in the 1970s and 1980s, labeled the New Homiletic, turned toward the hearer. The purpose of preaching focused less on persuasion and more on transformation, less on asserting religious truths and more on offering an experience of the gospel. Instead of viewing language as referential, its creative, evocative nature began to be emphasized. Thus homiletical strategies utilizing induction, celebration, story, narrative structures, and moves replaced a deductive, propositional approach to preaching. Now three-and-a-half decades after this shift began, preachers recognize that the homiletical landscape has continued to evolve in ways that influence how preaching ought to be done£for example, the rise of postmodernity, the decline of the mainline church, cultural pluralism, and biblical and theological illiteracy.Those considered to be the pillars of the New Homiletic £ David Buttrick, Fred Craddock, Eugene Lowry, Henry Mitchell, and Charles Rice £ discuss how to change their homiletical approach for a new day. Each of these distinguished scholars offers a lecture describing how his mind has changed, preaches a sermon reflecting these changes, and participates in a panel discussion with younger respondents" -- Publisher description.