Persuade Us To Rejoice

Studying such literary figures as Frederick Buechner, Albert Camus, George Dennison, Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, Alan Paton, Ignazio Silone, Alice Walker, Elie Wiesel, and Charles Williams, Robert McAfee Brown illustrates "the liberating power of fiction" by enabling the reader to enter their worlds. Brown asserts that although there is no faith that offers ironclad guarantees against future struggles, the wisdom of these authors can help us toward praising and rejoicing.

Travel with revered preacher and author Fred Craddock through his early years as he considers what made him take to the pulpit. ?For some reason, I felt I had to say ?Yes? or ?No? to the ministry so I could feel free again. My siblings and friends talked almost casually about options and preferences as to careers, but with no evident sense of urgency. Not so with me. I did not then nor do I now know whether the burden of choice was a trait of personality, a kind of super-conscientiousness, whether the calling to ministry itself carried a weight, a burden, peculiar to the task itself. Rightly or wrongly, when I thought of possibly becoming a journalist, that would be a choice, 100 percent mine. When I considered becoming a minister, that was not totally my decision; I was responding to God?s will for me. Of course, I had been told that journalists, lawyers, teachers, merchants, farmers?all could understand their lives as a vocation, a calling, but what I am telling you is that I perceived, I felt, I experienced the idea of being a preacher as different, and that difference was sobering, even burdensome. That?s why advice about not being in a hurry, taking my time, was not helpful even if wise. If it was my decision, why could I not make it now; if it was God?s decision, why did not God tell me, or at least tell my father or my mother? I prayed for the ache to leave me.? ?Excerpt from Reflections on My Call to Preach

A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.

Davis demonstrates that the activities of biblical interpretation and preaching are essentially related as arts and, in fact, as the arts most fundamental to the life of the church.

Burning Center, Porous Borders articulates what the church is and is called to be about in the world, a world now globalized to the point that the local is lived globally and the global is lived locally. The church must respond creatively and prophetically to the challenges-economic disparity, war and terrorism, diaspora, ecological threat, health crisis, religious diversity, and so on-posed by our highly globalized world. It can do so only if the church's spiritual center burns mightily. Conversely, it can burn mightily in the spirit of Christ only if its borders are porous and allows the fresh air/spirit of change to blow in and out. While there is much rhetoric about change, the most common response to change is to continue doing business as usual. This is particularly the case in the face of perceived global threats. In spite of the hoopla and euphoria of the global village, walls of division and exclusion are rising, hearts are constricting, and moral imagination shrinking. In response to this context, Burning Center, Porous Borders proposes alternative ways or images of being a church: burning center and porous borders, wall-buster and bridge-builder, translocal (glocal), mending-healer, radical hospitality, community of the earth-spirit, household of life abundant, dialogians of life, and community of hope. In Burning Center, Porous Borders congregational vitality and progressive praxis kiss and embrace!

Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended. How Words Make Things Happen suggests that the conventional idea of persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker's control of calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy (which assumes that 'poetry makes nothing happen') together have produced a misleading account of the relations between words and human action. Words do make things happen. But they cannot be counted on to produce the result they intend. This volume studies examples from a range of speakers and writers and offers close readings of their words. Chapter 1 considers the theory of speech-acts propounded by J.L. Austin. 'Speakers Who Convince Themselves' is the subject of chapter 2, which interprets two soliloquies by Shakespeare's characters and two by Milton's Satan. The oratory of Burke and Lincoln come in for extended treatment in chapter 3, while chapter 4 looks at the rival tendencies of moral suasion and aestheticism in the poetry of Yeats and Auden. The final chapter, a cause of controversy when first published in the London Review of Books, supports a policy of unrestricted free speech against contemporary proposals of censorship. Since we cannot know what our own words are going to do, we have no standing to justify the banishment of one set of words in favour of another.

Through detailed considerations of poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, Edward Lear, Yeats, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Paul Muldoon, along with sustained meditations on question-forms in poems, the role of fact in fictions, the nature of literary value, speech acts and performative utterances issued by poets, the book sets out a fresh model for relationships between poetry, poets, and readers - one which allows the historical fact of poems having made things happen to be itself happening."--Jacket.