The Homiletical Plot

An enthralling introduction to the art of preaching, or more specifically, how to tell the story. This delightful book is an excellent teaching resource and learning tool for all pastors from beginning students to seasoned pulpiteers.

Now in reissue with a new foreword by Fred B. Craddock and afterword by the author, Eugene L. Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, Expanded Edition follows in the same solid tradition of its predecessor. Upon its release, The Homiletical Plot quickly became a pivotal work on the art of preaching. Instead of comments on a biblical passage, Lowry suggested that the sermon follow a narrative form that moves from beginning to end, as with the plot of a story. This expanded edition continues to be an excellent teaching resource and learning tool for all preachers from introductory students to seasoned clergy.

Promoting the idea of sermon as narrative, Eugene Lowry's first book, The Homiletical Plot, became one of the most influential preaching books of the latter part of the 20th century. While the sermon as narrative has become conventional preaching wisdom, it is largely misunderstood. Sermons are, by definition, narratives and as such, they have plots. At the same time, the sermon is not a story. While similar in many ways, narratives and stories are distinct. Therefore, to think of narrative preaching as merely one of many homiletical styles is to misunderstand and reduce the nature of the sermon. The sermon is more than just an option for the preacher; rather, it is, by definition, a narrative because it happens in time, not in space. This changes everything because the sermon ceases to be something a preacher constructs, like a thesis or even a painting. Instead, it is more like a piece of music - something a preacher plays within intuitively, to a constant beat - time after time, week after week. In light of this revelation, what are new strategic aims for sermon preparation and delivery?

Illustrated throughout, this is a practical dip-in guide to the key elements of preaching. Preacher's A-Z is a guide to the elements of preaching. It provides ideas and essentials that a preacher needs before stepping up to the lectern.

There is often an unfortunate division between the technical work of biblical scholars and the practical work of preachers who construct sermons each week. These two fields of study, which ought to be mutually informed and supportive, are more often practically divided by divergent methods, interests, and goals. Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching aims to bridge that divide. Using narrative as an organizing theme, the contributors work through the New Testament offering examples of how interpretation can rightly inform proclamation. Three pairs of chapters feature an exemplary reading by a New Testament scholar followed by a sermon informed by that reading. Introductory and concluding chapters provide guidance for application of the model. Pastors and seminarians will find here a uniquely practical work that will help them with both the reading and preaching of Scripture.

The post liberal, cultural-linguistic theology of the Yale School has been one of the most important theological developments in the United States during the latter twentieth century. In this unique book, which combines theological analysis and homiletical reflection,Charles Campbell examines post liberal theology as it is embodied in the work of Hans Frei and develops the implications of this theological position for the theory and practice of preaching. Arguing that the trouble with homiletics today is fundamentally theological, Campbell offers Frei's theological position as a means for enriching the Christian pulpit and renewing the church.

""One of our most original social thinkers,"" according to the New York Times, Robert Nisbet offers a new approach to sociology. He shows that sociology is indeed an art form, one that has a strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, the age in which sociology came into full stature. Sociology as an Art Form is an introduction for the initiated and the uninitiated in so-ciology.Nisbet explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles (rooted in history), and actual modes of representa-tion found in the arts. He shows how the founding sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel constructed portraits (of the bourgeois, the worker, and the intellectual) and landscapes (of the masses, the poor, the factory system), all reflecting and contribut-ing to identical portraits and landscapes found in the literature and art of the period. In addition to marking the similarities between sociologists' and artists' efforts to depict motion or movement, Nisbet emphasizes the relation of sociology to the fin de siecle in art and literature, with examples such as alienation, anomie, and degeneration. He creates an elegant, brilliantly reasoned appraisal of sociology's contribution to modern culture.This book will be of interest to sociologists, artists, and anyone interested in how the fields relate to one another.