Abstract
The Practices of Christian Preaching: Essentials for Effective Proclamation
by Jared E. Alcántara
Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019. 224 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-8010-9867-3.
Leading homiletician Jared Alcántara offers a practice-centered, collaborative, technologically innovative, next-generation introductory preaching textbook. The book breaks new ground by adopting a practice-based approach to teaching preaching and by using innovative technological delivery to enhance the educational experience of learners. Alcántara introduces the basics of Christian preaching and emphasizes the skills preachers must cultivate throughout their lives. He shows that preachers can learn effective preaching by paying keen attention to five key competencies: conviction, context, clarity, concreteness, and creativity. Featuring the perspectives of a diverse team of collaborators, the volume is designed to prepare effective communicators for the church’s multicultural future.
Sunday’s Sermon for Monday’s World: Preaching to Shape Daring Witness
by Sally A. Brown; foreword by Luke A. Powery
The Gospel and Our Culture Series. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. 216 pp. $19.99. ISBN 978-0-8028-7112-1.
What can preachers do to help congregants navigate everyday life with the courage, imagination, and savvy it takes to testify in action and word to God’s mercy and justice? Christianity’s witness depends on credible Christian lives carried out in ordinary settings of everyday life. This volume helps preachers design sermons that equip believers to act with improvisational, creative courage in the ordinary settings of their Monday-to-Saturday lives. It will inspire both preachers and those who listen to them to move from sanctuary to street, week after week, eager to discern and participate in the ongoing, redemptive work of God already underway.
Preaching in the Purple Zone: Ministry in the Red-Blue Divide
by Leah D. Schade
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 264 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-1-5381-1988-4.
This volume is a resource for helping the church understand the challenges facing parish pastors, while encouraging and equipping preachers to address the vital justice issues of our time. It provides practical instruction for navigating the hazards of prophetic preaching with tested strategies and prudent tactics grounded in biblical and theological foundations. Key to this endeavor is using a method of civil discourse called “deliberative dialogue” for finding common values among politically diverse parishioners. Unique to this book is instruction on using the sermon-dialogue-sermon process developed by the author that expands the pastor’s level of engagement on justice issues with parishioners beyond the single sermon. This book equips clergy to help their congregations respectfully engage in deliberation about “hot topics,” find the values that bind them together, and respond faithfully to God’s Word.
Preaching in/and the Borderlands
edited by J. Dwayne Howell and Charles L. Aaron Jr.
Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020. 188 pp. $24.00. ISBN 978-1-5326-6465-6.
What is to be the church’s response to the immigrant? Most immigrants in American society are seeking a better life. They are among the most vulnerable, possessing little and at the mercy of those they work for in the communities where they live. The essays in this book address issues for churches to consider as they seek to better understand how to respond to immigration. The book examines biblical, ethical, theological, and homiletical areas of the topic and includes contributions from experienced pastors, theologians, legal experts, and activists.
Preaching about Racism: A Guide for Faith Leaders
by Carolyn B. Helsel
Nashville: Chalice, 2018. 128 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-8272-3162-7.
In her first book, Anxious to Talk about It: Helping White Christians Talk Faithfully about Racism (Chalice, 2018), Carolyn Helsel addressed the anxiety White Christians experience around conversations about race. In this follow-up, she addresses the urgency of preaching about racism and provides strategies and a theoretical framework for crafting biblical and theological sermons that incorporate insights from social sciences and psychology. Helsel also identifies ten myths about racism that listeners may be carrying and responds to five potential objections pastors can face when choosing to preach about racism.
Preaching Black Lives (Matter)
edited by Gayle Fisher-Stewart
New York: Church Publishing, 2020. 304 pp. $22.95. ISBN 978-1-6406-5256-9.
This anthology asks, “What does it mean to be a church where Black lives matter?” Prophetic imagination would have us see a future in which all Christians would be free of the soul-warping belief and practice of racism. This collection of reflections (focused specifically on the Anglican Church and the Episcopal Church) is an incisive look into that future today. It explains why preaching about race is important in the elimination of racism in the church and society, and how preaching has the ability to transform hearts. Kelly Brown Douglas, Wilda Gafney, Charles Michael Livingston, Jr., and Gene Robinson are among the twenty-six contributors.
Preachers Dare: Speaking for God
by William H. Willimon
Nashville: Abingdon, 2020. 192 pp. $19.99. ISBN 978-1-7910-0805-5.
This volume, adapted from Will Willimon’s Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale, is inspired by a quote from Karl Barth. In a world in which sermons too often become hackneyed conventional wisdom or tame common sense, preachers dare to speak about the God who speaks to us as Jesus Christ. Willimon presents a bold theology of preaching, emphasizing it as a distinctively theological endeavor that begins with and is enabled by God. God speaks, preachers dare to speak the speech of God, and the church dares to listen. By moving from the biblical text to the contemporary context, preachers dare to speak up for God so that God might speak today. With fresh biblical insights, creativity and humor, Willimon gives preachers and congregations encouragement to speak with the God who has so graciously and effusively spoken to us.
Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith Far from Home
by Barbara Brown Taylor
Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2020. 256 pp. $25.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-664-26170-2.
From renowned, traveling preacher Barbara Brown Taylor comes a new collection of thirty-one sermons of faith, grace, and hope, delivered as a guest. Taylor finds that when you are the invited guest speaking of faith to people you do not know, one must seek common ground: exploring the central human experience. Full of Taylor’s astute observations on the Spirit and the state of the world, along with gentle wit, this collection will inspire readers as Brown explores faith in all its beauty and complexity.
Atonement: Jewish and Christian Origins
edited by Max Botner, Justin Harrison Duff, and Simon Dürr
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. 261 pp. $59.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8028-7668-3.
What is the historical basis for today’s atonement theology? Where did it come from, and how has it evolved throughout time? In this volume, renowned biblical scholars investigate the early manifestations of this core concept in ancient Jewish and Christian sources. Rather than imposing a particular view of atonement upon these texts, they let the texts speak for themselves so that the reader can truly understand atonement as it was variously conceived in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, and early Christian literature. The resulting diverse ideas mirror the manifold perspectives on atonement today. Martha Himmelfarb, Carol A. Newsom, and N. T. Wright are among the twelve contributors.
Ecotheology: A Christian Conversation
edited by Kiara A. Jorgenson and Alan G. Padgett; foreword by Katharine Hayhoe
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. 248 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-8028-7441-2.
How should Christians respond to the climate crisis and widespread pollution of earth’s shared commons, water, and air? How might Christian communities think about human responsibility to other living creatures? In roundtable format, Richard Bauckham, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Stephen Bouma-Prediger, and John F. Haught navigate the layers of what it means for humans to live in right relationship with earth’s lifesystems. After each contributor’s essay, the other three contributors issue a response, including points of disagreement and questions. These ecumenical conversations represent the diverse viewpoints of the contributors’ theological and practical commitments, exploring creation care through a variety of frameworks, including natural science, biblical studies, systematic theology, and Christian ethics.