Abstract
In Women’s Voices and the Practice of Preaching, Nancy Lammers Gross addresses women’s difficulty in claiming their preaching voice. Lammers Gross, who teaches speech communication at Princeton Theological Seminary, explores the relationship between the physical speaking voice and voice in the metaphorical sense of the unique perspective of each speaker and her authority to communicate it (she labels this, “Voice”). Women become unable to use their physical voice effectively when their Voice has been silenced. Since the voice belongs to the whole body, women’s difficulty in claiming their voices often stems from disconnection from their bodies, brought about by cultural pressures or from physical and sexual abuse.
Lammers Gross launches her argument by analyzing the story of Miriam in Hebrew Scripture. She then recounts various stories, including her own, of women losing and gaining their voices. These narratives buttress her insistence that women must “bring forth [their] bodies to the service of proclaiming the good news … bring forth [their] whole selves to the people of God” (85). Chapter 5 offers a set of physical exercises designed to assist women in bringing forth their full selves, body and soul, to the preaching task. The final chapter explores an oral interpretation of the raising of Lazarus, in which Lammers Gross shows how attending to the voices of women in this text affects the interpretation and hence the preaching of this passage.
In this historical moment, when allegations of sexual abuse and the silencing of women abound, this book is particularly timely and necessary. Its description of the various ways that women lose their Voice is insightful, making the crucial point that this struggle is not a matter of personal failure, but rather is the result of systemic injustice. Even more empowering and helpful are the practical remedies found in the closing chapters of the book. The exercises in physical awareness and freeing the breath are accessible and effective tools for cultivating the engagement of the voice as a “full-body instrument” (101). Likewise, practices in the oral interpretation of Scripture show readers how to bring the fullness of embodied emotion to the reading of a biblical text and in doing so to unlock its meaning on a deeper level than a purely intellectual reading can provide. In these final chapters Lammers Gross is at her strongest, offering practices that are rooted in years of teaching experience and that have the authority and usefulness that derive from this experience.
The strengths of this book are somewhat offset by a few puzzling aspects of Lammers Gross’s argument. Using Miriam as a positive example of women claiming their Voice is peculiar, since in one key narrative she is punished and silenced for doing so. When she and Aaron ask the question, “Has God spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (Num. 12:2), she is stricken with leprosy, precisely for insisting that she too has a prophetic Voice. Miriam’s story as one that grants permission for women to speak seems ambiguous at best. Lammers Gross also makes an odd choice in her descriptions of women who have wrestled to find their voices. She offers sketches of three white women, based on actual students she has had, and presents lengthy testimonies from them in their own words; she then presents a sketch of a Korean woman and an African American woman that are composites, which she calls “historical fiction” (19). These sketches are less textured and convincing than those of the white women, in part because, since they present composites rather than specific individuals, we do not hear the women’s actual words. This authorial strategy has the inadvertent and paradoxical effect of contributing to the silencing of women of color and their particular struggles to claim their voices.
Despite these minor flaws, the importance and value of Lammers Gross’s project is indisputable. Her insistence that women’s voices are often silenced in preaching is a point that cannot be too often made. Her argument that the silencing of women is lodged in their bodies, such that the freedom of their voices must also be found there, breaks new ground in the homiletical literature and is practically helpful. It is evident from this book that Lammers Gross is a gifted teacher; in this volume she expands the walls of her classroom, thus giving the gift of her wisdom to the countless women who have struggled to claim their preaching Voice and voice.