John S. McClure
Biography
John S. McClure is Charles G. Finney Professor Emeritus of Preaching and Worship at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where McClure previously held the Charles G. Finney Professorship of Homiletics and has chaired the Graduate Department of Religion. McClure also previously served as president of the Academy of Homiletics. McClure wrote Ethical Approaches to Preaching (2021) and edited Learning Together to Preach (2023) and Under the Oak Tree (2013).
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Preaching & Worship
“Sarah Travis offers two great gifts to preachers. First, she makes us aware of an insidious colonial entanglement within much of our preaching. Second, she provides us with the theological resources to free our preaching from this colonial quagmire and preach with a genuinely postcolonial imagination. Her tone throughout is both hopeful and helpful. The result is a wonderful new resource for all preachers.”
Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit
Discipleship & Christian Education
“In each of his long-awaited lectures on Christian education, Loder’s vital and complex theology challenges approaches to education that can destroy the redemptive powers of the human spirit. The reader is shown how ministry in the ‘logic of the Spirit’ can restore these redemptive powers to the center of educational process in what is nothing short of a dramatic paradigm-shift in educational theory, vocation, and practice.”
Preaching & Worship
“In Feminine Registers, Jennifer Copeland manages to transcend essentialist models of gender to create a deeply relational and communicative approach to feminist preaching. Copeland situates gender in the midst of complex relationships and expectations within communities and asks how the 'field' (content/context), 'tone' (roles and relationships), and 'mode' (embodiment, implementation), conspire together to create a distinctively feminist 'register.' This promises to become one of a handful of important books on feminist homiletical method.”
Preaching & Worship
“In Her Preaching Body, Amy McCullough attends closely to forms of embodied agency through which women assert difference, uniqueness, and particularity-to-situations. While attending to gender, her study is not focused exclusively on questions of gender, but on how bodies involved in ritual process function in excess of signification, representation, and construction. As a result, she is able to show us how the body at worship knows both itself and God, and habituates that knowing.”
Preaching & Worship
“In this smart and readable book, Snider does the spadework for a theology of preaching after the death of the Christian God shaped by Western metaphysics. Influenced by John Caputo's reading of Derrida, Snider discovers a constructive homiletic emerging from the ashes of philosophical deconstruction . . . His relentlessly positive approach to Derrida is refreshing, and his homiletical ideas encourage a fundamental rethinking of both our reasons for preaching and the messages we preach.”
Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art
Preaching & Worship
“Leonora Tubbs Tisdale presents us with a useful way to 'exegete' congregations and a striking new image of preaching as 'folk art.' She teaches us how to listen deeply for a congregation's operative theology. Then she shows us how to preach sermons that respond to and shape this theology.”
Preaching in/and the Borderlands
Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
“We have needed this book for a long time, and finally it has arrived. All of these essays are thoughtful and inspiring, helping religious leaders and preachers become creative interpreters of biblical texts, genuinely hospitable church leaders, informed educators of those who need to think more wisely and justly, and engaged witnesses against intertwined systems of injustice. Strongly recommended!”
Preaching & Worship
“Preaching Must Die! is a crucial addition to the conversation about postmodernity and preaching. Myers deconstructs modern preaching’s linguistic, metaphysical, political, and theological assumptions and observes vital signs of a ‘bold humility’ through which preaching might be resurrected in the pluralistic and postmodern context we have now entered.”
Talking About God When People Are Afraid
Preaching & Worship
“The reader of this book is swept up into the story and sermons of a group of socially conscious and theologically thoughtful preachers rethinking their practice of preaching from the inside-out. This book is one of those rare gems that takes us into a distinctly creative moment in the history of preaching, through the autobiographical lens of an eyewitness and participant observer. Reading it gives the impression that a missing link has been chronicled in the evolution of genuinely contextual and dialogical preaching.”
Preaching & Worship
“Elegantly written and gently persuasive, this book is essential reading for preachers who want to embody more genuinely relational forms of preaching and ministry.”
Biblical Studies & Commentaries
“Preachers have needed a book like this for years, and at last here it is! The first element in any preaching process is getting acquainted with the book from which the preacher’s text is taken. Now this process can be streamlined each week, allowing the preacher to move more quickly to the particulars of the text at hand. Top scholars have been recruited for this task, and the results are not only useful but inspiring.”
Preaching & Worship
“Marianne Gaarden’s groundbreaking ethnographic work shows how sermons function less as acts of information-transmission than as facilitators of an inner experience of meaning-making. Sermon listeners take fragments of the sermon they hear and carry them off into a ‘third room’ of internal dialogue. This a very important book for what it reveals about the individual sermon-reception process.”
Theologies of the Gospel in Context
Preaching & Worship
“This third volume in the important The Promise of Homiletical Theology series brings together a group of outstanding interpreters of contexts and situations in order to broaden and deepen our understanding of the theological nature of preaching. The result is a new and vital awareness of the expansive scene in which preachers are called upon to name the reality of 'gospel' in today's world.”
Toward a Homiletical Theology of Promise
Preaching & Worship
“Each chapter of this compelling book teaches a vital aspect of the promissory nature of preaching: as a lure to new forms of human dwelling and action, as a unique way of liturgically embodying eschatology, as a key to homiletical genre, as God’s unique way of acting and speaking in sermons, and as the way preaching becomes provisional good news in difficult situations. Highly recommended for all serious students of preaching.”
You Never Step into the Same Pulpit Twice
Preaching & Worship
“How can we best understand God’s relation to the world in an age of modern science and the involuntary suffering caused by pandemics, global warming, and violence? Allen invites the reader into his personal and scholarly journey to find a way to preach that brings the God of the Bible into the deepest possible interaction with the actual realities of the world today. This is an original, timely, and elegantly written book.”
Your God is Alive and Well and Appearing in Popular Culture
Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
“John Nelson brings first-rate theological scholarship to bear on American popular culture, unpacking operative belief systems in a way that is bound to stimulate the imagination of the working preacher.”
Preaching & Worship
“In this first-rate piece of homiletical scholarship, Richard Voelz argues against a constricting, stereotypical approach to the ways in which youth both produce and receive preaching. In its place he develops a compelling vision of churches and theological institutions acting together to both liberate and form young people as communicators of the gospel.”
NOTE: Only includes books currently in our catalog; not necessarily a complete list.
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