Is It a Sermon?

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)><em>Is It a Sermon?</em> is an informative and daring call to blur the boundaries of the sermon genre exploring the shoreline of homiletics or the place where preaching laps up against other modes of discourse.</strong></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In this book Donyelle McCray explores how preaching merges with prayer song performance and activism-the gospel dancing in and out of the forms we create for it. Consider the sermonic performance of Isaiah walking naked and barefoot for three years the deaconess whose morning prayer rhythmically flows into sermon or the gospel soloist who pauses in her song to tell a story or break into a sermonette. McCray is interested in the possibilities that emerge when we play at the shoreline and she questions what modes of preaching get overlooked due to genre classifications. She seeks to discover what we might learn from these shoreline preachers about bearing witness enacting Scripture and listening to life. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>While these questions could be explored generally McCray focuses on African American preachers who play at the boundaries of the sermon genre with attention to how genre fluidity provides a means of drawing on ancestral wisdom. Key figures like Mahalia Jackson Harriet Powers Rosie Lee Tomkins Thea Bowman Howard Thurman and Toni Morrison are examined as artists activists and proclaimers. She shines a new light on their work and points out how they reform preacherly identities and refuse traditional patterns of holding authority. Ultimately in blurring the boundaries of sermon genre this book offers readers strategies for embracing their voices more fully within and beyond the pulpit.</span></p><p><br></p>