Sacred Rhetoric

Description: Modern approaches to preaching today are largely fixated on how-tos--how to make preaching more relevant more interesting more entertaining. Michael Pasquarello suggests that this fixation may stem from a preaching imagination more beholden to technical scientific reason than theological wisdom. Rather than devising new techniques or strategies for effective speaking Pasquarello offers something more salutary--portraits of ten exemplary preachers from the Christian tradition. Included in Pasquarellos gallery are Augustine of Hippo Gregory the Great Benedict Bernard of Clairvaux Bonaventure Thomas Aquinas Erasmus Hugh Latimer Martin Luther and John Calvin. These excellent preachers conceived of Christian speech as a unique theological practice learned through prayerful attention to the Bible and aimed at communion with God. Sacred Rhetoric invites readers to join an extended conversation with the past in order to become faithful preachers of the gospel in a post-Christian society. Preachers seminarians and students of Christian history will find much to learn from Pasquarellos fresh perspective and passion for the past. Endorsements: Mike Pasquarello is concerned about the crisis in preaching. Refreshingly he does not merely carp about the cancer and then suggest the application of rhetorical bandages. In this bold book he cuts to the core of the problem demonstrating how theology and proclamation have been rent apart by centuries of modernistic habit. The conversation that Pasquarello initiates here does two things: it offers the reader historic models whose wisdom will inform and restore preaching to its theological home and it establishes the author as a leading voice in postmodern homiletic thought. --Clayton J. Schmit Fuller Theological Seminary About the Contributor(s): Michael Pasquarello III (PhD University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) is Granger E. and Anna A. Fisher Professor of Preaching at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is the author of Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation.