Word: sermonic
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...noon Mass in the nursingschool dormitory of Boston College one Sunday this month, Father F. X. Shea let it be known that the subject of the sermon was pain. But instead of delivering a homily, he challenged his congregation of 27 students to explain what pain meant to them. "There's a lot to be gained in suffering, and a nurse can help a patient learn that," said one girl. "But does the God you believe in have a vested interest in pain, to make people grow by insights through pain?" challenged the priest. "We make most...
Traditionally, members of a congregation are a captive audience who can either doze off or walk out, but cannot talk back. Today, more and more U.S. clergymen are letting the people in the pew talk back by experimenting with "dialogue sermons" as an alternative to the pulpit monologue. One reason for this communal approach to the exposition of God's word is that today's educated congregations are unwilling to put up with authoritarian preaching that lacks the stamp of credibility. Advocates of the dialogue sermon point out that since industry, government and education have discovered the virtue...
Though the temperature was in the 90s, Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda was in the mood to deliver a sermon. On a dusty polo field in the copper city of Kitwe, Kaunda, who is the son of a Presbyterian preacher, warned last week of the perils of drunkenness and lack of discipline among workers...
...surely crazier than we realize." But he undercuts his own arguments by his hysterically hectoring tone. Christians, he writes, "made all the world a hell." He testifies he has seen scientists at work who are "corrupt, mindless, ignorant." In the end, his book induces only the normal long-sermon doze and the final dogged agreement that, yes, we're not as good as we should...
...rhetoric comes between the audience and the action. All that is on the sound track is the noise of what is happening -the tense silence of a patrol exploding into a racketing firefight, the terrible pleadings of wounded men, the ominous urgency of a chaplain's sermon about death. The men of Mike Company are not identified by name until the epilogue; by that time many of them have already established their personalities by what they...