Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric

Description

"If you ain't got no proposition, you ain't got no sermon neither." This was the battle cry of Isaac Rufus Clark, one of the most influential and colorful professors of homiletics in the black church in the twentieth century. Clark taught at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta for twenty-seven years (1962-1989). In Teaching Preaching, Katie Cannon, one of Clark's myriad preaching proteges, conceives her role as purely "presentational": "to bring Clark face to face with a reading audience, allow him to explain the formal elements of preaching from the inside out." Teaching Preaching is an invaluable resource for ministers who struggle from Sunday to Sunday to find their ethical voice in the preparation of each and every sermon.

Katie G. Cannon is Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia. She is the author of Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community.

"Clark waged a one-person war against all those students and others who took a cavalier, uncaring and sloppy attitude toward their preaching or other forms of communication. His forte was clear, precise, cogent, organized and prophetic utterance. Other than this was an abomination. He felt so deeply on this subject because of his deep love for the Saints, the beloved people of God. Therefore, a sermon for him needed to be an offering acceptable to God, no less acceptable than the most adequate gift of our time, our energy, our imagination, and our financial resources."--James H. Costen, former president of Interdenominational Theological Center "Teaching Preaching is a creative, fresh approach to teaching and learning preaching from a perspective that integrates the Word of God with everyday challenges and opportunities...I encourage you to read Teaching Preaching, and be informed and transformed, and become more effective in the preaching effort. If you are not a preacher, this book will help you to learn the what, how, and why of listening to a sermon." -Lonnie J. Oliver, The Presbyterian Outlook "This book is as much about how to live as how to preach. Clark taught his students to hammer out a sermon filled with substantive content born of theological reflection on God and the human predicament.: -- Interpretation, April 2009 -- Cleophus J. LaRue * Interpretation * "Clark's case for tight, linear movement and theological and rhetorical focus is as good as anything I have seen. The book not only documents a bygone era with lasting effects in African American preaching, it also speaks compellingly and broadly to new-era preachers. An ecumenical group of twenty-three doctor of ministry in preaching students at Aquinas Institute of Theology recently gave this book a high rating." - Teaching Theology & Religion, August 2005 * Teaching Theology and Religion *