Is It a Sermon?

Art, Activism, and Genre Fluidity in African American Preaching

Donyelle C McCray

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English

Westminster/John Knox Press,U.S.
08 October 2024

Christianity; Christian social thought & activity

Is It a Sermon? 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.

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.

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.

By: Donyelle C McCray
Imprint: Westminster/John Knox Press,U.S.
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 10mm
Weight: 254g
ISBN: 9780664266875
ISBN 10: 0664266878
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 08 October 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Donyelle C. McCray is Associate Professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School. Her scholarship focuses on the ways African American women and laypeople use sermons to play, remember, invent, and disrupt. She is the author of The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher, co-author of A Surprising God: Advent Devotions for an Uncertain Time, and is researching the preaching and spirituality of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. In a forthcoming documentary film and transmedia project, she collaborates with artists on theological responses to gentrification. Before becoming a homiletics professor, McCray served as an estate planning attorney. Existential questions emerged that led her to seminary and to ministry as a hospice chaplain. Consolation, compassion, and interdependence continue to be core themes in her scholarship.

Reviews for Is It a Sermon?: Art, Activism, and Genre Fluidity in African American Preaching

""Donyelle McCray leads readers to the shorelines of homiletics to discover fresh preaching pearls from ancestral wisdom. This wisdom stretches the human imagination as wide as the work of the Holy Spirit to reveal the fluidity of sermon genres. Like the Pentecostal dynamite power of the Spirit, McCray blows up myopic paradigms of what a sermon is and challenges us to see the Spirit of proclamation poured out on all genres, from singing to quilting. This groundbreaking book will not only ignite a critical conversation about multivocality in the field of homiletics; it will change the field for years to come."" --Luke A. Powery, Dean, Duke University Chapel and author, Becoming Human: The Holy Spirit and the Rhetoric of Race ""Donyelle McCray blurs the boundaries of traditional preaching and invites readers to experience the lives and art of several historical and contemporary figures as expressions of proclamation. While appreciating aspects of the traditional 30-minute oration, she reminds us that the Holy Spirit is the source of the church's preaching and invites us to become attuned to the Spirit's proclamation outside as well as inside church walls. Not content with abstractions, Is it a Sermon? highlights specific rhetorical strategies African American musicians, visual and literary artists, and dancers have used to convey spiritual wisdom."" --Alyce M. McKenzie, Le Van Professor of Preaching and Worship, Director of the Center for Preaching Excellence, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University