More than Truth: The Hope of Preaching and Its Languages in Context

Abstract

This essay is adapted from a keynote address offered at Societas Homiletica in Budapest, Hungary (August 2022). It frames preaching in shifting social contexts as a practice of theologically ethical meaning-making—supported by accountability to lived experiences, practical wisdom and decision making, and imaginations grounded in boldness and humility. The essay argues that pedagogical strategies in support of these practices prioritize the possibilities that emerge in the constraints of learning contexts. Teaching within the mass crisis of a global pandemic is offered as a case study in the connected outcomes afforded in reassessing one’s presuppositions in both pedagogy and preaching.

Keywords

• ethics
• preaching
• meaning-making
• epistemologies
• practice
• wisdom
• lived experiences
• social contexts
• culture
• embodiment
• religious practice
• pedagogy
• teaching and learning
• hermeneutics