Episcopalian Ellen F. Davis of Duke Divinity School is the guest on the latest EerdCast from Eerdmans Publishing.
Davis, Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of Bible and Practical Theology, is the author of Preaching the Luminous Word: Biblical Sermons and Homiletical Essays.
EerdCast’s website offers this summary of the discussion:
- How did the two preachers mentioned in the book’s prologue — Krister Stendahl and John Donne — influence Davis’s approach to preaching? (2:25)
- What does “biblical preaching” look like when liberated from a reliance on sermon illustrations? (5:41)
- What does Ellen Davis think about Karl Barth’s famous dictum that preachers should preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other? (8:00)
- Why are imagination and language essential to “the preacher’s most important responsibility” according to Davis? (9:54)
- How can a single word from the biblical text become the fulcrum of an entire sermon? (14:15)
- Does Davis’s approach to preaching — along with her Old Testament scholarship — intend to offer a corrective to standard approaches? (18:40)
- How does Davis prepare for a sermon? (22:49)
