Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching

The Introduction to African American Preaching is an important,groundbreaking book. This book acknowledges African American preachingas an academic discipline, and invites all students and preachers into ascholarly, dynamic, and useful exploration of the topic.AuthorFrank Thomas opens with a bus tour study of African Americanpreaching. He shows how African American preaching has gradually movedfrom an almost exclusively oral to an oral/written tradition. Readerswill gain insight into the history of the study of the African Americanpreaching tradition, and catch the author's enthusiasm for it.NextThomas traces the relationship between homiletics and rhetoric inWestern preaching, demonstrating how African American preaching isinherently theological and rhetorical.He then explores thequestion, what is black preaching? Thomas introduces the reader tomethods of close reading and ideological criticism. And thendemonstrates how to use these methods, using a sermon by Gardner CalvinTaylor as his example.The next chapter considers the question, what is excellence in black preaching?Thenext chapter seeks to create bridges and dialogue within the field ofhomiletics, and in particular, the Euro-American homiletic tradition.The goal of this chapter is to clearly demonstrate connections betweenthe African American preaching tradition and the field of homiletics.Thomasnext turns to questions about the relevancy of the church to theMillennial generation. Specifically, how will the African Americanchurch remain relevant to this generation, which is so deeply concernedwith social justice?