Cardinal Newman\u27s Pilgrimage, in His Own Words

This is the text of a presentation given at Marshall University on October 14 and 17, 2019, to commemorate the October 13 canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman. As the title suggests, it draws largely upon his autobiography, an autobiographical novel, and his published letters to trace the trajectory of his religious life, from the earliest glimmers in his mid-teens to his conversion to Catholicism at the age of 44

The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The Victorian Pulpit is the first book to study the nineteenth-century British sermon from the perspective of orality-literacy theory (the branch of literary and rhetorical inquiry concerned with the differences between spoken and written language). Building on the groundbreaking work of Milman Parry in the 1920s Albert B. Lord and Eric A. Havelock in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially Walter J. Ong in the 1970s and 1980s, orality-literacy studies had become an active, wide-ranging discipline by the 1990s, the time the book was conceived and written. The first part of this study of the sermon as oral literature focuses on orality-literacy intersections in the rhetorical and social history of the Victorian pulpit. I begin with homiletic theory, examining Victorian expectations that the preacher exhibit the ethos of the classical orator while delivering sermons exemplifying the literary sophistication of the accomplished essayist. I then consider methods of delivery, analyzing the debate over whether, and to what extent, the artifacts of literacy-manuscripts of sermons and the like-should be introduced into the oral lifeworld of pulpit oratory. Finally, I discuss public reception of the sermon, focusing on how the common practice of attending preaching services on Sunday and reading sermons during the week provides yet another illustration of the intersection of the spoken and the printed word. The book closes with a comparison of sermons on John 11 preached by Charles Haddon Spurgeon, John Henry Newman and George MacDonald. These three belong to different categories in orality-literacy studies; their work illustrates some of the many ways in which the oral and written traditions intersect in the preaching of Victorian Britain

“’National Apostasy,’ Tracts for the Times, and Plain Sermons: John Keble\u27s Tractarian Prose.”

John Keble is perhaps best known for The Christian Year and his work as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1831 to 1841. In this essay, I argue that his prose is worthy of study as well. I focus on National Apostasy, the sermon that John Henry Newman saw as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement; the 8 pieces he contributed to the Tracts for the Times; and his many contributions to the Plain Sermons, by Contributors to the Tracts for the Times

Four Case Studies in Teaching Sermons at a Public University

In this paper, delivered at the March 2017 meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association, I discuss my experience with teaching sermons at Marshall University, a public institution in Huntington, WV. I have done this in four classes over the past several years: “Good Essays” (a 200-level general-education course in the English Department); “God Talk” (another gen-ed course, team-taught with a faculty member in religious studies); “Sermon: Text and Performance” (a 400-level class in the Honors College); and “The Victorian Spoken Word” (a graduate seminar in English). The audiences were very different, as were the texts we used (Newman, Spurgeon, and other Victorians in “Good Essays” and the graduate seminar, a mix of countries and time periods in the other two) and the amount of time we spent on sermons in each class (one class period in “Good Essays” and “Spoken Word,” two weeks in “God Talk,” and the entire semester in the Honors class). I discuss why I chose the texts I did (and, in the case of the Honors class, what led me to create an entire course on preaching), how I presented them in class, and how the students responded to them. I also offer some remarks about what these experiences taught me about the challenges and opportunities that come with teaching religious rhetoric in a secular environment

Turning “Bad Jews into Worse Christians”: Hermann Adler and the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews

This paper explores how sermons contributed to Jewish-Christian relations in Victorian England. I begin with a rhetorical analysis of sermons preached on behalf of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, the largest and best known missionary organization of its kind. I then examine a collection of sermons in which Hermann Adler, then rabbi of London’s Bayswater Synagogue and later Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, pushes back against their efforts, offering the “true explanations” of passages which, in his view, had been improperly employed by Christian preachers. Finally, I trace a kind of “feedback loop” in which both Jews and Christians responded to Adler, and sometimes had their work responded to as well. This is more a “case study” than an exhaustive treatment of the subject; as I state in the conclusion, “pulpit discourse is one aspect of the interfaith landscape that can be much more fully explored.

The Tractarians\u27 Sermons and Other Speeches

This is the first chapter of A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It provides an overview of the Tractarians\u27 homiletic theory, and examines the various genres of their oratory: sermons (both plain and university ), lectures, and episcopal charges

Introduction to A New History of the Sermon : The Nineteenth Century

This is the introduction to A New History of the Sermon:The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It discusses the concept and history of rhetorical criticism, and seeks to lay a foundation for the rhetorical study of the Anglo-American pulpit

Pusey\u27s Sermons at St. Saviour\u27s, Leeds

E . B. Pusey as a Preacher. It would not be surprising to find such a phrase as the title of a nineteenth-century work. Authors in both Britain and America used it in books and articles about numerous ministers, literary figures, the Apostle Paul, and even Jesus himself.1 Edward Bouverie Pusey, in fact, was the subject of one such piece: a review of Sermons for the Church\u27s Seasons from Advent to Trinity, published in the Spectator on 11 August 1883. Such a scope would, however, be too broad for a scholarly study in the twenty-first century. Pusey\u27s canon is simply too vast (numerous volumes of university and parochial sermons2) and the list of possible topics (historical, theological, rhetorical, linguistic) far too long. In this essay, therefore, I will focus on just one work, a collection entitled A Course of Sermons on Solemn Subjects Chiefly Bearing on Repentance and Amendment of Life. These sermons were preached over a period of just a few days in October of 1845, but they provide a helpful snapshot of a career that stretched for over fifty years.

Some Reflections on the Field of Sermon Studies

Multidisciplinary endeavours with the word ‘studies’ in their names have brought like-minded scholars together for over sixty years. Those specializing in certain parts of the world, for example, can join the North American Conference on British Studies (founded in 1950), the British Association for American Studies (1955), the African Studies Association (1957), or a host of other groups. Similarly, organisations for scholars interested in specific time periods include the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (1983), the Society for Renaissance Studies (1967) and the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies. Finally, students of politics, gender and other aspects of society are served by the Political Studies Association (1950), the Society for Cinema & Media Studies (originally the Society of Cinematologists, 1959), the National Women’s Studies Association (1977) and the Cultural Studies Association (2003).