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 Mc Cray 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. Mc Cray 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, Mc Cray 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.
Circa l’autore
Donyelle C. Mc Cray 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, Mc Cray 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.
