Teaching Preaching : Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric

"If you ain't got no proposition, you ain't got no sermon neither." This was the battle cry of Isaac Rufus Clark, one of the most influential and colorful professors of homiletics in the black church in the twentieth century. Clark taught at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta for twenty-seven years (1962-1989). In Teaching Preaching, Katie Cannon, one of Clark's myriad preaching protégés, conceives her role as purely "presentational": "to bring Clark face to face with a reading audience, allow him to explain the formal elements of preaching from the inside out." Teaching Preaching is an invaluable resource for ministers who struggle from Sunday to Sunday to find their ethical voice in the preparation of each and every sermon.

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Taking the Holiness of Preaching Seriously 2. Bearing the Cross of This Holy Course 3. A-Not The, but A-Theological Definition of Preaching 4. A Critique of Contemporary Preaching 5. The Sermonic Text 6. Creative Textual Selections 7. Three Textual Testers 8. Sermonic Title, Introduction, and Proposition 9. Definition, Elaboration, and Exemplification of the Sermonic Body 10. Sermonic Clarification 11. Justification 12.Transtitions 13. Substance and Form in Proclaiming a Relevant Gospel 14. Procedures in the Conculsion of the Sermon 15. Anatomy of the Idea 16. Four Bitter Pills for Black Revolutionary Religion