"The book is a follow-up to Eslinger's earlier A New Hearing, the standard text on the varieties of homiletical method since its publication in 1987."--BOOK JACKET.

No longer distributed to depository libraries in tangible format (per ANTS-v9-#09)

For over forty years Stanley Hauerwas has been writing theology that matters. In this new collection of essays, lectures, and sermons, Hauerwas continues his life's work of exploring the theological web, discovering and recovering the connections necessary for the church to bear faithful witness to Christ in our complex and changing times. Hauerwas enters into conversation with a diverse array of interlocutors as he brings new insights to bear on matters theological, delves into university matters, demonstrates how lives matter, and continues in his passionate commitment to the matter of preaching. Essays by Robert Dean illumine the connections that have made Hauerwas's theological web-slinging so significant and demonstrate why Hauerwas's sermons have a crucial role to play in the recovery of a gospel-shaped homiletical imagination.

Through her investigation of the mnemonic role of images in vernacular preaching and in mystical texts, Lina Bolzoni moves beyond the traditional art-historical approach to late Mediaeval and Renaissance art which tends to concentrate on style and iconography. offers new ways of reconstructing their meaning. By bringing her knowledge of rhetoric and the art of memory to bear on the visual arts she opens up new perspectives for the study of religious art and literature of the Renaissance, and shows how these images actually functioned within the everyday context of the liturgy and of the life of the common people.

This volume explores the integral role of memory and mnemonic techniques in medieval preaching from the thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. It argues that the mendicant orders inherited from the early Middle Ages both the simple mnemonic techniques of rhetorical practice and a tradition of monastic meditation founded on memory images. In the thirteenth century Dominican and Franciscan writers drew on these basic techniques even as they re-evaluated the ancient mnemonic system of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BC). The increasing emphasis that intellectuals placed upon cognitive science, ethics, and on distinctions between rhetoric and logic created a climate that welcomed an image-based memory system designed for orators. The book also explores the Franciscan contribution to mnemonics, which has been almost entirely neglected by scholars. As the Franciscans came to value imaginative meditation as part of their own spiritual lives, their habit of meditating on mental images of the virtues and vices eventually spilled out into their sermons. As the new orators of the period, Franciscans and Dominicans each inserted mnemonic images into their sermons as a way to aid the recall of both preachers and listeners. The products of such mnemonic practices in medieval sermons, which included elaborate descriptions of buildings, schematic renderings of the number seven, and verbal images of the virtues and vices, were then allegorised in moral terms and circulated on the continent in exempla collections. This book argues that verbal images and complicated schema functioned as 'ordering devices' for those preaching and listening to sermons, whilst also provoking an affective response that enhanced listeners' devotional and penitential experiences.

Preaching hope in the contexts of HIV and Aids, hunger and poverty are but some of the issues that are looked at in the seventeen chapters of this insightful book.