Description
One hundred sermons that display the victorious, even if on occasion painful, historical and spiritual pilgrimage of black people in The usa.
A groundbreaking anthology, Preaching with Sacred Fire is a unique and powerful work. It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each and every sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology―which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and plenty of others―offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history.
The collection provides new insights into the underpinnings of the black fight for emancipation and the upward thrust and growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sermons from the first decade of the twenty-first century point toward the way forward for African American preaching. Biographies of the preachers put their work in the cultural and homiletic context of their periods.
The preachers of these sermons are women and men from a range of faiths, ancestries, and educational backgrounds. They draw on a vast and luminous landscape of poetic language, the use of metaphor, rhythm, and imagery to communicate with their congregations. What they all have in common is hope, resilience, and sacred fire. “Even all through the most difficult and oppressive times,” Simmons and Thomas write in the preface, “the delivery, creativity, charisma, expressivity, fervor, forcefulness, passion, persuasiveness, poise, power, rhetoric, spirit, style, and vision of black preaching gave and gives hope to a community under siege.”
This magnificent work beautifully renders the complexity, spiritual richness, and strength of African American life.