Why a blog on preaching?

When I finished my M.Div. in 1996, I had a passionate desire to learn more about preaching. Homiletics was part of the M.Div. curriculum at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, but at that time it was not highly developed, and I finished with the feeling that so much more needed to be said about preaching the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

During my years in seminary, the homiletics program seemed to reflect the unfortunate sentiment that great preachers are born, not trained. However, my thought at the time was that if even the most tone-deaf seminarian can be trained up to basic competence in liturgical chant shouldn't there also be a way to methodically teach preaching? And, while fully acknowledging the importance of liturgical chant in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, can't we say that good preaching is AT LEAST as important to the life of the Church as liturgical chant? My answer was a resounding YES. So, I actively sought out a doctoral program where I could do advanced studies in homiletics. I happened to find just such a program at Drew University, and I began my doctoral work in 1998.

The strength of the program at Drew, was that I studied homiletics from within the Liturgical Studies discipline. My adviser, Charles Rice, had made a powerful argument for approaching homiletics from a liturgical perspective in his book, The Embodied Word. In my dissertation I examined the "liturgy of the word/liturgy of the eucharist" dichotomy from the perspective of an Eastern Orthodox Christian. My dissertation advisor, John Behr suggested the title of the dissertation, Encountering the Word, and thus the title of this blog.

Since completing my Ph.D. significant advances have been made in the curriculum at St. Vladimir's Seminary, for which I am immensely grateful. Yet, more can always be done. My objective, in creating this blog, is to have a place to post thoughts, ideas, homilies and reflections on the preaching life. Specifically, I would like to help further the discussion about preaching in the Orthodox Church, both from the perspective of those who preach, and perhaps even more importantly, from the perspective of those who listen. On a more general note, I hope that this blog is an opportunity for anyone who is passionate about preaching to participate in a discussion on how it is manifested in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the end, however, the most important thing is our encounter with the Word of God, Jesus Christ.