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Word about Recent Book: III. Ministerial Studies: Contemporary African American Preaching: Diversity in Theory and Style, Preaching in Black and White: What We Can Learn from Each other

At roughly the same time, two new books have come out on preaching in the African American tradition, but there the comparisons stop. The one is written by a white female homiletician who formerly taught at Vanderbilt Divinity School, the other is co-written by a white male minister in conversation with a prominent black preacher. The former is scholarly and eclectic, the latter more anecdotal and narrow in its focus. In Contemporary African American Preaching, Susan Bond highlights the diversity of styles in that grand tradition (as the subtitle indicates). To that end, she examines five contemporary preachers, each an example of a unique approach to preaching in the black church: Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Gardner C. Taylor, James Earl Massey, James A. Forbes, Jr., and Henry H. Mitchell. She seeks to place these and other black preachers within a variety of categories which she names as “‘gentlemen preachers’ of an older rhetorical style; afrocentrists who argue for a particular cultural and racial difference; celebrationists who favor a cathartic structure; liberation or social crisis preachers committed to social activism; a growing number of pastoral care theorists; and an emerging group of womanist and black feminist homileticians” (p. xi). In light of this latter category, Bond concludes the book with a chapter on African American women and womanists. Before any of those things, however, she includes an introductory chapter on homiletical theory within the African American tradition. This may be her best contribution to the literature, along with Cleo LaRue’s The Heart of Black