Drew Hart
drew.gi.hart@gmail.com
There is little doubt that preaching can be big business, a commodity of sorts, which can be manipulatively packaged in a way that is extremely profitable. And while forms of the ‘prosperity gospel’ are both popular, and if honest, speak to the aspirations of many poor people, the question still remains, how does it minister to one’s soul in the midst of actual life with all its hardships? Luke Powery sets out to counter the fluffy death-avoiding pulpit ministry that is unquestionably sweet but ultimately superficial.
With an insightful and prophetic witness, Powery reminds his readers that “Preaching hope is inadequate without taking death seriously. Not only is death the context for preaching hope, but hope is generated by experiencing death through the Spirit who is the ultimate source of hope” (10). Given this, he argues persuasively that preaching death, both our daily little deaths and Big Death, are not just for funerals and Christology, but are essential for any word that sets out to offer life-giving hope.
The site of Powery’s homiletical inspiration is located primarily in two sources that have been a great means of hope in countless African American churches in the midst of painful suffering and death. The first reservoir for homiletics is the Spirituals. Powery makes the case that the Spirituals in essence are sung sermons that provide hope at the location of death. They offer a model for spiritual preaching that is sorely needed in our communities. The second location that provides the primary metaphor and model for a truly spiritual preaching of death and life for Powery is found in Ezekiel 37’s popular narrative of “the Valley of Dry Bones.” With the Spirituals and Ezekiel 37 at hand, we are called to, and reminded of, the need for a preaching ministry that has an intertwining encounter with spirit, death, and hope.
If you are seeking to preach more faithfully a word of hope to and to engage more honestly the full depth of the gospel with people who are dying little deaths every day and will face Big Death one day, then this book is for you. It is an excellent resource and ought to be on a shelf of all those who are given the heavy responsibility of preaching gospel to our broken world.
Download PDF of Post
Drew Hart is from Philadelphia and is a PhD student at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia in the area of Theology and Ethics. He is interested in the intersection and discourse between Black Theology/Prophetic Tradition and Anabaptism. Drew believes that together they can contribute immensely in decolonizing American theology, ethics, and ecclesiology while also promoting lives that are more just, peaceful, and oriented around the life and teachings of Christ.
Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, and religious forms to determine to what extent, if at all, they conduce to robust conceptions of justice. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine.
Areas of Interest and Research:
African American Religious Studies
Africana Philosophy
African American Moral, Social, and Political Thought
African American Intellectual History
Liberation and Postcolonial (Christian) Thought
Philosophies of Liberation
Contemporary Religious Thought
Race, Gender, and American Christianities
Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms
Histories of Race Discourse in the Americas
(Christian) Social Ethics
Critical Social Theory/Social Philosophy
Theories of Race, Gender, and Power
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
He is deeply committed to a praxis in which dualities of mind/heart, mind/body, and emotions/thought are consistently challenged and replaced with integrated models of selfhood that cherish self-multiplicity - the point at which the postcolonial becomes self-consciously embodied. He also enjoy taking walks in the coolness of the day, singing, laughing, and writing poetically and theoretically on his lived experience, whatever helps to bring more beauty and justice into the world.
Drew Hart is from Philadelphia and is a PhD student at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia in the area of Theology and Ethics. He is interested in the intersection and discourse between Black Theology/Prophetic Tradition and Anabaptism. Drew believes that together they can contribute immensely in decolonizing American theology, ethics, and ecclesiology while also promoting lives that are more just, peaceful, and oriented around the life and teachings of Christ.
