International Journal of Homiletics II
Bibliographic record
Abstract
COVID-19-pandemic: the crisis was not only a challenge for the forms of preaching but also its content. What could and should be said? How can people be comforted and strengthened without preaching weak and banal ‘good news’? And again and again the question: How can we speak of God amid a worldwide crisis? For Societas Homiletica it became clear quite soon that the Budapest Conference would have to be postponed (and – God willing – we will meet in Budapest from August 12 to 17, 2022!). But our International Secretary, Prof. Dr. Theo Pleizier, came up with the idea of organizing an Online Conference on “Preaching in Time of Crisis.” The International Board of Societas Homiletica supported this idea, and on August 10–12, 2020, the first Online Conference in the history of Societas Homiletica ‘took place.’ We are glad and honored to present five outstanding papers delivered at the Online Conference in this Special Volume of our International Journal of Homiletics, two from Europe and three from North America (Canada and the USA).\nClara Nystrand from Lund (Sweden) compares sermons delivered in Sweden in the time of the Spanish flu 1918 with sermons delivered in the first phase of the Corona pandemic. Especially the way preachers talk about God and his:her actions differs – showing theological shifts in the past 100 years and asking questions about preaching today.\nAndré Verweij, pastor and researcher in the Netherlands, analyzes five Easter sermons delivered in the Netherlands during the first wave of the Covid-19-pandemic and discovers a lamenting mode in preaching, which steers away from interpreting the pandemic’s possible ‘meaning’ or ‘message.’\nJoseph H. Clarke and David Csinos from the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax, Canada, show how fruitful dialogue between psychotherapy and homiletics can be. They offer insight into “Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy” (ISTDP) and – knowing that preaching is not psychotherapy – present fruitful aspects of a conversation with this school and practice of psychotherapy for homiletics, especially in times of crisis.\nDavid M. Stark, teaching and doing homiletical research at the University of the South in Sewanee (USA), speaks about a dual pandemic of COVID-19 and systemic racism. By exploring sermons from a high-church tradition to a virtual congregation Stark suggests to speak about Eucharistic Preaching thus connecting the sermon to its surrounding liturgy. The paper develops this notion further and discovers Eucharistic embodiment as a perspective for preaching and homiletics.\nIn the final article, Edgar “Trey” Clark III from Fuller Theology Seminary in Pasadena (USA), examines protests in support of “Black Lives Matter” and sees these protests as a form of Spirit-inspired proclamation – connecting lament and celebration, particularity and universality, word and deed.\nObviously, the COVID-19-pandemic changed not only the forms and media of preaching, but also its contents – and will have an impact also in the time ‘after’ the pandemic.:Editorial .............................................................................................................................................................. iii\nPreaching in Times of Pestilence – 1918 and 2020\nClara Nystrand ................................................................................................................................................. 1\nPreaching in a Lamenting Mode: Easter Lockdown Sermons in the Netherlands\nAndré Verweij ............................................................................................................................................... 13\nSteer into the Storm: Dynamic Psychotherapy for Preaching in Anxious Times\nJoseph H. Clarke and David M. Csinos ................................................................................................. 23\nEucharistic Preaching as Early Response to a Dual Pandemic\nDavid M. Stark ................................................................................................................................................ 33\nProtest as Preaching: The Pneumatic Proclamation of Black Lives Matter\nEdgar “Trey” Clark III ................................................................................................................................. 43
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".