The Caged Bird's 21st Century Song: A Homiletic Practical Theology from the Preaching of African American Women

Abstract

This dissertation engages the sermons of African American women with the purpose of learning more about their preaching content and style. I begin by exploring the social location of African American women, and how their social location problematizes their monolithic absorption into the categories of Black preaching and women’s preaching. I then examine the strengths of creative ingenuity as a means of understanding how African American women negotiate listener expectations of a sermon. These listener expectations are cultural products established overtime, through the simultaneous practice of preaching and listening to preaching. At minimum, within sermons, listeners expect to hear something familiar to their life experience, scripture, theological reflection, and a primary message. With these expectations in view, I then analyze the sermons of seven women alongside of Black and women’s preaching literature. I categorize both the distinctive elements of their sermons and ways in which their sermons are parallel to, disruptive to, and divergent from the literature. In order to resource preaching as a form of creative ingenuity, I end with a distinctly pedagogical orientation. I develop a guided process for aspects of sermon development, based on the distinctive components of these preaching women’s sermons.