Christian Humanist Profiles Episode 283: Chelsea Yarborough

In the sixteenth century, Desiderius Erasmus revolutionized homiletics by bringing the insights of Ciceronian and later humanist rhetoric to bear on preaching, and historians of Protestant and Catholic traditions in the following centuries agree that worship gatherings transformed radically with that crossover.  Not long after, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and others brought the humanist love for human individuality into the theater and replaced allegorical representations of spiritual forces with individual human characters, changing drama in Europe.  And more recently, Dr. James Cone brought Black Church traditions of worship and activism into academic theology, shaping the discipline irreversibly.  And now, the Reverend Dr. Chelsea Brooke Yarborough invites us to think about American oratory, specifically public speech by Black women, in the light of academic homiletics and as preaching in its own right.  Her recent book Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women, from Baylor University Press, is our text today.  Does it preach?