Description
Book SynopsisFew have consoled the church as ably as the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich. However, her prophetic gifts have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on contemporary homiletical theory and the history of Christian spirituality, Donyelle C. McCray presents Julian as a preacher, examining the apostolic dimensions of Julian’s vocation as an anchoress and highlighting the steps she took to align herself with renowned preachers like Saint Cecelia, Mary Magdalene, and the apostle Paul. Like Paul, Julian saw Jesus’ body as her primary text, placed human weakness at the center of her theology, and used her own confined body as a rhetorical tool. Yet she navigated a web of censorship that threatened to silence her. To voice her convictions, Julian developed a novel approach to authority and exploited the fluidity of the medieval English sermon genre. McCray charts this process, revealing Julian as a central personality in the history of preaching whose best contemporary parallels operate outside the pulpit in august figures like retreat leader Evelyn Underhill, gospel singer Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith, and street preacher Reverend Billy.
Trade ReviewThe Censored Pulpit brims with subversive power, holy wisdom, and academic sophistication. Homiletician-hagiographer Donyelle McCray’s fascinating analysis of the preaching legacy of medieval England’s famed mystic, Julian of Norwich, will stoke the sacred imaginations of theological scholars and working clergy. Contesting century’s old homiletics doctrine, McCray convincingly argues why the sermon’s context need not require a pulpit, formal liturgy, Christian assembly, and without doubt a male preacher. Instead what is most constitutive of preaching and requisite for preachers is having the spiritual courage to proclaim the extravagant witness of the gospel in embodied speech as did Norwich and a chorus of other contemporary lay preachers who have followed in her wake. -- Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Howard University School of Divinity
Table of Contents1 Vocation: A Living Sermon 2 Voice: Julian’s Aurality 3 Scripture: A Corporeal Text 4 Intention: Preacher as Lover 5 Authority: Marian Proclamation 6 Trajectories: A Mystical Homiletic
