Preaching Migrations: Introduction, Part 1
The issue of Liturgy on the theme, “Preaching Migrations,” guest-edited by Jerusha Matsen Neal, looks at movement of people; trajectories of social, economic, and cultural change; the impact of these shifts on preaching. What follows is the first part of her Introduction to this issue of Liturgy. –– Melinda Quivik
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In her essay “Vesper Flights,” Helen Macdonald describes the evening ascent of flocks of swifts into the upper atmosphere. These birds, which never descend to the ground, rise nearly 8,000 feet every dusk and dawn to read weather patterns, see the stars, and orient themselves. Swifts spend only a few months on their breeding grounds, MacDonald explains. “The rest of the time they’re moving.” Once called “demon birds” because of their unintelligibility to border-bound peoples, MacDonald describes swifts as the “closest things to aliens on Earth.”
Our contemporary world is familiar with the demonization of border-crossers, also regularly described as “aliens.” Humanity is on the move, migrating in record numbers to escape disorienting loss. The United Nations estimates that at the end of 2019, 79.5 million persons were living as refugees, displaced by natural disaster, climate crises, or war. Added to this number are migrations fueled by globalization and economic hardship. Given these shifting populations, the contextual discipline of preaching is also undergoing significant change. Preaching, like any rhetorical practice, is shaped by a particular place and time. What difference do those who have experienced displacement bring to its study?
This issue of Liturgy focuses on the significance of displaced communities for the study and practice of preaching. Human communities are different than the swifts MacDonald describes, of course, and the losses incurred from falling bombs and rising oceans should not be normalized or idealized. Such losses are fierce. But the affected communities glean wisdom in their reorienting work. They witness to weather systems of colonial power that continue to rage, and they see navigational stars that place-bound communities miss. They frame a critical, contemporary, homiletic question: How does place matter — and how does it not? What changes through experiences of displacement, and what remains the same?
Such inquiries require theoretical, theological, and pedagogical migrations in a field easily plagued by settled homogeneity. Homileticians like Pablo Jiménez, and theologians like Willie Jennings and Kwok Pui-Lan, have noted that theological education, including the teaching of preaching, continues to center on the experience of white, North American communities, a proclivity rooted in colonialism and the North Atlantic slave trade. The wisdom and experiences of dislocated communities are essential conversation partners as the homiletic discipline undergoes its own necessary migration, dislocating its insular understandings of preaching history, genre, and pedagogy.
The structure of this issue will keep these dual migrations in view: (1) the migrations within the field of preaching itself and (2) the concrete ways that dislocated persons have preached in response to migration. The first three essays in the issue describe the shifting ground of contemporary homiletic study, underscoring the value of these dislocations in reorienting the discipline. Edgar “Trey” Clark III responds to preaching histories that foreground Western male experience by focusing his attention outside of Europe and the North American continent. His article, “Learning from the Herstory of Preaching in the Global South: Reflections on the Preaching Lives of Rebecca Protten and Dora Yu,” uses the life stories of two under-studied preachers to reexamine basic definitions of proclamation in light of a preacher’s person and place.
All of the essays in Liturgy 36, no. 2 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.
Jerusha Matsen Neal is an assistant professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School.
Jerusha Matsen Neal, “Preaching Migrations: Introduction,” Liturgy 36, no. 2 (2021): 1-2.