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The Crisis of Bad Preaching is an audacious response to a long-simmering pastoral crisis: poorly prepared, often stale, and largely irrelevant homilies that are fueling the mass exodus of people from the Church. Echoing Popes Benedict and Francis, Rev. Joshua Whitfield confronts what is perhaps the most common complaint of Catholics around the world: hollow, vacuous preaching. A parish priest in Dallas, Whitfield encourages fellow preachers to profound renewal, reminding them that preaching is not just something they do, it is essential to who they are. Catholic preaching today often achieves the opposite of what it should, which is connecting the People of God with the Gospel of Christ in a compelling and motivating way. With an insider’s candor, biting honesty, and persuasive conviction, Whitfield stresses that preachers need to return to this ideal because the wellbeing of the Church depends on it. More than just another how-to book, The Crisis of Bad Preaching is at once deeply challenging and uplifting and full of practical advice for a reversal of the status quo. In Part I, Whitfield explores the essential role of the preacher as a public intellectual and member of the communion of preachers that spans the history of the Church. Whitfield offers advice about which great preachers—from Origen, Augustine , and Aquinas to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bishop Robert Barron—to study and what to learn from them. Whitfield also explains why preachers must submit in humility to the fullness of the Church—its teachings, authority, practices, and structures. In Part II, Whitfield explores the important habits of prayer, preparation, cultivating rhetorical skill, and learning to take full advantage of both positive and negative criticism. He explains how the way of the preacher must be the way of the Holy Spirit and argues that without the preacher opening his heart to the fire of evangelical proclamation, he will lack the capacity to preach the transforming grace of the Gospel, his mandate. In a brief epilogue, Whitfield encourages ten habits for listening. Addressed to both laity and the ordained, he asserts that fixing preaching will take the concerted effort of all members of the Church.

The early church fathers readily found parallels, or types, in the narratives of the historical books that illumined the New Testament. This ACCS volume features a rich treasure trove of ancient wisdom, including homilies of Origen, commentaries from Gregory of Nazianzus and Bede the Venerable, and question-and-answer works from Augustine, Theodoret of Cyr, and Bede.

Hans Urs von Balthasar places Origen of Alexandria “in rank . . . beside Augustine and Thomas” in “importance for the history of Christian thought,” explaining that his “brilliance” has captivated theologians throughout history (Spirit and Fire, 1984, 1). This brilliance shines forth in his nine extant homilies on Isaiah, in which he employs his theology of the Trinity and Christ to exhort his audience to play their crucial role in salvation history. Origen reads Isaiah’s vision of the Lord and two seraphim in Isaiah 6 allegorically as representing the Trinity, and this theme runs throughout the nine homilies. His representation of the seraphim as the Son and Holy Spirit around the throne of the Father brought early accusations that Origen was a proto-Arian subordinationist, followed by a pointed condemnation by Emperor Justinian in 553. These homilies, originally delivered between 245 and 248, are extant only in a fourth-century Latin translation. Though St. Jerome, likely because of these controversies, does not identify himself as the Latin translator, the evidence overwhelmingly points to his pen, and his reliability in conveying Origen’s authentic meaning is well documented. If one sets aside the questionable charges of subordinationism, these homilies, expounding on passages from Judges 6-10, come alive with Origen’s legacy of presenting Christ as the central figure of the soul’s ascent to God. Reading allegorically the two seraphim to be Jesus and the Holy Spirit around the Father’s throne, Origen draws a picture of the Trinity as a tightly knit whole in which the Son and the Holy Spirit eternally sing the Trisagion (“Holy, holy, holy”) to each other and the Father about the divine truths of God’s nature, allowing the part of their song that conveys the “middle things” of salvation history to be heard by creation. The “second seraph” is the Son, or Jesus, who descends holding a hot coal, or Scripture, from the altar of the throne, with which he cleanses Isaiah’s lips, or the believer’s soul. Origen employs his signature exegetical method of allegory and typology through the lens of the threefold meaning of Scripture to emphasize to his hearers that Christ is the deliverer, the content, and the reward of the healing Word. He repeatedly assures them that those who submit to Scripture will enter into salvation history’s cycle of cleansing from sin, growth in virtue, and ever-deepening knowledge of God. As a result, they will become like Christ and thus will be prepared to join the Trinity for all eternity at the heavenly wedding feast.

The two Books of Homilies, along with the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, have long been basic documents of the Church of England, and are valuable in showing how Anglican doctrine shifted during the Reformation, as well as being of considerable historical importance.The first book, published in 1547, early in the reign of Edward VI, was partly, though not entirely, the work of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and the inspiration appears to have been his. This was intended to raise the standards of preaching by offering model ser mons covering particular doctrinal and pastoral themes, either to be read (particularly by unlicensed clergy) or to provide preachers with additional material for their own sermons.The success of the venture led Bishop EdmundBonner, who had contributed to Cranmer's book, to produce his own Book of Homilies in 1555, during the reign of Queen Mary. The Second Book of Homilies, published in 1563 (and in a revised form in 1571) appears in turn to have been influenced by both Cranmer's and Bonner's books.The present edition brings together all three books, edited and introduced by Revd Dr Gerald Bray.

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