Richard Lischer

"After the horrors and violence of the twentieth century, words can seem futile. In this reflection on the place of preaching today, Richard Lischer recognizes that our mass-communication culture is exhausted by words. Facing up to language's disappointments and dead ends, he opens a path to its true end." "With chapters on vocation, interpretation, narration, and reconciliation, The End of Words shows how faithful reading of Scripture rather than flashy performance paves the way for effective preaching. Lischer challenges conventional storytelling with a deeper and more biblical view of narrative preaching. The ultimate purpose of preaching, he argues, is to speak God's peace, the message of reconciliation." "While Lischer's End of Words will surely be invaluable to pastors and preachers, his honest, readable style will appeal to anyone concerned with speaking Christianly."--BOOK JACKET.

Today it seems extraordinary that a nation the size of the United States could have been so profoundly affected by the minister of a little Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. But at a turning point in American history, Martin Luther King, Jr., had an incalculable effect on the fabric of daily life and the laws of the nation. As no other preacher in living memory and no politician since Lincoln, he transposed the themes of love, suffering, deliverance, and justice from the sacred shelter of the pulpit into the arena of public policy. He was the last great religious reformer in America. How the man who always saw himself as "fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher" crafted his strategic vision and moved a nation to renewal is the subject of this remarkable new book.

Richard Lischer's book is a stirring affirmation of preaching's importance as a major enterprise in its own right. It is, he writes, "a theological preface whose aim is to show how theology informs preaching and how preaching, as a kerygmatic, oral, practical activity, informs theology and brings it to its final form of expression." Dr. Lischer points to the historically negative results of preaching's exclusion from theology, and then shows the benefits derived from the proper interaction of the two disciplines. As he elaborates on this theme, he explores the centrality of the Resurrection in both theology and preaching, the relation of the law and the gospel, and how preaching calls upon theology to recover its oral-aural foundation. For Lischer, the act of preaching is an exercise of the preacher's imagination. The real work of imagination is not inserting clever stories or esthetically pleasing images into the argument of the sermon. It is knowing how to read texts in such a way that they will be allowed to function according to their original power and intent.

Describes the author's wrenching loss of his son to melanoma, a tragedy also marked by the imminent birth of another child and the spiritual lessons imparted by the young man throughout the end of his life.

"A collection of biblically and theologically rooted sermons about living the Christian life with conviction"--

"Parables make up one-third of Jesus' speech in the New Testament. In this volume, Richard Lischer provides an expert guide to these parables and proposes an important distinction between reading and interpreting the parables.Emphasizing the importance of reading the parables versus interpreting them, Lischer asserts that reading offers a kind of breathing space to explore historical, literary, theological, and socio-political dimensions of the parables and their various meanings, whereas interpreting implies an expert and critical position that must be defended. In this volume, Lischer lays out four theories for reading parables: 1) parables obscure truth; 2) parables teach many truths; 3) parables teach one truth; and 4) parables undermine the truth. Ultimately, he concludes that biblical parables undermine dominant myths called "the truth" to shine light on the Truth that is Jesus, God's presence with us"--

On life and work of an Indian intelligence officer.