Word: far
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many preachers devote far too little time to research, reading and writing in sermon preparation. As a result their poorly constructed, poorly thought out addresses wander from point to point, and listeners' minds wander too. Lack of effort is not necessarily a sign of sloth. Ministers increasingly are expected to bear heavy loads of counseling and administration that nibble away their time. One rule of thumb is to spend "an hour in the study for each minute in the pulpit." But many modern preachers say they are lucky to manage half that...
...Brooklyn and Phillips Brooks of Boston. Clyde Fant of the First Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, a former homiletics teacher, notes that even then folks found fault with the state of the pulpit. "Where are the good preachers?" asks Fant. "Right where they've always been -few and far between." By most accounts, the 20th century giant was Harry Emerson Fosdick, who died...
Gardner C. Taylor, 60, Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, N.Y. "He has a voice that sounds like God," an admiring fellow preacher says of Taylor. To anyone who has listened to a Taylor sermon, the judgment does not seem far off target. Taylor's voice is deep and apparently inexhaustible. Working variations on a biblical theme ("Create in me a clean heart, O God"), he artfully circles around his subject, now lulling the listeners into serenity, now rising to majestic sincerity in stately cadences that overwhelm as much with their sound as with their meaning. Taylor says that...
...Rose, he turned down every film role that was offered, waiting for the one that would let her shine brightest. People laughed at the time, but on her European tour last year, he even demanded that she be paid in gold. He was turned down, but the idea was far from laughable. Gold has since more than doubled in value...
...plot because of its cushion of intelligence and moral fastidiousness. Author Read is best known in the U.S. as the author of Alive, a nonfiction account of how some Uruguayan survivors of a plane crash in the Andes resorted to cannibalism to survive; his six previous novels, far less sensational, deserve more readers than they have received, and his latest may be his best. No one now writing has achieved quite the same equipoise between malaise and morality, ideas and emotions. In this tale of human imperfectibility, the devil gets his due and not a scintilla more. - Paul Gray