Word: preacher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Franklin Pollard, 45, First Baptist Church of Jackson, Miss. Pollard is very much in the evangelistic mainstream as preacher in a big church in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's biggest denomination. He was raised in a Texas shack, one of seven children of a poor oilfield worker. "We had three rooms and a path," he likes to say of the primitive conditions in his childhood. But though he has a ready supply of down-home anecdotes, he shuns the kind of cornpone and bombast sometimes associated with evangelical pulpits. Pollard commands attention instead with infectious charm...
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...
Peter J. Gomes, 37, the Memorial Church at Harvard University. A quintessential New England preacher who speaks like a Brahmin, Gomes is a board member of the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth, Mass., his famous home town. He happens to be black. Gomes (rhymes with homes) notes wryly that his parents raised him in "a rather backward environment in which language still had some validity." The Plymouth schools thereafter drilled him in memorizing large chunks of great prose and poetry, a skill he retains...
...preacher to students, he constantly searches for "the judgment of history upon this place and this moment. We're very unlikely to uncover anything new. It's a conceit of our age that we are the first people who ever encountered anxiety or fear or guilt." When Gomes preached on one of the year's hottest campus issues, divestiture of university investments in firms active in South Africa, he did not dwell on the politics. Instead, he spoke of the irony that the dispute underscored: the crying need for firm moral convictions in a time when universities...
...lawyer. He switched to his present vocation only after working his way through the philosophical skepticism of the logical positivists rampant at Cambridge University when he was there. He arrived in the U.S. for good in 1952, and has preached in Chicago for 18 years. As a preacher, he tries to translate the Gospel into the idiom of today, so that "the Bible comes alive and the Christian faith is made believable." One way that Davies makes the Bible come alive during his sermons is by gesturing, mimicking and acting out roles with the skill of a Marcel Marceau...