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Patterns of Preaching : A Sermon Sampler
This collection of sermons by noted homileticians illustrates thirty-four distinct styles of contemporary and traditional preaching.
Sermons That Make Points R Scott Colglazier
Preaching Verse by Verse Fred B Craddock
ThesisAntithesisSynthesis James H Harris
From Problem through Gospel Assurance to Celebration Frank A Thomas
Sermon as Jigsaw Puzzle Joseph R Jeter Jr
Patterns for Subjects
Wedding Homily Lisa M Leber
Funeral Homily Mary Alice Mulligan
Topical Preaching Thomas H Troeger
Preaching on a Biblical Theme Diane TurnerSharazz
Preaching on a Doctrine Barbara Shires Blaisdell
Preaching on a Christian Practice Sally A Brown
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Bipolar Preaching Joseph R Jeter Jr
Sermon as Theological Quadrilateral Ronald J Allen
Simple Inductive Preaching L Susan Bond
Contemporary Patterns
The Form of the Text Shapes the Form of the Sermon Alyce McKenzie
Four Pages of the Preacher Paul Scott Wilson
Sermon as Plot and Moves David G Buttrick
Preaching from Oops to Yeah Eugene Lowry
Moving from First Naiveté through Critical Reflection to Second Naiveté Pablo A Jiménez
Sermon as Movement of Images Barbara K Lundblad
Sermon Drawing from the Arts Charles L Rice
Sermon Developed as an Author Develops a Novel Jana Childers
Sermon as Portrayal of a Biblical Character Ella Pearson Mitchell
Teaching Sermon William B McClain
Preaching on a Personal Issue Kathy Black
Preaching on a Social Issue Leonora Tubbs Tisdale
Group Study Martha J Simmons
Patterns for Theology
Preaching from the Perspective of Evangelical Theology Bryan Chapell
Preaching from the Perspective of Liberation Theology Carolyn Ann Knight
Preaching from the Perspective of Postliberal Theology Serene Jones
Preaching from the Perspective of Revisionary Theology Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki
Preaching in a Postmodern Perspective John S McClure
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Patterns of Preaching: A Sermon Sampler
Ronald J. Allen
Недоступно для просмотра – 1998
Ronald J. Allen is Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Preaching and New Testament at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. He is author of many books, including Patterns of Preaching and Interpreting the Gospel, and coauthor of One Gospel, Many Ears and Listening to Listeners, all from Chalice Press.
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Despite Americans’ food preferences, most of us like to think of ourselves as animal lovers — there’s about one cat or dog for every 2.4 people — and many Americans can even express pretty radical views about animal rights, at least when pollsters call.
For example, 32 percent of respondents to one 2015 Gallup poll agreed that “animals deserve the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation.” Skeptical of such strong support for animal rights, I conducted a follow-up survey a few years later, finding an even higher rate — 47 percent — endorsed this view. (I’m a professor and researcher who studies social movements, food systems, and animal rights.)
These results might lead you to believe that one-third to a half of Americans support giving animals substantial rights. But when respondents support animal rights in polls, they’re not actually talking about all animals.
In reality, people have a classification system for animals in their heads, and then perceive and treat them differently based on those classifications. Case in point: 75 percent of my survey respondents identified as an “animal lover,” though only about 6 percent followed a vegetarian or vegan diet. How we sort animals into different categories is shaped by an intersecting and evolving mix of factors, based in human psychology, cultural norms, direct experience, and media exposure.
Each year in the US alone, billions of animals are factory-farmed in terrible conditions, millions are confined in cages in medical labs, and countless animals’ habitats are cleared for development.
Until we have a clearer picture of how people actually think about animals, we have little hope of changing public opinion, let alone the laws that govern how animals live and die.
As a way to better understand these surprising poll results and their inconsistencies, I conducted a series of focus groups with diverse groups of Americans. What I found in my research demonstrates the serious barriers that stand in the way of change — while also pointing to some strategies to shift the way people think and eat.
How we categorize and rank animals
For the focus groups, I first screened participants by asking them the same Gallup poll question — whether they believe “animals deserve the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation.”
When thinking about the poll question, many people told me their mental picture of “animals” was restricted to only those they considered pets. Regardless of their response to the poll, almost no one endorsed the idea that all animals deserved legal protection on par with humans. As one respondent put it, “There is definitely a hierarchy.”
The conversations showed people slot different animals into different mental categories, a mostly unconscious sorting process that has enormous implications.
The topic has received some attention in recent years from social psychologists and anthrozoologists, although there remains ongoing debate about what, exactly, these categories are, as does a recognition that there will be major differences across global cultures.
The psychologist Hal Herzog put it in pithy terms with the title of his 2010 book: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals.
One study proposes four clusters based on the animal’s perceived warmth (defined as whether they have good intentions toward humans) and competence (defined as whether they have capability and skill). The groups included predators (low warmth, high competence), companions (high warmth, high competence), prey (high warmth, low competence), and pests (low warmth, low competence).
While these existing categories are useful for scholars, they don’t really reflect how people discuss animals in their everyday lives. In order to inform research and practice, I wanted to understand how people make sense of these issues on their own terms.
Based on my focus groups and some additional surveys, I came to identify four main categories of animals that people held within their mental schema: companions, wildlife, food/farm, and pests. From there, people connected each category to a different set of moral obligations and ideal forms of legal protection.
Companion animals included household pets, mostly dogs and cats but also a host of other domesticated animals, such as horses and rabbits. These animals were spoken about with sincere love and affection, and participants supported strong laws to protect them.
Wildlife brought to mind charismatic megafauna such as great apes, elephants, and whales. People believed these animals deserved respect and the ability to live free from human control, and many argued it was unethical to force them to perform as circus acts. However, respondents were ambivalent about the ethics of keeping wildlife in zoos, which they saw as having valuable educational and conservation possibilities.
Food/farm animals referred not only to those most common in the American diet — pigs, chickens, cows, fish, and the like — but also to several so-called “exotic” animals less frequently consumed in the United States, such as an octopus or alligator.
Here, participants expressed hope that these animals would not be subject to excessive cruelty, and in some instances recognized the moral ambiguity of their own meat consumption. Mostly, though, people just tried not to think much about it. “I feel kind of bad about eating pig,” one respondent explained, “because the more I learn about the animal, the more I realize it’s about as intelligent as a dog. … But bacon is delicious.”
For all but the rare vegetarian, any cognitive dissonance was overwhelmed by the dominant ideology of “carnism,” which insists these animals were made to be meat.
Finally, the category of pests included animals with little to no moral consideration or legal protection. “I don’t look at pests like that as animals,” another respondent said. “I don’t look at rats and roaches and stuff, even though they are animals, I don’t look at them as animals.”
Pigs are as smart as dogs. Why do we eat one and love the other?
Useful as this framework may be, these categories are not set in stone. Variations exist between individuals — a squirrel, for instance, might be considered a pest by one person, wildlife by another, or food by another. There’s also variation within a single individual: A person who generally considers turtles to be wildlife might consider them food at an international restaurant, or begin to categorize them as companion animals if, say, their child wanted one as a pet.
This categorization is understandable, as it prevents us from having to spend too much time or mental effort in treating all animals equally. Even a devoted vegan draws distinctions between different types of animals, willing to swat at a mosquito or sometimes exterminate a cockroach, albeit with a twinge of guilt.
What a legal system for animal rights could look like
The categorization — and how participants talked about each group of animals — also tracks with actual law, which has resulted in a confusing and conflicting legal system for animals.
For example, most state animal cruelty laws exempt “standard agricultural practices,” meaning farmed animals have little to no protection while dogs and cats do. A federal law that governs the proper treatment and humane handling of food animals does not apply to chickens, the most commonly slaughtered animal. Anti-cruelty laws are rarely applied to wild animals, and only a select few species are protected from so-called sport hunting.
Given this grim legal landscape, some thinkers and activists are creating models for what a more humane legal system for animals could look like.
Political theorists Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, for instance, created the concept of a Zoopolis that recognizes the moral worth of all animals but creates a multitiered legal structure to accommodate different categories of human-animal interaction.
In this world, domesticated animals would be granted a type of limited citizenship, wild animals a form of sovereignty, and liminal animals (the non-domesticated that live among humans, such as a raccoon in the city) a form of “denizenship” that allows for coexistence. Drawing parallels with human law, domesticated animals might be regarded in a way similar to children, wild animals like a sovereign nation, and liminal animals along the lines of a refugee or isolationist community.
This vision would call for the end of most forms of animal farming, a new relationship between pets and their guardians (no longer “owners”), creative solutions for preserving wild habitats, and alternatives to mass “pest” extermination.
In another approach, the nonprofit Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) is working through US courts to shift the definition of animals from legal “things” to legal “persons” who are capable of bearing rights of their own.
So far, the organization’s focus has remained only on animals such as great apes, elephants, and cetaceans (whales and dolphins). They say this is due to scientific consensus regarding their high levels of cognitive complexity, self-awareness, and bodily autonomy, meaning that these animals have a demonstrated ability to solve problems, interact socially, and decide how they want to spend their day-to-day lives.
In one ongoing case, the NhRP is working to relocate Happy the Elephant from a solitary enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. The organization claims Happy’s fundamental right to liberty is being violated and hopes to relocate her to a court-approved elephant sanctuary instead.
At this stage, the vision of Zoopolis remains very far off, and even the NhRP’s more limited legal arguments have consistently lost in court. Still, many see it as progress that its arguments are being taken seriously at all.
Unnaturally Delicious : How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World
The food discussion in America can be quite pessimistic. With high obesity rates, diabetes, climate change, chemical use, water contamination, and farm animal abuse, it would seem that there wasn’t very much room for a positive perspective. The fear that there just isn’t enough food has expanded to new areas of concern about water availability, rising health care costs, and dying bees.
In Unnaturally Delicious, Lusk makes room for optimism by writing the story of the changing food system, suggesting that technology and agriculture can work together in a healthy and innovative way to help solve the world’s largest food issues and improve the farming system as we know it.
This is the story of the innovators and innovations shaping the future of food. You’ll meet an ex-farmer entrepreneur whose software is now being used all over the world to help farmers increase yields and reduce nutrient runoff and egg producers who’ve created new hen housing systems that improve animal welfare at an affordable price. There are scientists growing meat in the lab. Without the cow. College students are coaxing bacteria to signal food quality and fight obesity. Nutrient enhanced rice and sweet potatoes are aiming to solve malnutrition in the developing world. Geneticists are creating new wheat varieties that allow farmers sustainably grow more with less. And, we’ll learn how to get fresh, tasty, 3D printed food at the touch of a button, perhaps even delivered to us by a robotic chef.
Innovation is the American way. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver, and John Harvey Kellogg were food and agricultural entrepreneurs. Their delicious innovations led to new healthy, tasty, convenient, and environmentally friendly food. The creations were unnaturally delicious. Unnatural because the foods and practices they fashioned were man-made solutions to natural and man-made problems.
Now the world is filled with new challenges changing the way we think about food. Who are the scientists, entrepreneurs, and progressive farmers who meet these challenges and search for solutions? Unnaturally Delicious has the answers.
