Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric

If you ain’t got no proposition, you ain’t got no sermon neither. This was the battle cry of Isaac Rufus Clark, one of the most influential and colorful professors of homiletics in the black church in the twentieth century. Clark taught at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta for twenty-seven years (1962-1989). In Teaching Preaching, Katie Cannon, one of Clark’s myriad preaching proteges, conceives her role as purely presentational : to bring Clark face to face with a reading audience, allow him to explain the formal elements of preaching from the inside out.

Teaching Preaching is an invaluable resource for ministers who struggle from Sunday to Sunday to find their ethical voice in the preparation of each and every sermon.