Additional information
by Rodney Wallace Kennedy (Author), William V. Trollinger (Foreword by), Brad J. Kallenberg (Foreword by)
Sermons from Mind and Heart attempts to show the week-by-week theological work that a pastor does. The combining of the intellectual with the emotional is rooted in the categories of logos and pathos from Aristotle's Rhetoric. Some of the sermons have substantive theological reflections with multiple sources and are thus heavily footnoted; other sermons have no footnotes. This doesn't mean that any sermon lacks logos or pathos but that there is an interplay, a back-and-forth, of a pastor struggling to communicate the Gospel in a "this is that" way that honors both the "then" of Scripture and the "now" of contemporary life. Rhetorical scholarship and methodology are important in understanding the content and the structure of the sermons. What matters most is the sense that these sermons are an ongoing theological conversation between the pastor and his congregation. Sermons, after all, are meant to be heard, and they exist in the moment as authentic rhetorical acts. All other versions of the sermon, including this written form, are only echoes of the primal sermonic experience.
Author Biography
Rodney Wallace Kennedy, lead pastor of First Baptist Church, director of the Baptist House of Studies, and teacher of homiletics and Baptist history at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, has a doctorate in rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He has been lead pastor at First Baptist Church in Dayton for eight years. He is the author of The Creative Power of Metaphor and The Encouraging Parent.
