Few have consoled the church as ably as the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich. However, her prophetic gifts have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on contemporary homiletical theory and the history of Christian spirituality, Donyelle C. McCray presents Julian as a preacher, examining the apostolic dimensions of Julian’s vocation as an anchoress and highlighting the steps she took to align herself with renowned preachers like Saint Cecelia, Mary Magdalene, and the apostle Paul. Like Paul, Julian saw Jesus’ body as her primary text, placed human weakness at the center of her theology, and used her own confined body as a rhetorical tool. Yet she navigated a web of censorship that threatened to silence her. To voice her convictions, Julian developed a novel approach to authority and exploited the fluidity of the medieval English sermon genre. McCray charts this process, revealing Julian as a central personality in the history of preaching whose best contemporary parallels operate outside the pulpit in august figures like retreat leader Evelyn Underhill, gospel singer Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith, and street preacher Reverend Billy.

In 1928, when Riverside Church (NYC) pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick asked the question in Harpers Magazine, “What’s the Matter with Preaching Today?” he did not know that one response to that question had just entered the world in Humboldt, Tennessee. Fred B. Craddock revolutionized preaching theory and practice by flipping pulpit logic from deductive to inductive—often called the preaching-as-storytelling revolution—and in so doing brought renewed interest and impact to the practice of preaching, effectively rescuing it from an often tedious and moralizing fate. With Fred, preaching was anything but boring. Rather, it was an exciting and enlightening ride that led to the renewal of faith. To honor Craddock’s legacy, Mike Graves and André Resner invited ten leading voices in homiletics to identify something that is right about preaching today. In addition, they issued a call to a wide variety of people to contribute stories about Fred’s impact on their lives and ministries. Twenty-seven remembrances of Fred are included here throughout the book. If you appreciate effective and engaging preaching—as either a preacher or listener—the essays and remembrances here will speak to you and provide encouragement about preaching’s present and future. With contributions from: Ronald J. Allen Barbara K. Lundblad Alyce McKenzie Debra J. Mumford Luke Powery Andre Resner Richard Ward Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm Paul Scott Wilson

After a series of sex scandals rocked the film industry in 1922, movie moguls hired Will Hays to clear the image of movies. Hays tried a variety of ways to regulate movies before adopting what became known as the production code. Written in 1930 by a St Louis priest, the code stipulated that movies stress proper behaviour, respect for government, and 'Christian values'. The Catholic Church reinforced these efforts by launching its Legion of Decency in 1934. Intended to force Hays and Hollywood to censor films, the Legion of Decency engineered the appointment of Joseph Breen as head of the Production Code Administration. For the next three decades, Breen, Hays, and the Catholic Legion of Decency virtually controlled the content of all Hollywood films.

This volume sheds new light on a wealth of early 20th-century engagement with literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity that significantly shaped the work of anglophone literary modernism. The essays spotlight 'translation,' a concept the modernists themselves used to reckon with the Classics and to denote a range of different kinds of reception – from more literal to more liberal translation work, as well as forms of what contemporary reception studies would term 'adaptation', 'refiguration' and 'intervention.' As the volume's essays reveal, modernist 'translations' of Classical texts crucially informed the innovations of many modernists and often themselves constituted modernist literary projects. Thus the volume responds to gaps in both Classical reception and Modernist studies: essays treat a comparatively understudied area in Classical reception by reviving work in a subfield of Modernist studies relatively inactive in recent decades but enjoying renewed attention through the recent work of contributors to this volume. The volume's essays address work significantly informed by Classical materials, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Ovid, and Propertius, and approach a range of modernist writers: Pound and H.D., among the modernists best known for work engaging the Classics, as well as Cummings, Eliot, Joyce, Laura Riding, and Yeats.