The YDS and greater Yale communities are invited to the 2023 Beecher Lectures, taking place October 11-13 at the Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel.
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Presenting this year’s lectures is Alexander Deeg, Professor of Practical Theology at the University of Leipzig. Dr. Deeg will speak on “Preaching Towards G–d: A Homiletic for Metamodern Times.”
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Each of the three lectures will start at 11:30 a.m. A Q&A will follow the third and final lecture.
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Prof. Alexander Deeg has been teaching practical theology with a focus on homiletics and liturgy at Leipzig since 2011. He is currently Chair of the Liturgical Committee of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany and President of the Societas Homiletica. His publications include The External Word and its Liturgical Form: Reflections on a Fundamental Protestant Liturgy (2012), the coauthored book The New Old Testament Pericope Texts: Exegetical and Homiletic-Liturgical Approaches (2018), and the coedited volume Liturgy, Body, Media: Challenges for Worship in the Digital Society (2019).
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Describing his Beecher Lectures, Deeg notes that there might appear to be more urgent tasks than preaching “in this turbulent world with its manifold problems, which include the climate crisis, wars across the globe, injustices, social violence, and more. But we continue to preach—and there are many good reasons to do so.” He says that his lectures will explore why we should continue to preach in our “metamodern” times, emphasizing that we are “preaching towards God—not about God or from a ‘religious’ perspective or as if we were God. Preaching is … a continuous new beginning, a permanent fresh start, a continuous intervention.”
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The three lectures are:
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• October 11: “Messianic Humor and the Slit in the Umbrella: A Fundamental Homiletical Reflection”
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• October 12: “’Turn It and Turn It’: A Sacramental Hermeneutics Beyond Fundamentalism and Liberalism”
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• October 13: “Open-ended Longing: Homiletical Rhetorics in Metamodern Times”
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The Beecher Lectureship was founded in 1871 by a gift from Henry W. Sage, of Brooklyn, N.Y., as a memorial to Lyman Beecher, to sponsor an annual series of lectures on a topic appropriate to the work of the ministry. It is the longest-running and best-known lecture series on preaching in the U.S.
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The lectures will be live-streamed: https://livestream.com/accounts/565116/events/10962277