About the Contributor(s): Rodney Wallace Kennedy (PhD, Louisiana State University) is lead pastor of First Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio, as well as director of the Baptist House of Studies at United Theological Seminary, also in Dayton. He is the author of several books on homiletics, including Sermons from Mind and Heart (2011). Derek C. Hatch (PhD, University of Dayton) teaches theology and ethics at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas.

This collection of essays and sermons by Rodney Kennedy and Kyle Childress is focused on honoring the memory of Will Campbell--the prophet from the South who made a vocation of destroying sacred cows. The essays and sermons attempt to be true to the spirit of Will Campbell's devotion to the gospel above all else. It should not be surprising that the essays and sermons are about the business of deconstructing more sacred cows while lifting up the truth claims of the gospel. ""The same God who blessed us with preacher man Will Campbell now blesses us with Childress and Kennedy.These two...

With an eye toward reuniting the church and the academy, this book focuses on the role that scholarship can play in making good preachers into really great preachers. This is the bridge between scholarly and popular writing that informs the sermon and makes it more powerful and meaningful for the people who regularly listen to sermons. Preachers are challenged to raise the level of their commitment to scholarship as well as overcome any pre-existing prejudices with scholarship. The preacher as scholar is the perfect way for the pulpit to respond to the challenges of a secular, post-modern...

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 Aristotles Rhetoric. Some of the sermons have substantive theological reflections with multiple sources and are thus heavily footnoted; other sermons have no footnotes. This doesnt 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...