This dissertation will explore the relationship between human agency and divine agency by bringing the work of Albert Borgmann into conversation with the approaches to preaching found in the New Homiletic. It asks: on what authority is the practice of preaching built? The New Homiletic movement began as a criticism of traditional (logical/propositional) approaches to preaching that emphasised the authority of the preacher. Alternatively, the New Homiletic relies on narrative and dialogical modes of preaching to relocate authority within the experience of the listener. The New Homiletic has made progress by shifting authority from the preacher, but this shift does not go far enough. The question of authority must be framed by way of God’s authority as the primary authority of preaching. This dissertation will draw on the work of Albert Borgmann. Central to Borgmann’s work is the effect of technology on society which he calls the device paradigm. The device paradigm describes the cumulative effect of replacing things with devices. Devices sever the relationship between the means and ends of all things and encourage a life of consumption of commodities. An overemphasis on methodology in preaching risks commodifying preaching by separating the means of preaching from its ends. As an alternative, this dissertation presents preaching as a focal practice. Focal practices are Borgmann’s proposal to counter to the disengaging nature of devices. By putting significant things, focal things, at the forefront of one’s life a person can build their life around engagement. Preaching is a focal practice. The effective power of preaching is external to the practice of preaching, and it is God, as the focal thing, who gives it authority. Building on the principles of Polynesian navigation, the preacher will be presented as a navigator. The preacher cannot create the change they wish to see in their congregation. Instead, they work to orient the community to what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will do. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Since the advent of the environmental crisis, some writers have raised concerns with the moral influence of Christian scripture and interpretive traditions, such as the medieval book of nature, a hermeneutic in which nature and scripture are "read" in reference to one another. Scripture, they argue, has tended to stifle sacred relationships with nature as a non-human other. This thesis argues that such perspectives are reductive of the sacred quality of scripture. Environmental perspectives should be concerned with the desacralization of religious texts in addition to nature. Chapter one suggests that two questions surrounding the medieval book of nature's history can help us address ways that such perspectives reduce religious interpretation of sacred texts. The first question is the tension between manifestation and proclamation, or the question of how scripture and nature reveal sacred meanings. The second is the problem of evil, or the question of where evil and suffering come from. It also proposes that Shakespeare's As You Like It and religious philosophy, particularly Paul Ricoeur's writings, can help us address these problems and provide a contemporary religious perspective of the "book of nature." Drawing on scenes in the play in which nature is "read" as a book and Ricoeur's essay on "Manifestation and Proclamation," chapter two argues how manifestation often works interdependently with proclamation. Chapter three discusses how anthropocentric worldviews in which natural entities are exploited also distort interpretive relationships with scripture. Overcoming desacralization requires giving up desires to suppress contingencies, particularly suffering, in nature and in interpreting religious texts. Only as the characters in As You Like It accept contingencies are they able to engage hidden sources of hope, which is comparable to the need to let go of mastery in interpretation Ricoeur describes. Chapter four discusses problems with attempts to uncover the origins of the environmental crisis by discussing what Ricoeur writes about the problems with theodicy and Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of evil. Assumptions that specific human origins for evil can be blamed confirm deceptively human-centered worldviews and can mask valuable messages about how to morally respond to suffering that are taught in Judeo-Christian narratives.