Over the past 30 years, the effects of globalization, climate change and multiple military coups have reshaped the Fijian landscape. The “lines in the sand” around issues of land ownership, rising tides and Fijian identity have complicated the relationship between the Fijian Methodist Church and the land which grounds its culture. The historical fissures between the majority Methodist indigenous church and Fiji’s large Hindu population continue to place the rights of first peoples in tension with rights of ethnic and religious minorities, even as the country’s secular government stresses the possibility of harmony. In recent years, the church’s primary responses to these demographic, political and environmental changes have been homiletic and hermeneutic. In spite of declining membership and reduced political influence, the church’s present experience has been re-read as a “New Exodus” journey toward a promised land. This theme of “New Exodus” has become a dominant trope in sermons, church education events and Fijian Methodist self-understanding. A more complicated hermeneutic, however, mines the biblical theme of exile to describe the current situation. In iTaukei (indigenous Fijian) understanding, the ‘vanua,’ or land, connotes the traditional culture of those who live on that land. As change impacts the culture of indigenous village life, the land itself is understood to change. Though 80% of Fijian land is tribally held, many Fijian Methodists experience the land on which they have lived for generations as suddenly unfamiliar. My paper will explore these disparate biblical readings of the Fijian Methodist experience through a homiletic analysis of four Fijian sermons, pointing to the importance of pulpit rhetoric in creating new conceptions of place and direction in a world where familiar markers are washing away.

In recent decades historians have demonstrated that women were preaching in the U.S.A. long before the ordination of women to ministry. Many Quaker, evangelical, and Holiness women were itinerant preachers who traversed the country throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, encountering numerous hardships and obstacles as they went. In this essay I identify and examine three types of transitions in which the Spirit appears to have been “on the loose” so that women were able to claim their preaching vocations: ecclesial and theological transitions, political and geographical transitions, and personal transitions in the lives of the women themselves. I conclude by reflecting on what we might learn from this history for opening the pulpit to preachers on the margins today.

This article suggests that topical preaching can be revisited with integrity in postmodernity. The topical sermon in postmodernity should seek to place texts in conversation with one another in such a way that each text is valued and respected. Instead of allowing only one text to be heard at the exclusion of all others, appropriate topical preaching should model the embrace of otherness and conversation.

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Toward the end of 2015, 65.3 million people were seeking refuge or were otherwise forcibly displaced globally. This is the largest number since the recordings began around World War II. In Europe more than 1 million people arrived by sea in 2015 – more than four times as many as the previous year.1 The crisis situation stirred public debate as well as church-based initiatives trying to deal with the situation. In order to understand the interaction between public discourse and local preaching a group of homileticians from seven European countries collaborated on an empirical study of how the refugee crisis impacted preaching. In what follows we present the initial results from the Scandinavian countries.

In October 2016 homileticians from seven European countries met in Leipzig in order to reflect on political preaching in the context of the so called European ‘refugee crisis’. This article shows the background of this conference, gives a very brief overview of the perspectives from different countries, and suggests ways to continue European homiletical research on this theme.

Preaching is in transition, so is homiletics as the theory of preaching. In this article the development of homiletics in the Low Countries is explored as a case-study within the dynamics of international homiletical thought. The material for this case-study consists of the doctoral theses that have been published since the turn of the century. The amount of doctoral work in homiletics, the variety of methodological approaches and theological perspectives, provide a viable entrance to homiletics as academic discipline. It will be concluded that homiletics has developed into an international, empirically oriented, culturally sensitive, and theological diverse field. Preaching is in transition, so is homiletics. The transition, as seen through the lens of recent Dutch contributions to scholarly discourse in preaching, has three focal points: pneumatology, language, and empirical research.

This thesis will posit that a query of the medieval trope, Fortune, can be read as a query into femininity. Fortune is depicted with many quintessentially medieval feminine traits, and women in texts that discuss Fortune often have Fortune's traits. While texts that link Fortune and femininity usually do so to censure women, some writers turned the trope to their advantage for just the opposite purpose. Both Chaucer in the "Monk's Tale" and Christine de Pizan personify Fortune to subtly point out the flaws in antifeminist medieval view of women. This thesis explores the ways in which these writers cleverly took advantage of genre and characterization to use Fortune to defend women and womanhood.

[pt] Vida e obra dos objetos: uma investigação sobre as potências da materialidade a partir do Sermão do Espírito Santo, de Antônio Vieira apoia-se, funda-mentalmente, na polissemia dos termos vida e objeto para examinar certas situações interacionais em que objetos (entendidos modernamente como inanimados) são investidos de vida, isto é, de qualidades e comportamentos em geral atribuídos a sujeitos (seres que se movem, agem e possuem um ponto de vista próprio). A dissertação propõe apreender o fenômeno da vida dos objetos através de três caminhos que se entrecruzam. O primeiro consiste em observar manifestações dessa vida na circunstância mais imediatamente presente, contemporânea ao pesquisador, num registro cotidiano e doméstico dentro do qual o próprio ato de escrita da dissertação se desenrola. O segundo e principal caminho conduz aos séculos XVI e XVII: sob a intercessão privilegiada do Sermão do Espírito Santo, do padre Antônio Vieira, e tomando como pano de fundo as tensões culturais implicadas na colonização das Américas e na catequização das populações nativas, realiza-se uma comparação pontual entre concepções ameríndias e concepções eurocristãs da vida dos objetos. O terceiro caminho é uma especulação sobre a possibilidade de falar em uma vida do texto, e, para tanto, busca-se aplicar ao domínio estrito das palavras alguns pressupostos contidos em teorias recentes acerca da agência de objetos materiais. Somando estes esforços aos esforços crítico-reflexivos de outros pesquisadores, a dissertação espera apresentar uma rica diversidade de traços subjetivos encarnados pelos objetos, diversidade que espelha diferentes maneiras de viver. / [en] Life and work of objects: an investigation on the powers of materiality based on the Sermon on the Holy Spirit, by Antonio Vieira rely fundamentally on the polysemy of the terms life and object to examine some interactional situations in which objects (modernly understood as inanimate) are invested with life, that is, with qualities and behaviours attributed in general to subjects (beings which move, act and have their own point of view). The dissertation proposes to apprehend the life of objects phenomenon through three paths which are intertwined. The first one consists in observing the manifestations of this kind of life in the most immediately present circumstance, contemporary to the researcher, in a daily and domestic register inside of which the very act of writing the dissertation happens. The second and main path leads to the 16th and 17th centuries: with the privileged intercession of the Sermon on the Holy Spirit, by priest Antonio Vieira, and also by taking as a background the cultural tensions involved in the colonization of the Americas and in the catechization of native populations, a punctual comparison is made between Amerindian conceptions and Euro-Christian conceptions of the life of objects. The third path is a speculation about the possibility of speaking of a life of the text, and for this purpose some assumptions contained in recent theories about the agency of material objects are applied to the strict domain of the words. By joining this efforts to the critical-reflexive efforts of other researchers, the dissertation expects to show a rich diversity of subjective features embodied by objects, a diversity that reflects different ways of living.

Studien behandlar teckenspråkstolkars agerande vid språkliga utmaningar som kan uppstå vid tolkning av predikningar med särskilt fokus på religiös terminologi, metaforer och liturgiskt språkbruk. Vidare undersöker studien vilka konsekvenser tolkarnas handlande har på det religiösa budskapet. Med två predikningar som källtext baseras studien på åtta inspelade tolkningar gjorda av fyra teckenspråkstolkar med erfarenhet av tolkning i religiösa miljöer. Relevanta passager transkriberades och analyserades med hjälp av diskursanalys. De främsta strategier som identifierades vid förekomst av religiösa termer var användandet av ekvivalent tecken och bokstavering. Vid metaforer var avbildande verbkonstruktioner konsekvent förekommande bland samtliga tolkar. Två andra strategier som identifierades vid metaforer var formbaserad tolkning och tillägg. När det kom till dessa strategier fanns det skillnader gällande hur explicit metaforen ska tolkas där både formbaserad tolkning och strategiska tillägg lyftes som strategi till samma utmaning. Medan de inom tidigare nämnda kategorier fanns mönster i tolkarnas agerande visade analysen att det inte fanns någon konsensus i tillvägagångsätt för att hantera liturgiskt språkbruk vilket ledde till att tolkningar av samma källtext kunde generera helt skilda måltexter. Detta leder till att tolkningarna utgår från hur enskilda tolkarna uppfattat källtexten, något som i värsta fall får som konsekvens att den döva personen tar till sig felaktigt teologiskt budskap i tron att detta är vad som förkunnas av predikanten. Studien kommer således fram till slutsatsen att det saknas standardiserade metoder för att hantera de lingvistiska utmaningar som finns vid teckenspråkstolkning av predikningar, något som har en potentiell negativ påverkan på överförandet av det religiösa budskapet. / The study investigates the actions of sign language interpreters when faced with linguistic challenges that may arise during the interpretation of sermons, with a particular focus on religious terminology, metaphors, and liturgical language. Furthermore, the study examines the consequences of interpreters’ actions on the religious message. Based on two sermons as source texts, the study draws on eight recorded interpretations conducted by four sign language interpreters experienced in church interpreting. Relevant passages were transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis. The primary strategies identified in the presence of religious terms were the use of equivalent signs and fingerspelling. In the case of metaphors, depictions through verb constructions were consistently observed across all interpreters. Two other strategies identified with metaphors were form-based interpretation and strategic additions. Regarding these strategies, there were disagreements on how explicitly the metaphor should be interpreted, with both form-based interpretation and strategic additions being suggested as approaches to the same challenge. While patterns in interpreters' actions were evident in the previously mentioned categories, the analysis revealed no consensus or standardization in approaches to handling liturgical language, resulting in interpretations of the same source text yielding vastly different target texts. This suggests that interpretations are based on how individual interpreters perceive the source text, potentially resulting in the deaf individual receiving incorrect theological messages, believing them to be the preacher's intended message.