Bücher von Richard Lischer

Stations of the Heart is a father's heartbreaking and hopeful story about his beloved son, in which a young man teaches his family "a new way to die" with wit, candor, and grace.As the book opens, Richard Lischer's son, Adam, calls to tell his father, a professor of divinity at Duke University, that his cancer has returned. Adam is a charismatic young man with a promising law career, and that his wife is pregnant with their first child makes the disease's return all the more devastating. Despite the cruel course of the illness, Adam's growing weakness evokes in him a remarkable spiritual strength. This is the story of one last summer, lived as honestly and faithfully as possible. Deeply moving and utterly lacking in sentimentality or self-pity, Stations of the Heart is an unforgettable book about life and death and the terrible blessing of saying good-bye.

Richard Lischer's book is a stirring affirmation of preaching's importance as a major enterprise in its own right. It is, he writes, "a theological preface whose aim is to show how theology informs preaching and how preaching, as a kerygmatic, oral, practical activity, informs theology and brings it to its final form of expression."Dr. Lischer points to the historically negative results of preaching's exclusion from theology, and then shows the benefits derived from the proper interaction of the two disciplines. As he elaborates on this theme, he explores the centrality of the Resurrection in both theology and preaching, the relation of the law and the gospel, and how preaching calls upon theology to recover its oral-aural foundation.For Lischer, the act of preaching is an exercise of the preacher's imagination. The real work of imagination is not inserting clever stories or esthetically pleasing images into the argument of the sermon. It is knowing how to read texts in such a way that they will be allowed to function according to their original power and intent.

Parables make up one-third of Jesus' speech in the New Testament. In this volume, Richard Lischer provides an expert guide to these parables and proposes an important distinction between reading and interpreting the parables.Emphasizing the importance of reading the parables versus interpreting them, Lischer asserts that reading offers a kind...