Bring Back Beautiful Sermons

St. Augustine remains the Church’s greatest preacher. A single sermon of his can roam in many directions. That is a marvelous virtue, because it reflects reality: God’s glory is beheld in the breadth of the world, given to us in the breadth of Scripture. The homiletic habit of today—one point, please!—can be an enemy of divine beauty, the oratorical devolution of Benjamin Jowett’s dictum that any given text in the Bible has only “one meaning.” How wretched!