Her Preaching Body

The preacher's body is a tool for proclamation, a vehicle by which a sermon comes to life. Female preachers, engaged in a task not long their own, know well the added attention directed to their physicality. They can experience ordinary decisions about attire, accessories, hairstyles, and movement as complex, and occasionally precarious, choices around how to bring flesh to their sermons. They can also experience the extraordinary power of their bodies, when materiality weighs in on the message. McCullough explores the every-Sunday bodily decisions of contemporary female preachers, with an eye to uncovering the meanings about body, preaching, and God alive underneath. Ultimately, she argues for a renewed understanding of embodiment, in which one's living body, inescapably intertwined with her preaching, becomes the avenue for greater knowledge about how to preach and deeper insight into the faith professed.

""Her Preaching Body is a very important book for everyone who cares about preaching. It draws on sophisticated theory, careful ethnography, and deep pastoral wisdom in analyzing some of the ways that women exercise embodied agency in preaching. I have learned a lot from this book, and I know I will be sharing it with students, preachers, and academics for years to come.""
--Ted A. Smith, Candler School of Theology, Emory University

""Through vivid examples and sophisticated analysis, McCullough effectively argues that if Christian preaching's primary subject is the embodied Word of God, the preacher's body is central to her message. While this book attends particularly to women's bodies in (and out) of the pulpit, it more broadly demonstrates the ways that social constructions of gender both hinder and enhance the preacher's ability to communicate and either inhibit or facilitate authentic self-expression.""
--Robin Jensen, Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame

""In Her Preaching Body, Amy McCullough attends closely to forms of embodied agency through which women assert difference, uniqueness, and particularity-to-situations. While attending to gender, her study is not focused exclusively on questions of gender, but on how bodies involved in ritual process function in excess of signification, representation, and construction. As a result, she is able to show us how the body at worship knows both itself and God, and habituates that knowing.""
--John S. McClure, Professor of Preaching and Worship, Vanderbilt Divinity School

Amy P. McCullough is the Senior Minister at Grace United Methodist Church in Baltimore, Maryland.