LIFE IS A JOURNEY
Heading in the Right Direction
Metaphors shape the way we think. Metaphors shape how we make decisions. Metaphors allow us to experience one thing in terms of something else. The following is a sermon produced by a student in a course I teach on metaphor theory. The assignment was to put the basic elements of metaphor theory to use in […]
Paul and Lydia
By Justin Rossow Sometimes you preach a metaphor IN the text. And sometimes you preach a metaphor FOR the text. In Acts 16, Paul meets Lydia at a river. A literal river. Nothing metaphorical about it. But the sermon below takes the image of a river–of tubing and whitewater rafting on a river–as a metaphor […]
How Speaking of Jesus Changed My Preaching
Speaking of Jesus: The Art of NOT Evangelism isn’t intended to be a book on preaching. It’s a book about the primary ways we interact with people who don’t know Jesus. So it’s a book about evangelism, or, as the subtitle suggests, a book about NOT doing evangelism the way we used to. As I read […]
Source and Target, Target, Target Domains
If you know even the basics of contemporary metaphor theory, then you know that in the metaphor “Richard is a gorilla,” what we know (or think we know) about gorillas is the “Source domain.” The metaphor works by taking what we know and expect and how we reason about gorillas and mapping those inferences and […]
Passing on the Faith
In a sermon series called “Family Matters,” we wanted to talk about the importance of passing on the faith to the next generation. But we also wanted to share some of the results of a Family Needs Survey the congregation had taken a few months before. The results of this survey showed a sense of […]
Outreach and Journey
Conceptual Metaphor in Speaking of Jesus, Part 3 Speaking of Jesus intends to move Christians beyond thinking of non-Christians as “the enemy” and of salvation as “crossing a boundary line;” instead, Medearis wants people not only to speak of, but also to follow Jesus. This view of the Christian faith—faith as following Jesus—inherently embodies a […]
LIFE IS A JOURNEY
The following is an excerpt from my 2009 dissertation Preaching The Story Behind the Image: A Narrative Approach to Metaphor for Preaching. The LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor is prevalent both in our culture and in the Biblical text. The cognitive linguistic approach characterized by the work of Georg Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner […]
