Emotion, Language, and the Practice of Preaching

How do emotions work in preaching, and how can they be identified, analysed, and evaluated with scholarly precision? Drawing on research in homiletics, rhetoric, and affect theory, Matthew D. Love argues that emotional language is central to persuasive preaching rather than incidental to it. Emotions shape cognition, guide interpretation, and influence how sermons are embodied by listeners. By integrating rhetorical criticism with contemporary accounts of emotion, the volume reframes preaching as disciplined communicative work with the heart and offers a rigorous framework for analysing how language evokes, directs, and sustains affect in sermonic discourse.The analysis is grounded in close readings of sermon texts by three influential preachers: Fred B. Craddock, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Gardner C. Taylor. Across nine representative sermons, emotional force is traced through five recurring features: explicit emotional lexemes, sensory language, metaphor, identification, and scene. Craddock’s narrative sermons cultivate imaginative empathy; Taylor’s prose engages longing, awe, and moral tension; and Gardner C. Taylor’s cadenced oratory deploys metaphor and identification to sustain communal memory and hope. Together, these readings demonstrate how emotional language functions across differing styles, contexts, and theological commitments. Bringing theory and practice into sustained dialogue, Love offers a transferable critical method for sermon analysis while deepening scholarly understanding of emotion in preaching.