Charles L. Campbell is James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Duke Divinity School, past president of the Academy of Homiletics, and the 2018 Beecher lecturer. His publications include The Word before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching; Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei's Postliberal Theology; Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a Rhetoric of Folly; and 1 Corinthians in the Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible series.Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, which received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Constructive-Reflective category as well as the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. A prolific writer and highly sought-after speaker, he is also an ordained Baptist minister.

"These essays are a first, not the final, word on preaching and the grotesque. They are an invitation to look with new eyes upon the cross, to consider again the ways its strange aesthetic can transform us and our world." – Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology

Charles L. Campbell is James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Duke Divinity School, past president of the Academy of Homiletics, and the 2018 Beecher lecturer. His publications include The Word before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching; Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei's Postliberal Theology; Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a Rhetoric of Folly; and 1 Corinthians in the Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible series.Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, which received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Constructive-Reflective category as well as the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. A prolific writer and highly sought-after speaker, he is also an ordained Baptist minister.

"These essays are a first, not the final, word on preaching and the grotesque. They are an invitation to look with new eyes upon the cross, to consider again the ways its strange aesthetic can transform us and our world." – Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology