preaching from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans

Over at The Living Church’s Covenant blog, I’ve got a new post on three books I recommend to my students. Here’s how it begins:

For the last decade and a half, I’ve taught St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans to seminarians. Most of this teaching has taken place in the context of semester-long courses surveying the entirety of the New Testament, so I’ve had to agonize over how to distill what I want to say about Romans into the space of just one class period (which is to say, three short hours for the greatest letter ever written). But several times—like this current spring semester—I’ve been given the chance to teach a whole class on Paul’s masterpiece. What luxury—and what joy!

As I pondered what textbooks to assign, I was mindful that for 16 consecutive weeks this summer, preachers who use the Revised Common Lectionary will have the opportunity of preaching through large chunks of Romans. (Aside from the four Gospels, Romans shows up in a longer segment of weeks in the lectionary than any other biblical book does, underscoring its significance.) And so I thought of my students, not yet ordained, who may be looking ahead to some such future summer wondering how they might best mine the text of Romans and deliver it to their congregations homiletically. What resources could best equip them for the task? What could I suggest they purchase to keep on their bookshelves for years to come?

I ended up requiring two books and strongly recommending a third: all three of them are written by women, and two of them written by Episcopal priests.

Read the rest here.

And one more thing.

Here’s a review I wrote a while back on one of the most interesting recent books on Romans. The book is by Matthew Croasmun, of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, and I enthusiastically recommend it:

• “Paul and the Cosmic Tyrant: Sin and Emergence Theory.”