Quotations from Vital Speeches of the Day: #7 – Barry C. Black on Releasing the Power of Responsible Rhetoric

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barry C. Black has been the Chaplain of the U.S. Senate for over two decades. On October 23, 2020 he virtually delivered a speech to the World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association titled Releasing the Power of Responsible Rhetoric. It was published on pages 19 to 22 of the January 2021 issue of Vital Speeches of the Day magazine. He said that:

 

“Immaturity and childishness speak first, then understand what has been said, and then think about the consequences of what has been said. Spiritual maturity reverses it: Think, understand, speak. Think of what needs to be said or written. Understand the impact that it could make. And then write it or speak it. Strive for spiritual maturity.”

 

And, in the first paragraph on page 20 he gave a historical example from a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

 

“And on and on again, he was emphasizing normalcy never again. But Mahalia Jackson, a much better speechwriter, had heard Martin speak time and time again, and she can be heard in the background saying, ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin!’ He plowed on. Now is the time, now is the time… ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin!’

 

Wyatt Walker and others had realized they had labored through the night writing this wonderful conclusion so that Martin wouldn’t tell them about the dream. But as he reaches the point for the peroration, there’s a pause. And Martin flips over the manuscript and goes rogue.

 

I say to you today my friends, that despite the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

 

And the rest is history. The speech is not known as ‘Normalcy – Never Again.’ It’s known as the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”  

 

At the web site for the C. S. Lewis Institute you can also find an eight-page pdf of his speech titled Praying Your Way Through Life’s Challenges.

 

The floral cross was adapted from this image at Openclipart.

 

 

On August 26, 2023 this blog had a gigantic spike in page views, with 27.6 times the annual average

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because this blog is not commercial, I don’t look hard at the number of page views I’m getting each day. But on August 26th something quite amazing happened. As shown above, there were 12,295 views – which is 27.6 times the annual average of 446 per day. What on earth had happened?

 

On August 25th I had blogged about how Preaching is a very special form of public speaking. As is usual, I had put that post at the Public Speaking group on LinkedIn (my only ‘advertising’ for the blog). The group owner, James Feudo, recommended it – which meant it was featured pinned at the top of the page rather than moving down after newer posts appeared. It has received over 134 impressions. That presumably led a lot of people to my blog. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What about the long term? As shown above, there only have been two months, June 2016 and July 2023 when this blog has averaged over 2000 page views per day.

 

I started Joyful Public Speaking after I joined Toastmasters International. As I learned about public speaking, I wanted to reach further than the ~20 people in a typical club. Just on August 26th the blog reached ~615 times that number of people.

 

On June 7, 2021 I blogged about how Your speech has more reach than you think. In that post I discussed John Zimmer’s notion that you should multiply the time for your speech by the number of people in your audience. I called it the reach, in units of person-minutes. LinkedIn estimated the reading time for my blog post on preaching at 2 minutes, so its reach would similarly be 24,590 person-minutes or 409.8 person-hours, or 17.08 person-days.

  

Preaching is a very special form of public speaking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preaching is a special form of public speaking which has been done for thousands of years, as shown above by a 1517 print of Saint Paul in Athens. Wikipedia defines a preacher as:  

 

“A person who delivers sermons or homilies on religious topics to an assembly of people.”

 

And it defines a homily as:

 

“A commentary that follows a reading of scripture, giving the ‘public explanation of a sacred doctrine’ or text.”

 

The art of preaching is called homiletics:

 

“Homiletics, the art of preaching, studies both the composition and the delivery of religious discourses. It includes all forms of preaching, including sermons, homilies and catechetical instruction. Homiletics may be further defined as the study of the analysis, classification, preparation, composition, and delivery of sermons.”

 

When I looked at the Internet Archive for books on preaching, I found one over a hundred and fifty years old - the 1872 Yale Lectures on Preaching by Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887).

 

There is an article by Michael Duduit at Preaching.com titled The 25 most influential preaching books of the past 25 years. Number 21 on the list from 2005 was edited by Haddon Robinson and Craig Brian Larson and is titled The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching. You can read it online at PREACHINGtoday. Chapter 13 is about The History of Preaching. It discusses key preaching types:

 

Teacher preachers

Herald preachers

Inductive preachers

Narrative preachers

 

There are ten chapters just in the section on Delivery, starting with Chapter 160: The Source of Passion.