L S Lowry Quotes

What book(s) changed your life and why? I could probably list books for days, so I’ll just list a few favorites: The Giver by Lois Lowry, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate, 1984 by George Orwell, the Bible, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and Juliet by Andras Visky (which is a play, but I think it still counts).

NEFARIOUS means utterly, completely wicked. The character in The Wizard of Oz could have been called the Nefarious Witch of the West but authors like to use the same beginning consonant, often. Perhaps L. Frank Baum crossed out nefarious after wicked came to his mind. Thank goodness, because Nefarious would be a terrible name for a musical.

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

And so I shall prefer to speak of the continuity or the movement of a sermon, rather than of its outline.

Says Robert Roth in Story and Reality: “For the Greeks . . . words were definitions. . . . For the Hebrews, on the contrary, words were descriptions.” 14

Hence there is more action or natural movement in describing, for example, a God who walks in the garden in the cool of the day than in defining a pre-existent Logos.

Why not conceive every sermon as narrative—whether or not a parable or other story is involved?

Whatever the thinking of Prof. Lowry and his editor, they obviously share the conviction that The Homiletical Plot can sit comfortably on the shelf with the scores of books on preaching since 1980.

Sometimes a sermon idea seemed to emerge on its own, possessed of its own power, and required a developmental process more akin to pruning than putting together.

It is not enough to probe the question of what the text is saying. It is equally important to discover why it is saying what it says. The question of why is most often the context for the transition into homiletical form.

It is indeed The Story, and our task is to tell it, to form it, to fashion it—not to “organize” it.

So it is that much homiletical advice tends to function in reverse—that is, it works reasonably well in evaluating a sermon already formed, but provides very little help en route!

A sermonic idea is a homiletical bind; a sermon is a narrative plot!

The plain fact was he knew how to do it intuitively, but he could not articulate what it was that he did.

The term plot is key both to sermon preparation and to sermon presentation.

It is a disservice to any form to elevate it as the form.

Transforming our intuitions into articulate form is precisely the purpose of this book.

One might say that any sermon involves both an “itch” and a “scratch” and sermons are born when at least implicitly in the preacher’s mind the problematic itch intersects a solutional scratch—between the particulars of the human predicament and the particularity of the gospel.

Era come se in quel momento stesse contemplando al di là della sterminata pianura e oltre i vulcani l'enorme tumultuoso azzurro oceano stesso, percependolo ancora dentro il cuore: l'impazienza illimitata, la brama incommensurabile.

So it is that once a person has settled on the question as to what is wrong, the choice of cures is limited.

In the case of the movie High Noon, it is obvious that the viewers are not held by their intrinsic interest in the history of the American frontier, in law enforcement, or in noon trains.

The set of outline notes of our poorer sermons, however, will likely reveal that they were shaped by the nature of their substantive content, not by the process of the narrative experience that is anticipated.

Note, too, that fiction writers inevitably catch their central characters in situations involving ambiguities, not contradictories. The marshal in High Noon was being asked to choose not between a good and a bad but between two goods (or two bads, depending upon your angle of view).

the primary purpose of sermon introductions is to produce imbalance for the sake of engagement.

So it is that once a person has settled on the question as to what is wrong, the choice of cures is limited. You do not prescribe surgery for a minor cut, nor do you put a Band-Aid on cancer. The question of the human condition is, I believe, the most fundamental and consequential question of all.

diagnosis is central to our homiletical task.

I noted a second time appreciation for the author’s making room for intuition in the sermon process. Most of us give lip service to the fact that preaching is an art as well as a science, but then we become afraid that someone will think we speak of preaching as an art as an excuse for ambiguity, sloppy thinking, and poor reasoning. In defense, we omit all art and artistry and proceed to offer the reader an adequate technology for framing and delivering the message.