Developing MJ's suggestion for Logos (Verbum) Homily Builder tool
MJ recently wrote a post on the new Sermon Assistant tool, and opened it with comments about the homily builder. I wanted to reply to those comments, but realized I should probably write my own post so that hers can remain on-topic with Sermon Assistant. (Full disclosure; have not used Sermon Assistant)
My homiletics class in seminary recently had a (brief) demo of Verbum's homily builder tool, which (longtime Verbum user here) I have intentionally avoided using. (Knowing Logos' approach to software, I suspected it would just be a reskin of the sermon builder tool, which in its nature is quite different from Catholic homiletics. I have avoided it because I am wary of the underlying assumptions of non-liturgical worldviews influencing the content and focus of my work)
So, I have started using the tool for homily writing for my preaching class, just to see if I can get some use out of it and give it a fairer chance.
It's missing one major thing that would make it useful at all for Catholics:
The underlying presumption guiding the vision of this tool is that most of Logos-using preachers are preaching based on a topic or on a single scripture passage. This is not the Catholic experience: the Sunday homily is inspired by the lectionary readings for the day, which are three distinct passages of Scripture (usually an Old Testament passage, a Pauline Epistle passage, and a Gospel passage). Ideal preaching integrates all three passages into an interpretation that applies to the paschal mystery, the present liturgy, and the moral/ethical/spiritual needs of the congregation. That's six points of fundamental and primary data per homily. The underlying assumption behind the homily tool needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift from a single-passage or topical mindset to this liturgical-date mindset.
For example, for my present assignment, I am writing a homily on the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, year B. Its readings are 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51. The homily builder could acknowledge that it's a homily on these three readings; but it would be more accurate to say that the homily is for the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B. (I know the tool has the ability to type this metadata on the side, but it presents it not as primary data, but as supplementary data--you can even see the fatal underlying assumption at work here in that these fields are pushed to the bottom of the tool, visually prioritized after "topic", "series" (??), "number", "occasion," and other fields that are largely foreign to and irrelevant to the Catholic experience. On the contrary: liturgical date should be the first field that the homily builder tool asks the user. The only exceptions to this would be for masses for special occasions (weddings and funerals, basically--and anything outside of this would be pretty rare).
The improvement that I am asking for is simply that the Homily Builder tool understand that liturgical date is the primary metadata information for a Catholic homily; if the Homily Builder tool understood this, then it would be able to:
- Automatically populate the homily with the scripture passages for that day
- Automatically supply the calendar date on which this liturgical date falls this year (So, my 19th Sunday of Ordinary will be August 11, 2024)
That's a minimum of what the homily builder should be able to do. But professional-grade software for Catholics would be able to...
- Supply topic suggestions based on the recommendations of the Vatican's Homiletic Directory, which itself is long overdue to be added to the store (further topics and seasonal themes could be elucidated from The Sunday Lectionary: Ritual Word, Paschal Shape by Normand Bonneau, Liturgical Press, 1998--another treasured book needed in the store)
- Suggest (from the user's library) other homilies, sermons, and commentaries based on the liturgical date first, and the individual scripture passages second
- For feast days of a particular saint, suggest resources or dictionary entries on that particular saint (it serves the double purpose: reminding the preacher that the date will be a particular saint's day, while providing immediate access to information about the saint, who might make a good anecdote or illustration for the homily)
- In fact, there should be a metadata field that connects the homily to a particular saint and that saint's feast date. This field could be automatically populated when the user puts in a liturgical date or a calendar date. For my homily, August 11 is St. Clare of Assisi--although the Sunday celebration trumps saint feast days, if I chose to say something about St. Clare in my homily, it would be nice to have this metadata tag available for future reference--maybe the next year St. Clare's feast will fall on a Monday, and I'll be able to give her more attention; I'll want to know what I said about her on past August 11ths, or other times when I mentioned her not necessarily on her feast.
Thanks for attending my Ted Talk
Comments
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Vote at The Sunday Lectionary: Ritual Word, Paschal Shape by Normand Bonneau, Liturgical Press, 1998 | Logos
Also for the RCL more generally see Gail Ranshaw's works:
And thank you for your response. I agree with everything you said ... and putting it into the seminary context is a big help in getting Logos to listen. Multiple passages in sermons and workflows has been a long-term effort to get them to see what is obvious to many lectionary users.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Excellent post Br Damien, spot on. I would only add one thing. Church teaching also indicates that the prayers of the Mass of the day are also very valid and useful for homily development, so imho your same suggestions of access to the lectionary readings of the Mass should apply to the Mass prayers from the Missal - ordinary as well as specific to the day/feast. So a homilist could draw on prayers like the Collect, Preface, Eucharistic Prayer chosen, Prayer after Communion, etc. I have seen that these often can be used to accentuate a point in the readings or that the homilist has made,
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Don Awalt said:
Excellent post Br Damien, spot on. I would only add one thing. Church teaching also indicates that the prayers of the Mass of the day are also very valid and useful for homily development, so imho your same suggestions of access to the lectionary readings of the Mass should apply to the Mass prayers from the Missal - ordinary as well as specific to the day/feast. So a homilist could draw on prayers like the Collect, Preface, Eucharistic Prayer chosen, Prayer after Communion, etc. I have seen that these often can be used to accentuate a point in the readings or that the homilist has made,
Yes! The euchology of a given mass is essential to formulating the direction of the homily. The Homily Builder could be coded in a way as to draw these in from the user's preferred Missal.
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As it currently is, I am not going to use the Homily Builder for homily writing. It simply doesn't offer me anything that Microsoft Word doesn't do better. Instead of having yet another tab open in Verbum which does not do much, it's easier for me to have Word open in another window and use my Passage Guide (three instances of it) for my research.
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Yes I agree. I use Word as well. Never used any of the homily or sermon building tools, the job would take longer and may not be as good. Sometimes tools restrict the creativity. We should always remember homily development is a combination of prayer-Scripture-Holy Spirit-reflection-submission on a path for the words to come out.
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As a Lutheran using the traditional Western ordo and pre-Vatican II lectionary, I couldn't agree more with the OP. Additionally, I will incorporate texts like the Introit and Gradual into the sermon. This is why I wrote elsewhere that the sermon builder assumes an Evangelical/Baptist mindset that is unhelpful to traditional Christians. While I don't have much understanding of how the propers function in an Eastern Orthodox context (I'm sure there's a better word than "propers"), I imagine they would have similar concerns.
Pastor, Immanuel Evangelical-Lutheran Church (LCMS), Alexandria, VA
Vice President, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (East-Southeast Region)
Author of (Dis)ordered: Lies about Human Nature and the Truth That Sets Us Free
Personal website: Esgetology
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Christopher Esget said:
I imagine they would have similar concerns.
According to my estimates based on estimates of membership by denomination, around 3/4 of Christians share the same concerns. Unfortunately, Logos is so evangelically biased in it designs, that it hasn't even implemented liturgical calendars correctly. It mixed liturgical calendar and lectionary together not recognizing that the lectionary is imposed/mapped to a common calendar. The workflows also show a similar myopic view. Sanctoral cycles had been implemented correctly but when they dropped the ribbon in favor of the home page, they destroyed the sanctoral cycle confusing it with calendar devotionals.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
According to my estimates based on estimates of membership by denomination, around 3/4 of Christians share the same concerns.
That's interesting, MJ. What's your data source? I've often wondered how all of us stack up.
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Lew Worthington said:
That's interesting, MJ. What's your data source? I've often wondered how all of us stack up.
I used wikipedia's list of Christian denominations by number of members. I included:
- Catholicism including canonically irregular, sedevacantist, and independent catholicism.
- Anglicans which should technically have some constituents removed but I figured that the Protestants in groups I omitted balance things out
- Lutherans with the same proviso
- Eastern Protestant Christianity
- Messianic Judaism
- Eastern Orthodoxy
- Oriental Orthodoxy
- Nestorians
I know there are several smaller churches that should be included, and many that I don't know where they belong which I simply rely on Anglican and Lutherans to provide some correction slack. So, yes, my figure is an approximation that I am comfortable is reasonable.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Just posting this reply just to raise awareness (actually hoping that a Logos employee sees it) and also to expand beyond the RCC scope - not trying to take away from your needs, but trying to convince Logos that it makes business sense to build it. This is a needed list of functionality not only for the Verbum homily, but also for the wider ACELO-world (to use MJs acronym for Christians from a variety of traditions) and beyond - where lectionaries or something alike to lectionaries are used. This spreads into the "proper protestantism" even of non-Lutheran heritage: many in the English speaking world use the RCL or other lectionaries, for other languages I would assume similar.
For German I know it: The official material accompanying our German protestant lectionary (called "pericope book") tries to integrate the readings from gospel, epistle, old testament, sometimes different mandatory sermon text and even a motto verse for the liturgical day and two carefully selected hymns. Even though the German protestant lectionary aims at single-text preaching over a six year cycle, the preacher is encouraged to see these texts together (as the congregation will hear them all) and to incorporate the resonaces between them and the situation of the congregants into the sermon.
A much smaller scale, but a use-case that is reaching from the mainline church way into low-church evanglicalism are the moravian texts/watchwords. For every day they will give one OT verse that is actually drawn by lot, then a NT verse and a third text usually from a hymn. Pastors and laypeople alike when giving a quick input (like on birthdays, when they visit a nursery home, as spiritual input into a church business meeting or many more occasions) will often try to craft an integrated message from these texts together and the situation they are in. A homily builder with even the basic functionality you laid out would thus be a massive help.
Have joy in the Lord!
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