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
