Sermons

I will look at Edwards and maybe Emerson.

One thing missing is stuff which is from other religions. I am looking for the art of it, though ofc it can be in service of shitty politics so I don't know how far I want to go.

Thanks for the post. I’m interested to check out some of these

It's not a genre I've ever loved - they've largely sunk into reasonableness by the end of the 17th & by the 18th there's that solid grim careerist aspect to them - even the greatest of the 18th century (Swift, Sterne) are on best behaviour in their sermons.

Feels like the wilder traditions - mechanick preachers, radicals, all of that - don't really get captured much after mid-17th-century printing/religious-liberty clampdowns, or become the much plainer dissenting sermon. Like I respect someone like Price at the end of the century, but I don't particularly want to read him.

In general I prefer earlier so yup Donne and Taylor are the two exceptions I'd make - maybe Lancelot Andrewes in there too, kind of chillier. If I think of anyone else I will drop them in.

do british schoolkids have to read anything like we American hghschoolers read "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God?" (for historical purposes only, to explain the Great Awakening)

When I went to the Luther Museum in Wittenberg they had a whole exhibit of tracts from the Reformation era of preachers of all sorts of persuasions, not just Luther and his followers. Probably a lot of stuff not translated into English, though.

This guy is intriguing: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Muntzer

I'm glad to hear Taylor is getting reprinted - he was hard to find for a long time. Holy Dying is really spectacular, that opening… man as a "dream of a shadow of smoke" is a line that comes into my head weirdly often while just blankly staring at stuff.

(And lol while googling I see that David Tibet/Current 93 is a Jeremy Taylor fan of course)

This is recent and academic, so not what you're looking for, but as a Kipling fan I really like this Rowan Williams sermon about his work:

http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1604/rudyard-kipling-sermon.html

When I was young "Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten" was a popular book. I think it was a collection of sermons by a Unitarian. Kind of in that anodyne style that also characterized certain newspaper columns of the era. Honestly, sermons are works I'm pretty fond of. They remind me a little bit of essays, but written to be delivered in person. They're different from speeches to me too. A different purpose. There's a lot of stuff that I think does descend from the sermon tradition, but nothing quite like it. I'd say it's more or less a dead art form, alongside syndicated newspaper columns.

Lily - I am OK with Williams and will have a look. He did a pretty decent interview on Rilke that I happened to come across a few years ago.

The guy from Sublunary who reprinted Taylor also had a lot of time for Thomas Traherne.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Traherne

Guess we could expand this thread to include spiritual writing.

i've always felt there might be interesting stuff in Bossuet, but have never known where to start