Beecher Lecture II: Will Willimon

Event time: 
Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm
Location: 
409 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

https://livestream.com/yaledivinityschool
Will Willimon ’71 M.Div., Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School, will present the three-part Beecher Lectures at YDS September 14-16.
Dr. Willimon will present the three-part Beecher Lectures as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his graduation from YDS. The theme for his lectures is “Preachers Dare: Speaking for God.” His three Beecher Lectures are:
•    Sept. 14: “Preaching: An Impossible Possibility”
•    Sept. 15: “Preaching: God Getting What God Wants”
•    Sept. 16: “The One True Preacher”
All three lectures will take place at 11:30 a.m. in Marquand Chapel. Seating is limited to 80 people from the on-campus community; details on securing your place will be announced closer to the date. Alumni and other off-campus friends of the School are encouraged to watch the live broadcasts on the YDS Livestream channel or view the post-event videos on YouTube.
Will Willimon earned degrees from Wofford College (B.A.), Yale Divinity School (M.Div.), and Emory University (S.T.D.). A dozen colleges and universities have awarded him honorary degrees. He is the author of roughly 90 books and has served as Bishop of the United Methodist Church. One of his most recent books is Accidental Preacher: A Memoir, which portrays his formative years at YDS. For 20 years he was Dean of Duke University Chapel. Earlier this year, Will’s preaching was the subject of a PBS documentary, “A Will to Preach.” 
The recipient of the YDS Distinction in Ordained Ministry Award in 1992, Will, along with his wife, has established the Will and Patsy Willimon Scholarship at YDS.
In his Beecher Lectures, Dr. Willimon will explore what he describes as the “astounding claim” at the heart of Christian faith: the claim that God speaks. “Against all odds, preachers dare to speak to, with, and for the God who has spoken to us,” Will explains. “The best justification for the practice of Christian preaching is theological: God in Christ is determined to be in conversation with creation through a peculiar people who respond to God’s address by daring publicly to repeat what they’ve heard.” 
The title of his Beecher Lectures, “preachers dare,” was coined by Karl Barth, whose work Will began to study during his student days at YDS and has remained one of his long-standing research interests. It is also the title of a book Will published in 2020 (Abingdon Press). We will have copies of the book available for students to pick up at the lectures at no charge as long as the supply lasts, with the proviso that they read the book.
  
One of the most distinguished lecture series on preaching in the world, the Divinity School’s Lyman Beecher Lectureship was founded in 1871 by a gift from Henry W. Sage of Brooklyn, N.Y., as a memorial to “the great divine whose name it bears,” to sponsor an annual series of lectures on a topic appropriate to the work of the ministry.

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