• When Speech Was King
• Walter Ong's Brilliant Recovery
• The Invention of the Alphabet
• How Writing Changed the World
• The Gift of Literacy
• The Dangers of A Paper Orientation
• Loss of Personal Presence
• Loss of Shared Space
• Loss of Discovery
• The Psychodyamics of Orality

It's hard to overestimate how much print culture changed the way we process information. Since we were born and raised in it, we don't typically appreciate its pervasive influence. Certain literacy has provided many benefits in terms of preservation of knowledge. But those benefits came with a cost: communication could become generic and depersonalized. Literary sermons could for the first time be delivered without the necessary connection between heart and tongue. It became possible to read things to people that the preacher didn't personally understand.

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 Chapter 2- The Theology of Orality

• How Literate Was the Ancient World?
• Does Christianity Require Literacy?
• The Bible and a Literate Revelation
• The Word of God in Torah, Prophets, Jesus and Paul
• What the Bible Displays About Its Own Literacy and Orality
• Scripture's Oral Roots
• The Theology of Sound: Why Sound Matters to God

How do we account for the fact that for most of the history of God's people, there was no feasible way for individuals to read, much less own, their own personal Bibles? Literacy was for the hyper-educated and elite. It was s specialized skill that only a few needed to master. That means the average home, synagogue, and church setting had to operate much differently than we do today. They had to utilize oral resources which tied them very close to the theology of sound. It's no accident that God prioritizes sound over text. Sound permeates people in a way text just can't duplicate.

• Preaching in the Early Church
• Patristic Preaching
• Medieval Preaching
• Reformation Preaching
• The Twentieth Century Move Toward Literate Homiletics
• Preaching in Post-Modernity'

Preaching wasn't always done with the same reliance upon literary tools that we find so common today. For much of church history, preachers relied much more upon their overall understanding and absorption of scripture so that they could preach in a variety of settings without having every word figured out ahead of time. A sermon wasn't something exterior to them on paper as much as it was interior- a result of the synthesis of scripture, doctrine, and personal aquaintance with the text.

• Augustine's Help in Rehabilitating Dead Pagans
• Aristotle and the World of Rhetoric
• Quintilian and the Roman Way
• Preparing Yourself as a Preacher
• Need for a Personalized Theology
• Need for Character
• Building Breadth in Your Reading
• Stocking Your Pantry
• The Lost Art of Scripture Memory

• Preparing an Orally-Generated Sermon
• Listening to Your Text
• Dialogic Preparation
• Why Roadmaps are Better Than Outlines
• Pre-hearsing a Sermon

• Delivering an Orally-Generated Sermon
• Being "In the Moment"
• The Importance of Eyes
• Why Powerpoint is a Mistake in Preaching
• The Unfinished Sermon
• Adapting to the Room
• The Futility of Saving Your Sermons
• Starting Where You Are
• The Danger of Winging It

Chapter 7 contains 16 Homework Assignments (Presented in 1-3 minute Video Clips) featuring "Things You Can Do This Week" to start training yourself in Oral Homiletics.