Top Highlights

• a partial explanation for the decline in preaching over the last half century, with a few suggestions for its remedy.
• will suggest that societal changes that led to the concerns expressed in the 1960s to 1980s in educational circles—societal changes reflected in a decline in the ability to read (texts) and write—have led to the natural cultural consequence that people cannot preach expositorily.
• Neil Postman. Postman coined the term media ecology to describe how changes in dominant media alter the human and social environment.
• Media ecology, as a discipline, is comparatively less concerned with the content of a given medium and more concerned about how the mere presence of that medium itself alters individual consciousness, social structures, or cultural habits and sensibilities.
• In this book, I am asking a media-ecological question: How has the movement from language-based media to image-based and electronic media altered our sensibilities, and how, in turn, has this change in sensibility shaped today’s preachers?