2025 Annual Meeting:

Preaching and Place

This year’s theme extends the theme from 2024: “Preaching Builds Bridges.” Our 2024 theme prioritized the work stemming from our 2019 theme “Preaching and Homiletical Whiteness,” as well as the 2022 Wabash-funded self-study of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Academy of Homiletics. As a guild, AOH members have made considerable efforts to be more inclusive, expansive, and just in their teaching, research, and practice of preaching. And while real-life bridges connect people and perspectives, we cannot do so without also accounting for place.

In the biblical witness, place serves a variety of functions: naming God’s presence and activity, defining God’s presence and judgment, marking socio-cultural and religious difference, accounting for the formation and maintenance of identity, charting the faithfulness and faithlessness of God’s people, mapping God’s present and future promises, and much more. Throughout history, place has been a way that identity, conflict, community, and interactions with the Holy have been mediated.

In recent years, we have become more accustomed to accounting for the ways that place affects our homiletical theory and practice, and the ways that homiletical theory and practice affects place. Contextuality, globalization, coloniality, migration, ecological crisis, war, the changing nature of sacred spaces and spaces from which preaching happens, digitality, place-based pedagogy, and more have all become integral to our collective work as it relates to place. And we have more work to do.

This year’s theme invites us to reflect on “place” in our research, teaching, and practice of preaching, especially as we continue our collective commitment to seeking justice in our scholarship.

Meeting Schedule

Wednesday, December 3: Pre-meeting Affinity Groups

Thursday, December 4: Day 1

Friday, December 5: Day 2

Saturday, December 6: Day 3

Academy of Homiletics Workgroups

When an Academy member has a paper that meets the submission guidelines for a workgroup, she or he should submit it directly to the workgroup convener. Conveners are not editors and will return papers that do not strictly follow the submission guidelines. Qualified doctoral candidates, those who have completed all coursework in a homiletics-related field, must work through their doctoral advisers in making workgroup submissions.

Access the 2025 Call for Workgroups Papers Here (coming soon!)

Scholarship Application

The Academy of Homiletics is pleased to offer a number of scholarships for the 2025 Annual Meeting to students and retirees. A successful application for the scholarship will result in a payment from designated AoH funds for the student or retiree’s registration fee for the Annual Meeting.  Scholarships are limited and will provided on a first-come, first-served basis.

Applications are confidential.  To apply for a Scholarship and Registration Code to cover the registration fee for the 2024 annual meeting, please submit your application to AoH Secretary, Sunggu A. Yang.  All applications will remain confidential and your request will not be shared beyond the Executive Committee. Applications are due by TBA.  Three members of the AOH Executive Committee will determine the recipients of the scholarships no later than TBA.

2025 AOH Scholarship Application

AOH wishes to thank all our Sponsors