Sermons In War: Reflections One Decade After 9/11 - Tapa blanda

“I continue to try and make sense of a blue, autumn day violated by war and the consequences that scarred us.” Pastor, professor of church history, husband and father, Dr. Michael Bledsoe provides a collection of the initial sermons he offered in response to 9/11. These are joined in turn by sermons offered over the past decade that speak to war and peace and “the complicity of religion with all that diminishes us.” These sermons, and a pastor’s reflection on why he chose to preach in the way he did, are not the pablum of Christianity-as-Entertainment but are “rocks thrown at windows.” For these sermons brave difficult questions, offer a critique of prevailing cultural and secular ideas and in the end, honor the lives of both congregant and citizen who have sought to make sense of their lives in a context of war.

A graduate of Stetson University with a B.A. in Religion, 1976, the M.Div. in 1983 and the Ph.D. in World Religions in 1988 from Southern Seminary in Louisville, Dr. Bledsoe has pastored four churches, including two smaller churches during seminary, one during the M.Div. and the other during the Ph.D. , Lick Branch Baptist Church in Deputy, Indiana and Union Baptist Church in Crothersville, Indiana. He then pastored for three years the First Baptist Church of Columbus, Ohio. Presently and since 1992, he has pastored Riverside Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. He has been an adjunct faculty member at Howard University School of Divinity since 1997, lecturing in World Religions, Philosophy of Religion, and Church History. Married to Melinda Dunn and father to Kelley and Kirsten, he lives with his family in Arlington, Virginia.