This past week Fred Craddock, one of the world’s most influential homileticians of the past half-century, died at the age of 86. Craddock burst onto the scene in 1971 with his As One Without Authority, and his seminal book landed like “a bombshell on the playground of preachers.” In it, Craddock called for a new homiletic, for preaching to start with the hearer, not the text, and for preaching to be inductive, not deductive. Read more