Reading Short Stories: A Pathway to Captivating Homilies

Bordenave, Ian Gerard

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Reading Short Stories: A Pathway to Captivating Homilies

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MLA citation style (9th ed.)

Bordenave, Ian Gerard. Reading Short Stories: A Pathway to Captivating Homilies. Aquinas Institute of Theology. rim.ir.atla.com/concern/etds/67d99207-e6d6-4b5c-b65b-3a066c54b087.

APA citation style (7th ed.)

B. I. Gerard. Reading Short Stories: A Pathway to Captivating Homilies. https://rim.ir.atla.com/concern/etds/67d99207-e6d6-4b5c-b65b-3a066c54b087

Chicago citation style (CMOS 17, author-date)

Bordenave, Ian Gerard. Reading Short Stories: A Pathway to Captivating Homilies. Aquinas Institute of Theology. https://rim.ir.atla.com/concern/etds/67d99207-e6d6-4b5c-b65b-3a066c54b087.

Note: These citations are programmatically generated and may be incomplete.

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Bordenave, Ian Gerard

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Abstract

This thesis project investigates whether reading a short story a week can help preachers to preach captivating homilies. Research from several United States Catholic dioceses has shown that parishioners desire to hear engaging homilies when they go to Mass. This author holds that reading a short story a week inspires preachers to adopt short-story traits for their preaching, like unity, brevity, and open-endedness, all of which captivate listeners.This project’s intervention involved qualitative research with five preachers from the Dominican Province of St. Martin de Porres in the southern United States. These preachers were asked to read short stories for twenty-six weeks and to allow their preaching to be evaluated approximately once a month for six months to see if their homilies would become more captivating. In this blind study, the preachers were not cued on what to look for in short stories, and the evaluators were not informed that the preachers were reading short stories. The goal was to see if reading short stories alone was enough to make homilies more captivating.The results from the twenty-six-week intervention showed no clear evidence that reading short stories helped preachers preach captivating homilies, except maybe in the case of one preacher who was already preaching narratively before the intervention began. What is clear from the intervention, however, is that narrative preaching is exceptionally good at captivating people. Further testing is warranted, with such corrections as taking a longer time frame to measure the effects of reading short stories and as preachers being informed about the nature of the intervention and the genre of short stories. The benefit of preaching captivating homilies is that people are more likely to receive the preached message, retain it, and put it into practice.

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