According to the general opinion in Poland, hearing a good sermon seems practically a miracle. Arguing with the above view, this article presents a volume of sermons entitled: With Christ in the liturgical year, which appeared in October 2011. Archbishop Jozef Michalik is the author of thought provoking and clever texts that can be found there. The article discusses the preaching characteristics of this Metropolitan Bishop of Przemysl. What have been highlighted here are: the wealth of homiletic materials, openness of the sermons to the ills of a contemporary social life in Poland and Europe, the inclusion of listeners in the course of argument, reasoning and argumentation, an exemplary of sermons and a variety of rhetorical figures used in them.
The author analyses content and formal structures of a sermon as an individual genre. He reasons that texts of religious communication sphere are not united on a base of a special religious style, but they are related to the several functional language styles.
The study is focused on the genres, which are appertaining to religious style, and those are classified into a confessional or a catechistic category. The central attention of the article however is orientated on the sermon as a genre.
The text deals with the attitudes towards the body and the soul in the Ruthenian Orthodox homiliary literature in the 17th century. In some sermons one can read that people are more perfect God’s creatures than angels which have no opportunity to come back to God after their fall at the beginning of the time. Preachers emphasized many advantages of having material body, the main being: — the body is not as precious as the soul but just because of the body, human being is able to do penance, do merciful deeds towards the poor, orphans, widows, sick people; can sacrifice sufferings for the sins; — weakness and mortality of the body help people to remember that they should make efforts to achieve future joy; — human nature is not tended to evil nor is the body, and the bodily death we cannot avoid is the only way to leave worldliness and reach better life in eternity. It is a very optimistic way of thinking about the body and the soul and it seems to have its source in the Church fathers’ teachings.
The subject of the study is the analysis of the use of deictic expressions in the beginning of the sermon written by Juraj Fándly Concio Historico – Panegyrica de Sanctis Slavorum Apostolis, Cyrillo, & Methodio dedicated to Saint Constantine and Methodius, published as part of the two-volume edition of Fándly‘s Príhodné Swátečné Kázňe (Trnava 1795 – 1796). Attention is focused on the area of personal and temporal deixis, on the analysis of means by which the sermon refers to the participants of the communication and their status, role and actual present situation. The study asks whether there is a correlation between the compositional division of sermon and the distribution of deictic expressions, and how deixis participates in the process in which the subject of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission becomes an actual part of the obedient lecture-oriented discourse.
The article examines the manuscript collection of sermons of the 17th century „Statir“ (Moscow, Russian State Library, Collection of Rumyantsev 411). The book was compiled by a priest from the Church of the Praise of the Mother of God in Orel-gorodok on the River Kama, the estate of the Stroganovs. The manuscript contains 156 homilies for various feasts, from which the text written for the service in honor of the feast of the Mother of God is selected. The historical context of the choice of the sermon‘s name is explained and the poetics of the sermon is examined. The main originality of the text is seen in the author‘s vivid presence, the idea of overcoming sinfulness is given a personal evaluation by the preacher. The author seeks to create the effect of people‘s unity in communion with the perfect image of the Mother of God. The Precept creates a synthesis of epic eschatological expectation and lyrical treatment of the soul. The sermon reveals individual feelings in line with the biography and personal qualities of the author, foreshadowing the future development of Russian philosophical lyricism.
The paper is devoted to the textual analysis of the sermon Sincere Encouragement to True Repentance and Prayer (Věrné probuzení k pravému pokání a modlení), presented by Bohuslav Mezibrodský in the community of Lowland Slovak evangelicals in the village of Eška (Hungarian Öskü) in September 1749. The subject of the sermon is an unusual natural phenomenon – the arrival of locusts, which caused existential fears among the inhabitants and caused huge confusion among them. The same subject was elaborated by Matej Markovič senior in the poetic composition The Mourning Song about the Grasshoppers (Smutná pieseň o kobylkách, 1749), the analysis of which will serve us as a model.
Archbishop of Esztergom and Cardinal Alexander Rudnay (1760 – 1831) achieved a successful church career not only thanks to his theological erudition, language and diplomatic skills, synodal as well as philanthropic activities, but also through his sermons. The English translation and analysis of his first sermon conceived in four languages (Latin, German, Slovak, Hungarian) and published in 1833 in an edition of his 82 sermons collected from 1778 to 1805 under the title „Kázne prihodné...“ points to the development of Rudnay’s personality, vision and faith or the multi-ethnic character of modern Hungary. The central theme of the sermon was the miraculous act of Jesus Christ, when the hungry people who followed him for three days were fed by the multiplication of the seven loaves of bread. The text does not lack references to the Book of Exodus, the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, the Book of Psalms, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Matthew and the Letters of St. Paul. Choice of the central theme, examples and arguments used, adherence to scholastic principles, emotional colouring, realization of own individual, warning against materialism and the importance of spiritual values, and the challenge not to sin again must have had a sophisticated and systematic effect on the recipient at the time and testify to Rudnay’s conscientiousness and dexterity already at a young age.
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