The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
February 2008
The Preacher In The Text:
Zora Neale Hurston And Thehomiletics Of Literature
By M. Cooper Harriss
University of Chicago Divinity School
1 A third collection, Tell My Horse (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938) contains only her work with Caribbean sources. So does the second half of Mules and Men. A portion of Hurston’s field research was published as Every Tongue Got to Confess: Folk-tales from the Gulf States (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002).
2 Flannery O’Connor offers this parallel between liturgy and manners in the essays collected in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).
3 See John Michael Spencer, “The Black Church and the Harlem Renaissance,” African American Review 30:3 (Autumn, 1996): 453-60. Spencer sees “an institutionalization of the [Harlem] Renaissance in the black church and that this institutionalization came in the form of the social gospel movement” (453).
4 Johnson published God’s Trombones, a book of poetry based on the “old-time” sermon, in 1927. Interestingly, Hurston’s transcription of Lovelace’s sermon in The Sanctified Church resembles the poems from God’s Trombones on the page.
5 Dolan Hubbard makes a similar argument but comes about it quite differently in The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994). See especially his chapter on Their Eyes (47-63).
6 The angel with the sword resonates closest with the account known as “Balaam’s ass” in Numbers 22:22-35. The language of “day nor hour” appears twice in Matthew (24:36 and 25:13), the Gospel Hurston seems unofficially to favor (though it also turns up in Mark and Luke).
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