Preaching is hard. Anyone who has ever sat with the Bible open, surrounded by commentaries, with a date circled on the calendar, knows what I mean. Words don't jump to life by themselves. When it happens, it's hard to explain how it happened. When it doesn't, it's just depressing.

This set of books about preaching tells us something about the difficulty of preaching. To read great preaching is to open oneself to homiletical despair. Sure I can see that Will Willimon is hilarious, Barbara Brown Taylor gentle, Marilyn McCord Adams brilliant—but how's that make me any more likely to be hilarious, gentle, or brilliant on some upcoming Sunday morning at 11?

Adams will seem like the one who doesn't belong among these homiletical greats. She's better known as a philosophical theologian whose work on such difficult late-medieval thinkers as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham has bailed out many a graduate student facing exams. In the best Anglican tradition she is also a priest, and has spent her teaching years at UCLA, Yale, and now Oxford, stepping in at local churches with charming names like St. Augustine's-By-The-Sea.

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Despite a light touch and often stirring biblical exegesis, Adams' preaching elsewhere has a kind of monotony to it. She introduces her work as "sermons preached for those who find God's Goodness problematic," and piles up vignettes about those whose experience of abuse has left them with mistrust of God as father, or the church as a place of healing. To her credit she does not simply replace one idol with another—God as mother comes in for scrutiny, and Adams loves traditional church teaching too much simply to throw it overboard. Yet she so regularly signals disappointment with the church's refusal to sanction same-sex relationships that she comes off here as something of a single-issue-preacher. By the time we reach sermons entitled, "Queer Variety," "Gay Pride, Humbled Church," and " 'Coming Out' in the Power of the Spirit," things have ...

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