In case your mind wandered during the reading from the Book of Ruth, you might have missed a rather intimate conversation between two women, of the sort you might not expect in the Bible. The older of the two is a widow named Naomi. She has some advice for her daughter-in-law named Ruth, who has the double misfortune of being both a widow and a foreigner. Naomi is speaking woman to woman, widow to widow: ‘In this environment,’ she says, ‘you need the help of a good man. But, God knows, a good man is hard to find. I have a cousin named Boaz who is such a man. Tonight, when Boaz is sleeping on the threshing floor, apply your best fragrance, curl up at his feet—and see what happens.’

Now, as a preacher, it’s my responsibility to make that bit of inconsequential advice relevant to one of the most consequential days in modern American history. Election Day—a day when the future course of the nation, institutions, and its role in the world hang in the balance.

Shortly after I preached at an Academy of Homiletics meeting in Oakland, California, a colleague said wryly, “I found your sermon most persuasive.” I presume he spoke tongue in cheek, having read a friend’s early critique of my rejection of ‘persuasion’ as a paradigm for Christian preaching.

Why would anyone wish not to be persuasive, especially a preacher, of all people, whose “success” depends on his or her ability to win an audience? In this endeavor the preacher follows certain biblical precedents. Jesus apparently told his parables in a religiously contested situation. Paul argued his message against a variety of opponents in the marketplace, the synagogue, and even in his own churches. Like Paul, we preach in an atmosphere of religious and cultural pluralism. Persuasion is a rhetorical necessity in a capitalist democracy. How else are you going to elect a candidate or sell a product? It flourishes in a society like ours that prizes the exercise and spoils of free speech.

Image: Given how important memoir has been in your life, I find it interesting that you seemed to fall into the genre. What accounts for your decades-long fascination?

Richard Lischer: Most memoirists write at an inflection point in their lives—which is, of course, a remembered inflection point—from which they date some new understanding of themselves. The poet and preacher John Donne pointedly wrote, “I date my life from my ministry.” I completed two memoirs about my own inflection points before developing a scholarly interest in the genre. I had no institutional purpose in writing them other than the need to tell—nothing to defend, no axe to grind, no score to settle.