This book by Father Nicholas Grace (IVE), is principally written for persons who would like to know the basic rules and tools, principles and techniques associated with the art of preaching and public speaking, and especially efficient sermonizing. The book proposes to give some of those tools that can give the preacher a more professional edge. It will be attractive to any person who perhaps struggles to retain the attention of their listeners on a regular basis, and would like simple solutions to what has been a difficult problem.
Father Grace shows his enthusiasm for communicating worthy topics in a worthy manner and tries to offer in a very synthetic and simplified way a means for aspiring preachers to be able to improve their speaking relatively easily, by offering quick access to what might otherwise be inaccessible. The book puts the readers in touch with some the great preachers & orators of the past and present, from Bishops, to Popes to Politicians.
Indeed it shows how even the modern language of today’s political rhetoric can be somewhat helpful to preachers in the present, as the orations from the senate floor were helpful to the likes of the studious Fray Luis de Granada in the past.
It must be said that Fray Luis and his Obra Magna on preaching, (Retórica Eclesiástica), play an important role in the book, though it is not a summary of Retórica Eclesiástica, but is rather inspired and illuminated by it, as it also is by the more modern efforts of Preachers like Bishop Fulton Sheen.
The book goes through a wide array of topics like: Preaching preparation, styles, gesture, pronunciation. There is also a summarized but still quite comprehensive presentation of the five canons of rhetoric, (The classical approach to understanding effective communication) as well as established modes of persuasion: Ethos, Logos and Pathos.
Finally, what makes learning easy with this effort of Father Grace are the very extensive examples he provides to illustrate his points, particularly, but in way exclusively, from the Sacred Scripture.