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Rating: 
Summary: Powerful
Review: A powerful collection of three sermons directed at current and future pastors, Taylor discusses the role of a pastor in the church and society. She accurately describes the hot oil feeling of interpreting the Word of God for receptive and unreceptive ears. And she details the awkwardness of that relationship when the pastor feels the well of communication has dried. A must read for anyone who preaches or seeks a conversational relationship with God.
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Summary: How She Broke the Silence!
Review: Barbara Brown Taylor is one more uniquely creative lady! When she begins Yale's Lyman Beecher Lectures her first words are, "How shall I break the silence?" After two attention grasping questions she paraphrases words from Genesis One, hints of creative silence: "The empty air is formless void waiting to be addressed...and the earth could be all ocean, a blue waterworld in space." Bringing in the first man Adam with several other metaphors, she has already captured every poet's attention! This is the same way she preaches...from Clarksville, to Atlanta, to Boston or to Washington. ...The last Chapter on Restraint is my favorite. There she quotes or refers to, Pascal, Rumi, Auden, Frost, Max Picard and then later tells a Jerry Garcia Story, of the "Grateful Dead" edited by Ken Kesey. Not only is she a Poet but an incredible story teller and knows the best from Robert Schumann to Samuel Barber. These last musical references are based upon "Jesus came among us as word. I believe God remains among us as music." How can you top that variety for sustaining interest of content?
How can anyone ever top her way of breaking silence?
Retired Chaplain Fred W Hood
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Summary: exquisite crafter of words..
Review: Barbara Brown Taylor is the kind of preacher that those of us who are, would like to be. The book is dedicated to her mentor, Fred Craddock, who is also- like her- a poet first, and then a preacher. Taylor helps her listeners to anticipate, then embrace, God's silence, rather than lament it. She helps us all to understand that silence in such a way that we know we are looking over her shoulder, as she seeks to understand it herself. As long as God has Taylor, God is not silent..
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Summary: "Homiletical restraint" as respect for God's silence
Review: In these 1997 Lyman Beecher lectures in preaching delivered at Yale Divinity School, Barbara Brown Taylor focuses on the task of the preacher in a world where people thirst for a word from God. How may we approach this seemingly silent God with due respect, proclaiming the Word without violating the silence, by speaking with restraint? Her first chapter examines the late twentieth-century language with which we talk about God in theology and speak to God in prayer. The second chapter addresses the question of God's communication in Scripture and how the "voice of God" was heard less and less in the land as the centuries progressed. Finally, Taylor explores what the silence of God means for preachers and how they may exercise "homiletical restraint" in speaking of the divine.
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Summary: But sometimes, He is NOT SILENT
Review: This book is composed of three lectures Barbara Taylor gave at Yale University under the generous support of the Lyman Beecher Lectures. It's always fun to see who gets to be picked by the committee and each time they roll around with the announcement, it is always a delightful surprise. No more so than in the case of Ms. Taylor, who has been an inspiring speaker for many years with speaking engagements in many places of worship from here to Hattiesburg and back.
In these lectures, which are, after all, aimed toward her fellow practitioners, she asks us, what happens when the words dry up and when God seems to turn His face away from the mess that we humans have made of our world? What does the preacher, a man or woman who depends on His word in the original sense of the word "depends" (i.e., hanging from, like a pearl earring hanging from the girl in Vermeer's painting) what does the preacher do to be able to give something to the folk assembled to hear him -- or her of course? Is there a recourse in silence, or music? In Lecture II all of these elements come together and Ms. Taylor really starts to (to use the lingo of jazz which she loves) "cook." And she doesn't turn off the heat until she's out of the kitchen! Now, sometimes God is silent, or SEEMS to be, but happily, usually He is NOT SILENT.
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Summary: God's silence may be a way to draw us to new understanding.
Review: Through her sermons, Barbara Brown Taylor has earned the reputation of speaking meaningful volumes using only a few choice words. In "When God is Silent," she lives into this reputation once again. Basing her reflections upon Hebrew Testament images of a famine in God's word, Taylor suggests that the glut of wordiness in the world of Church may really be the result not of an outpouring of God's Word upon the faithful, but of a God who is largely silent to us in this day and time. God is leading us to new and unknown discoveries by deliberately NOT speaking, thereby calling us, even requiring us, to listen intently for a new word. Our propensity to speak all the more reveals an unhealthy desire to fill the quiet void with our wordiness, thereby avoiding the real and unpredictable encounter with the God and Creator of the Universe. A book useful for any who dares to preach the Word and exciting for all people of faith, "When God is Silent" is provacative, accessible, and... troubling. The Rev. Ms. Taylor argues that we live in a time when words are rapidly losing their power of meaning, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to say anything of substance of the Word. Nevertheless, the preacher is called to speak, and to speak faithfully. Fortunately, the Rev. Ms. Taylor's grasp of the written and spoken word remains balanced, firm and courteous, and she shares with the preacher useful insight for approaching the task. "When God is Silent" deserves our quiet attention and humble consideration.
Rating:
Summary: God's silence may be a way to draw us to new understanding.
Review: Through her sermons, Barbara Brown Taylor has earned the reputation of speaking meaningful volumes using only a few choice words. In "When God is Silent," she lives into this reputation once again. Basing her reflections upon Hebrew Testament images of a famine in God's word, Taylor suggests that the glut of wordiness in the world of Church may really be the result not of an outpouring of God's Word upon the faithful, but of a God who is largely silent to us in this day and time. God is leading us to new and unknown discoveries by deliberately NOT speaking, thereby calling us, even requiring us, to listen intently for a new word. Our propensity to speak all the more reveals an unhealthy desire to fill the quiet void with our wordiness, thereby avoiding the real and unpredictable encounter with the God and Creator of the Universe. A book useful for any who dares to preach the Word and exciting for all people of faith, "When God is Silent" is provacative, accessible, and... troubling. The Rev. Ms. Taylor argues that we live in a time when words are rapidly losing their power of meaning, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to say anything of substance of the Word. Nevertheless, the preacher is called to speak, and to speak faithfully. Fortunately, the Rev. Ms. Taylor's grasp of the written and spoken word remains balanced, firm and courteous, and she shares with the preacher useful insight for approaching the task. "When God is Silent" deserves our quiet attention and humble consideration.
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