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He has a gift for the short, sharp, descriptive phrase. The Apostle Paul appears as "a deformed wanderer with the label of Tarsus on his baggage." Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus marvels at Taylor's way of playing with a single word: "He whispers it and then he shouts it; he pats, pinches and probes it," each new sentence adding a shade of meaning. Taylor, a veteran community activist and a nationally influential churchman, has been at Concord Baptist for 31 years. He is widely regarded, with justice, as the dean of the nation's black preachers.
Peter J. Gomes, 37, the Memorial Church at Harvard University. A quintessential New England preacher who speaks like a Brahmin, Gomes is a board member of the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth, Mass., his famous home town. He happens to be black. Gomes (rhymes with homes) notes wryly that his parents raised him in "a rather backward environment in which language still had some validity." The Plymouth schools thereafter drilled him in memorizing large chunks of great prose and poetry, a skill he retains.
As a preacher to students, he constantly searches for "the judgment of history upon this place and this moment. We're very unlikely to uncover anything new. It's a conceit of our age that we are the first people who ever encountered anxiety or fear or guilt." When Gomes preached on one of the year's hottest campus issues, divestiture of university investments in firms active in South Africa, he did not dwell on the politics. Instead, he spoke of the irony that the dispute underscored: the crying need for firm moral convictions in a time when universities are celebrating their "freedom from morals, values and virtues."
Gomes' congregation necessarily changes with each graduation. He is naturally as concerned as his student listeners about attitudes toward the future. He notes: " 'What are you doing next year?' can be, and often is, regarded as a hostile question." Gomes makes cheerful academic jokes (on Ascension Day: "It is the Lord who graduates") and will quote Ogden Nash or Woody Allen as freely as Crisis Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. But he offers no easy optimism or simple uplift to his young charges. "Human progress is a foolish myth of epic proportions," Gomes insists. "It is the fantasy of our age and time. Human perseverance in the face of human folly, it is that of which the kingdom of heaven is made."
Elam Davies, 63. Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style on Welsh preachers, the only regular actors on display during his youth.