Preaching to the contemporary mind / Merrill R. Abbey.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Part One: The mind in today's world --
1. Achieving a meeting of minds --
Communicating in Babel --
Making the hearer a partner --
Teaching the preacher to listen --
Understanding to moods of the age --
Meeting the moods at the cross --
2. Authority and communication --
Basic elements part company --
Theological bond reconciles --
Double analysis opens the text --
3. Dynamic encounter --
A meeting that awakens concern --
Christ's tension with culture --
Popular religion's accommodated Christ --
Errors in this idolatry --
4. When we challenge an axiom --
Point of contact, or conflict? --
Power through defined need --
Scripture defies our axioms --
Mirrored in mass media --
Guidelines in controversy --
Part Two: The gospel in today's mind --
5. Faith confronts the secular mind --
"In love with this present world" --
Assumptions cast long shadows --
Man as end is man defiled --
Scientism, an utopian faith --
Some preaching approaches --
6. The gospel and the crisis in character --
Concern, forerunner of grace --
The "respectable" build the underworld --
Sources of the crisis --
Only the lonely hear --
Themes for the encounter --
7. Who speaks for freedom? --
Chartered in the Spirit --
Assault on freedom --
When is the pulpit free? --
Toward a philosophy of freedom --
Freedom's theological dimension --
Proposed double analysis --
8. Creative Christians confront crisis --
A day for apocalypse --
Home in a shattered world --
Crisis calls to creativity --
Preaching to the threatened --
Race at the bar of the gospel --
Leaning forward in hope.