If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself.

The lesson is simply: speak up .

It's OK to slip into advocacy now and then, so long as you do it tastefully. If it sounds high- or heavy-handed — or anything like nagging — you're doing it wrong. Just explain why you care about a particular value. The goal... See more

As I will use the term, then, a sermon is any message designed to change or reinforce what a group of people value. It might take the form of explicit exhortation, full of shoulds and shouldn'ts , oughts and mustn'ts . Or it may be entirely implicit, like the story of a selfless act that saves the day, huzzah! Commencement speeches, TED talks,... See more

Suppose you and I are listening to a physics lecture. Although we share the same goal — learning physics — we're pursuing it more or less independently from one another (and from all other students in the lecture). If  you  happen to fail the class, it's no real skin off  my  nose, and vice versa.

In contrast, suppose we're listening to a sermon —

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Now, to really get our heads around why sermons are interesting, it pays to contrast them with  lectures . Both take roughly the same form: a one-to-many broadcast. But they have different functions (moralizing vs. imparting knowledge), and — please bear with me here — in order to fulfill these different functions, they require different

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