Thomas G. Long is the Bandy Professor of Preaching Emeritus at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. A Presbyterian minister, Dr. Long has served churches in Georgia and New Jersey. He has taught preaching for over forty years -- at Erskine Theological Seminary, Columbia Theological Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and, from 2000-2015, at Candler. Dr. Long has served as the president of the Academy of Homiletics and as senior homiletics editor of the New Interpreter’s Bible. He has been editor of Theology Today, is currently an associate editor of Journal for Preachers, and serves as an editor-at-large at The Christian Century. He is the author of textbooks on preaching and worship, collections of sermons, and biblical commentaries on Matthew, Hebrews, and the Pastoral Epistles. In 2011, he was awarded the Emory Williams prize for excellence in teaching by Emory University, and in 2015 he received Emory’s “Scholar/Teacher Award,” the top faculty scholarship award of the university. He delivered the 2006 Lyman Beecher Lectures in Preaching at Yale Divinity School, and these have been published as Preaching from Memory to Hope. His most recent books are Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith, The Good Funeral: Death, Grief, and the Community of Care (with Thomas Lynch), and 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus.
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Parables Aren’t Platitudes. They’re Sticks of Dynamite
The first element that gets blown up by the parable is the motive of the landowner. Sometimes preachers, trying to fill in the gaps in the story, will surmise something like, “So the landowner, needing more laborers to work the vineyard, went back to the marketplace,” but this distorts the parable.