Hosted by the Philadelphia Theological Institute

SCRIPTURE. We can study it carefully. We can listen to sermons on it and read what the experts say about it. But in the end, Scripture needs to be rehearsed and encountered—and we can do that best in community with others. We’ll work through concrete, practical tools for reading and rehearsing Scripture in groups. Suitable for new and seasoned Bible readers alike, this session will invite solitary readers to become community readers as well—to gather around a shared text and encounter God anew together.

Anna Carter Florence is the Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees from Yale University and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div 1988, Ph.D. 2000). Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1998, Dr. Florence served as an associate pastor for youth and young adults at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. Her books include Preaching as Testimony, Inscribing the Word, and Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community, based on her 2012 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School; her current book project is ‘A’ is for Alabaster: A Preacher’s Alphabet. She has also published articles and chapters in numerous books and journals, including a year’s worth of lectionary text commentaries for www.WorkingPreacher.com.

Dr. Florence’s research focuses on testimony, preaching pedagogies, and creative strategies for
communities to engage and encounter the biblical text for our present context. She is a frequent
preacher and lecturer in the U.S. and abroad, most recently for the 2019 Macleod Lecture at
Princeton Seminary, the Festival of Preaching at Christ Church, Oxford, UK, and the
Fjellstedstka Preaching Program in Uppsala, Sweden. These give her plenty of chances to do
what makes her happiest: sitting around a table with a group of people, a big passage of
Scripture, and a big block of time to dive into it. She and her husband, the Rev. David Carter
Florence, have two grown sons. They also have two dogs, two cats, and way too much knitting
yarn.

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