On the sermons of Tyrone Williams
A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022.
Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.
Abyss
Pt. 9
We are so deeply mired in our philosophies as to have evolved nothing better than a sordid version of the void: nothingness. Into it we have projected our uncertainties, all our ills and terrors, for what is nothingness, ultimately, but an abstract complement of hell, the performance of outcasts, the last-ditch effort at lucidity mustered by creatures unequipped for deliverance? — E. M. Cioran[1]