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.
:) Emoticon automates affect
I start writing this lecture after class. I’m following what the poet Mary Ruefle writes in her book Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) about how, upon being required to deliver standing lectures to graduate students, she opted to write them out instead of providing spontaneous, informal talks. She writes, “I preferred to write my lectures because I am a writer and writing is my natural act, more natural than speaking.” I am following this impulse to write into the questions and materials at hand.
I start writing this lecture after class. I’m following what the poet Mary Ruefle writes in her book Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) about how, upon being required to deliver standing lectures to graduate students, she opted to write them out instead of providing spontaneous, informal talks.