Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church” William H. Willimon, editor Available February 2005

H. Shelton Smith delivers a courageous sermon that anticipates the Civil Rights movement (April 1956)

James T. Cleland, the first Dean of Duke Chapel, uses Death of the Salesman as the basis for a sermon on academic suicide (February 1959)

Martin Niemöller describes how his experience in Dachau taught him something about the God whose “strength is made perfect in weakness” (February 1963)

Activist and gadfly William Sloan Coffin Jr. assails intellectual immobility in a time of crisis (March 1967)

Former Duke provost Thomas A. Langford draws on Thomas Wolfe, the Beatles, and the Gospel for a Homecoming sermon (October 1967)

Thor Hall forsakes his planned sermon in favor of a plea for nonviolence in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy (June 1968)

Edmund A. Steimle tells those who doubt and question God that they can profit from the season of Lent more than those who are “unperturbed” (March 1971)

Billy Graham, in one of four sermons he delivered at Duke Chapel, focuses on Death (September 1973)

Martin E. Marty preaches with the bible in one hand and Psychology Today in the other (November 1983)

Will Campbell displays his gifts of humor, sarcasm, and outrageous prophetic pronouncement (January 1977)

Thomas G. Long challenges the “assumptive world” of his listeners and moves them toward that alternative world evoked by the imaginative power of the gospel. (November 1986)

Richard Lischer preaches in the week after an undergraduate member of the Chapel Choir was killed in a bus accident on campus (November 1992)

Peter J. Gomes delivers a lively, rich, elaborate rendition of the story of Joseph and his brothers (February 1995)

David G. Buttrick defends adaptation to the secular world, basing his sermon on Jeremiah’s words to the exiles of Israel (October 1995)

Fleming Rutledge, in the first days of the war with Iraq, speaks on the dangers of judging other persons or groups as evil (March 2003)

Barbara Brown Taylor, in “The Snake Savior,” describes a Savior who saves in ways we do not always find congenial with our expectations for salvation (March 2003)

William H. Willimon speaks on the first Sunday of the school year on the need for open minds, open hearts, and heightened imagination when dealing with the claims of the gospel (August 2003)

For a complete description of Sermons from Duke Chapel, please click here.

For information on how to order Duke University Press books, please click here.