A preacher’s job is harder in the 21st-century United States than in many other places and times. Imagine attending a liturgy and hearing the gospel preached in the Romanesque or Gothic churches of Europe when they were newly built. Those churches stood as the geographical heart and center of communities. Imagine a medieval villager’s sense of amazement while attending a liturgy. It must have been dazzling compared to daily life.

Today, our context is wildly different. Where pulpit preaching at Mass was once practically the only game in town, contemporary Mass-goers are inundated with sensory input and messaging in our postmodern world. We have multiple streams of content vying for our attention 24 hours a day: a proliferation of podcasts, programs, films, and other resources on every topic possible, including spiritual and religious content. We are swimming in far more information than our human brains can process meaningfully. Whereas the imagined European villager might have been dazzled by the majesty of the liturgy 1,000 years ago, in large part because of its difference from the monotony of daily life, we live in a state of constant overstimulation. When everything is dazzling, nothing is. How can a sole preacher hope to compete and break through the noise?

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