Have you heard that radio stations are now selling blocks of adveristing time in units of adlets and blinks? Adlets are 5 seconds long and blinks only 2 seconds! Folks are tuning out and changing stations more quickly than ever before.
As an indication of people's dwindling attention spans, this is bad news for the homilist trying to hold the attention of an audience ranging in age from toddlers to elders for 5 to 15 minutes. After how many minutes -or seconds- are the people in the Sunday assembly tuning out the homily and tuning in a spectrum of other thoughts?
It's true that it's more difficult to write a good short homily than it is to write a good long one - and perhaps therein lies the answer to the preacher's dilemma: less may indeed be more!
7/18/07
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t is so obvious when preachers/pastors have thought out and prepared their homilies well. Anyone who has written professionally in any capacity knows the difficult of crafting a document that makes your point efficiently but also elegantly. I personally am not bowled over by a sonorous voice or a folksy (and unfocused) presentation and much prefer the well-prepared homily. There are too few examples of this in the church unfortunately!
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