Why do Pastors Preach on Social Issues?

Abstract

Editor's note: The following article was prepared in honor of Samuel W. Blizzard, who, after a long and distinguished teaching career, is taking early retirement because of ill health. Since 1957, he has been Professor of Christianity and Society at Princeton Theological Seminary, and since 1970, he has held the Maxwell M. Upson Professorship of Christianity and Society at Princeton. He has also taught at Pennsylvania State University and Union Theological Seminary in New York, as well as serving as the director of both the Russell Sage Foundation's Training for the Ministry Project from 1953 to 1960 and the National Council of Churches' Clergy Research Project from 1957 to 1958. He is the co-author with Emory J. Brown of The Church and the Community and has contributed essays and articles to more than forty books, scholarly journals, and popular periodicals. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Maryville College, he pursued graduate study at Biblical Seminary in New York, Princeton Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Hartford Seminary Foundation, and Cornell University, as well as post-graduate work at Mansfield College, Oxford University. Prior to entering academic life, he served Presbyterian parishes in Roselle, New Jersey, and Long Green and Ashland, Maryland.

One of his students, Hart M. Nelsen, prepared this article utilizing Blizzard's highly influential study of clergy roles. Nelsen, a graduate of Occidental College, the University of Northern Iowa, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Vanderbilt University, is Professor of Sociology and Chairperson of the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America, as well as a member of the Boys Town Center, a research institute at Catholic University. He is the author of many articles in major sociological journals, the editor (with Raytha L. Yokley and Anne K. Nelsen) of The Black Church in America (1971) and author (with Anne K. Nelsen) of the forthcoming volume, The Black Church in the Sixties.

The data for this article were collected under support from the National Institute of Mental Health (1 R01 MH 16573). His colleagues in the larger study are Raytha L. Yokley and Thomas W. Madron.

Copyright © 1975 by Hart M. Nelsen