How to Discern the Good Life in Religious Speech? A Digital-Homiletical Research Perspective

Reception research demonstrates how in hearing sermons listeners become religiously involved. Yet how can we discern this communication of salvation and representation of the good life in the dimensions of the structure of the sermon or its content? How is salvation discourse related to references to human sin, suffering, misery and crisis? This paper is part of a larger project in computational theology to develop algorithms to study the sermon as religious discourse. Questions that will be addressed include: can we use
existing methods like ‘topic modelling’ and ‘sentiment analysis’? Do we need to develop a specific theological specification for annotation? And, how are concepts of salvation and the good life connected to the semantics of crisis? During the paper session the challenges of computational research in theology will be explored.