Preaching and Neuroscience @ Catholic Theological Union
About Us
// Purpose
Advancing Groundbreaking Research for Impactful Preaching
This project explores the real-time impact of Roman Catholic preaching on local congregations by creating a robust database of empirical data through neuroscientific and psychological methods. By examining key elements such as the perceived trustworthiness of the preacher and the narrative quality of homilies, the research aims to provide data-driven insights into what truly engages and affects listeners, moving beyond anecdotal feedback. This knowledge will guide preachers toward more impactful delivery while helping educators who train future preachers with reliable, evidence-based resources. Additionally, the project will produce open-access, online resources—including video and print materials—designed to enhance both individual practice and homiletics curricula, broadening its influence beyond the Roman Catholic tradition and fostering a truly “catholic” reach in its application.
// Rationale
Bridging Faith and Science to Transform Preaching, Move Hearts, and Inspire Change
Roman Catholic preaching, especially the Sunday homily, plays a central role in faith formation and spiritual nourishment. It is appropriately viewed as both a sacramental act and an encounter with the God of Jesus Christ intended to move hearts, inspire transformation, and foster Christian witness. The Church emphasizes the homily’s importance, underscoring that it must be comprehensible, contextually relevant, and delivered in a way that actively engages the assembly. Language within preaching, like all effective rhetoric, extends beyond words, using narrative and performance to convey emotion and motivate action. However, while research underscores language’s ability to affect cognition, emotion, and even physical health, studies examining the physiological and psychological impacts of preaching on Catholic congregations remain scarce. This project aims to bridge this gap, employing neuroscience and psychology to explore how homilies affect listeners, providing insights that may enhance the effectiveness of preaching.
// Program Design
Exploring Faith’s Impact on Mind, Heart, and Community
This research investigates the impact of preaching on listeners by analyzing how homilies influence thoughts, emotions, and actions. This will be achieved through self-reporting, behavioral assessment, and neurophysiological measurement. By examining trust, hope, compassion, openness memorability fostered through preaching, the project aims to uncover the neural processes and psychological factors that shape these virtues in faith communities. With attention to homilies preached in English and Spanish homilies, study seeks to understand how individual differences, cultural contexts, and social dynamics influence the reception of preaching. This will entail exploring how factors such as wording, delivery, and personal characteristics of the preacher contribute to spiritual connection, moral development, and potential human flourishing through wise reasoning.
// the Scientific findings
Illuminating Preaching: Bridging Faith, Science, and Impact
This project aims to enhance the full, conscious and active participation of Roman Catholic assemblies in the homiletic experience by filling a key gap in understanding how homilies impact listeners through neuroscientific insights. The project’s twofold purpose is to help preachers understand what resonates with their congregations and to equip teachers of preaching to shape effective preachers. Findings will be summarized in view of the five core virtues at the heart of this study—trust, hope, compassion, epistemic humility, and memorability. Input from Spanish and English speaking teachers of preaching, well respected preachers, students, ordinary Roman Catholic parishioners and even those unaffiliated from church or religion will inform this project. A primary output of this project will be ten bi-lingual videos that convey the scientific findings in a pastorally relevant manner. These will be available as open-access resources on this and other websites. A concluding conference at CTU, open to the public, will draw together leading voices in both neuroscience and preaching to consider the advances of this project. The event will premiere the videos and present project insights to leading figures in Roman Catholic preaching, further disseminating the project’s valuable findings.
// Evaluation
A data supported understanding of effective preaching
The overarching goal of the program is to develop an understanding of effective preaching that is supported by empirical data. This understanding should include both the impact on individual listeners as well as how effective preaching affects an assembly. Because the project addresses preaching in both English and Spanish, it will also consider what differences in language or cultural could have on preaching reception. There is also concern to discover to what extent religious affiliation and degrees of religious commitment impact preaching reception. These findings can contribute to more effective teaching of preaching, especially in this era of increasing religious diversity and disaffiliation.
// Communication
share the project objectives, progress, and outcomes
A four-year Communication plan for the project will be developed to share the project objectives, progress, and outcomes across a wide range of ministerial and scientiic platforms in order to reach the widest audience possible. This plan would include:
Announcements by both Catholic Theological Union and the University of Chicago of this joint collaboration, of project leadership, objectives and overall design
Advertisement for hiring members of the research team (post-doc, post-BA research assistant, the graduate assistant and the undergraduate summer research assistant)
Invitations to potential preachers in both English and Spanish
Advertisement for Research Subjects in both English and Spanish
Development of a webpage linked to both institutions with regular updates about the project over its four-year span
Social media campaigns aimed at strategic audiences to share updates
Summative Conference announcement, general invitation to the public and select invitations to stipended attendees
// Sustainability and Continuation
Transforming Preaching Through Insight, Impact, and Innovation.
Catholic Theological Union (CTU) will conduct ongoing behavioral testing through its Word & Worship faculty, leveraging its student population and the broader student access from two theology schools on campus. Working closely with the principal investigator and scientific team, CTU’s homiletic consultants will create high-quality, scientifically grounded, and pastorally accessible video resources with professional videographers. These open-access videos, available in both English and Spanish on the CTU website, will highlight research-backed strengths in preaching, sparking dialogue within and beyond CTU about preaching’s measurable impact. Additionally, CTU will integrate these findings into teaching at other institutions and within networks like the Catholic Association of Teachers of Homiletics, the North American Academy of Liturgy, and the Academy of Homiletics, alongside collaborations with schools like Aquinas Institute. CTU also plans to seek further funding to explore new questions on the impact of language on listeners’ cognition, neural processes, and social change, with future grant proposals targeted at NIH and NSF.
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