Homiletics textbooks often discourage the use of humor in preaching, regarding it as trivializing or distracting. The result is that many preachers have failed to understand humor's positive power, demoting it to the opening joke to get a guaranteed guffaw to warm up the crowd. Humor Us!, the second volume in the "Preaching and..." series, is a collaborative effort by homiletician Alyce M. McKenzie and humor scholar Owen Hanley Lynch that promotes humor, a force capable of great good, to its rightful place in the pulpit. Establishing humor as a divine gift, Humor Us! opens to preachers the world of humor studies with its positive portrayal of humor's usefulness to speak truth to power, unite people in their common humanity, and strengthen them to cope and survive in tough times. Humor Us! helps preachers understand how humor works and shows them, in very practical and specific ways, how preachers can put it to work in their sermons. It combines the wealth of knowledge of two highly regarded scholars-practitioners to show how humor can become a potent tool for sharing the good news in sermons. McKenzie and Lynch prove that humor, when applied thoughtfully, can foster compassion and a sense of common humanity, help challenge an unjust status quo, and invite listeners into a shared experience of the presence of God.

This book encourages us to take humor at work seriously. Although humor is usually associated with trivial or non-serious banter; it is a significant factor in the construction of organizational culture. This book provides an experience based organizational account of how organizations are produced and reproduced, as well as how organizational interaction is coupled with structure (organizational rules and resources). It is based on two ethnographic studies: the first, a year-long study of a hotel kitchen, and the second, a three-year study of a private boarding school. This long term examination of an organization's interaction is used to illustrate how organizational interaction produces the duality of organizational structuration over time. An ethnographic communication-focused approach provides methods for recognizing multiple sites and levels of the structuration process. As a result, this approach provides a major contribution to understanding the process of structuration through agents' actions in the context of their organizational culture. This book will appeal to those interested in the nuance and complexity of workplace interaction; specifically it is addressed to students and researchers in management, sociology, organizational and communication studies.