The Sermon’s Copy: Pulpit Plagiarism and the Ownership of Divine Knowledge

Abstract

This article interrogates the sermon as a genre of religious media designed to capture and mediate divine knowledge. It does so in order to better understand the complex nature of sermon authorship, particularly the way that it elicits a uniquely spiritual conception of ownership in the sermon as an object of intellectual property. By exploring recent debates about sermon stealing, or pulpit plagiarism, the article concludes that sermon authors have generated unique defenses of sermon ownership grounded not in legal entitlement but rather in theological arguments balancing an inalienable relationship to the divine with the imperative to distribute God’s word.