Eagle-eyed stalkers may have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet on the sermon front recently. So I should probably let you know – well, those of you who don’t have high-power telescopes trained on my house – what I’ve been doing.

I’m on sabbatical! After three years’ work, rabbis (at least those whose employers are nice) are lucky enough to be given three months’ leave for recuperation and study.

So while my shul’s wonderful lay leaders hold the fort, I’m busy working on a book about the history and theory of freedom of the pulpit.

To cut a 40,000-words-so-far manuscript short, freedom of the pulpit is the right of a preacher to preach what they think is right, no matter how controversial, without being sacked.

Some of the fantastic historical tidbits I’ve unearthed include:

• a novel, out of print since the 1850s, about a preacher in New England who risks the wrath of his church’s trustees by giving controversial sermons about social justice that cause wealthy members to leave and instead join the more conservative church just up the road (stop sniggering at the back)
• a mid-19th century proposal that Reform Judaism should merge (stop sniggering at the back) with the Unitarians
• a Unitarian minister whose temperance preaching was so successful that rum-sellers systematically joined his church for no reason other than to vote to have him dismissed
• a rabbi who won $1,000 in damages when his shul’s president punched him in the face on Rosh Hashanah
• a 1930s d’rashah by the senior rabbi of West London Synagogue in which he called his shul Council “feeble and futile” – unfortunately I wasn’t able to find out how his next annual appraisal went
• the time when the chief rabbi of South Africa, after delivering a sermon condemning apartheid, was told that in future he should “confine himself to topics relating to ethics”
• a C-of-E school chaplain who gave an assembly for 11-year-olds telling them it’s wrong to be gay and that “LGBT activists” are “totalitarian”, and then, when he was ticked off by the headteacher, ran crying to an Employment Tribunal… who had very little sympathy

Now I need to stop reading up on enjoyably wacky episodes from religious history, get on with the writing, and find a publisher.

Shavua tov!