A few days ago John Harp rolled in to Abilene with a load of sermon tapes (some on reels, most on cassette), files and books from Roy Osborne, longtime minister at Sunset Ridge Church of Christ in San Antonio, Texas. Pictured below are John and Mac after we unloaded and finished a tour of Special Collections.
In 1964 J. D. Thomas and Biblical Research Press published a volume of Roy’s sermons in the ‘Great Preachers of Today’ series. They reissued it under a new title in 1983. The Osborne Papers contain tapes from a fairly wide span of Roy’s preaching. The collection should prove exceedingly useful to historians and rhetoricians because of the time span covered by the reels and tapes, as well as providing a complementary audio version of the kind of preaching committed to print in Roy’s book. As samples of the kind of preaching held forth as exemplary by J. D. Thomas, these sermons will provide a fine window into the changing shape of homiletics and theology in post-war and late twentieth-century Churches of Christ.
They are currently in the queue for processing. We will publicize the finding aid when it is complete.
