What the sermon corpus talks about

This study maps what the sermon corpus actually talks about. From the analyzed sermon text we distilled 22,458 distinct claims — individual assertions a preacher staked out — and organized them under 286 subject headings. The chart shows the subjects carrying the most claims.

The three largest subjects — Reliability of the Bible, Discipleship, and Biblical Authority — together hold 6,309 claims. No single subject dominates: the largest holds about 10 in every 100 claims, a picture of a corpus that ranges widely rather than repeating one theme.

How to read the numbers

Each bar counts the claims filed under that subject. A claim that touches two subjects is counted under each, so bars overlap slightly and do not sum to the distinct-claim total. Claim wording is normalized before counting, so the same assertion made in many sermons counts once as a claim; the subject totals measure breadth of assertion, not repetition.

Methodology notes, honestly stated

Sample composition, honestly stated: sermon text is currently available for about 23,000 unique sermons — roughly 3.4% of the full catalog after duplicate discovery. Every figure here describes that analyzed subset, not the whole catalog. Claims are extracted and grouped automatically and imperfectly; subject headings are machine-proposed and overlap in places. All figures are aggregate counts only — no sermon text is reproduced here.