This essay considers Phillip E. Johnson’s “Wedge Strategy” for Intelligent Design (ID) advocacy, assessing his contribution to an eighty-year history of public education controversy. Starting with the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and culminating in the 2005 case of Kitzmiller v. Dover in Dover, Pennsylvania, this ancestry discloses interesting developments in rhetorical strategy. Though past studies have considered the creation–evolution debates as confrontations between religion and science, this piece is primarily interested in how these contests frame the opposition between liberality and illiberality. As Johnson and his allies asserted that ID was true, they were just as adamant that it would set people free. In making this claim, they drew on rhetorical resources previously employed by advocates of evolution, refashioning theistic appeals to positive liberty in the negative frame of academic freedom, and hoping thereby to affect a reversal of roles with their scientific critics. Important to discussions of public school science curricula, this analysis is also revelatory about liberal discourse writ large.

This article interprets a live electronic music DJ performance by Armin van Buuren at Ultra Music Festival 2019 in Miami as a religious, rhetorical text. It considers the methods of van Buuren and why he appeals to a younger generation that is seeking spirituality outside of traditional religion. Electronic music has long been identified by scholars as having a spiritual ethos, and van Buuren’s style epitomizes what is described as “technoshamanism.” His performance and the behavior of the audience can be described as religious behavior and manifests the dogma of the electronic music scene: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.

Drawing on insights from revivalist Jonathan Edwards, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and communication theory about inoculation, I examine Hell Houses, haunted house–style events designed to scare audiences into becoming Christians. Performances rely on inoculation to demonize outgroups and reinforce in-group commitment. While scholars identify Edwards as a rhetorical ancestor of Hell House tactics, inoculation reinforces in-group identity in a way that fits Edwards’s critique of “counterfeit love”—excessive in-group affection. The counterfeit love Hell Houses promote is bolstered by what Nietzsche termed ressentiment, Christian morality’s oppositional antagonism. Deconversion narratives from ex-Hell House actors suggest that reifying an oppositional group identity may ultimately undermine evangelistic goals.

Research on spirituality at the end of life is extensive. Most research prescribes why care workers should talk with patients and their families about spirituality, who should talk with them, and how care workers should do it. Few studies address the experiences of discussing religion with families at the end of life. In this study, semistructured interviews with nurses, patient advocates, chaplains, and social workers (n = 65) described their experiences of religious discussions with family members. Generally, families seek spiritual reassurance for their decisions, including that their decisions align with the will of God and their religion.

While Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Lawson are credited as the forces behind the Memphis sanitation strike, local faces galvanizing the movement are infrequently studied. The sacred rhetoric of African Methodist minister Rev. Henry Logan Starks—known as the “Gentle Giant” and trained in the tradition of holy defiance, transformative resistance, and Black liberation—is remembered and recalled as theologically transformative and prophetically provocative. Using ideological criticism, this essay will analyze the phrase “You are somebody” as an example of prophetic rhetoric and rhetorical re-conditioning.

In a speech given to students at Grosse Pointe High School on March 14, 1968, just three weeks before his death, Martin Luther King addressed the uprisings that consumed America during this time. During the same time that King delivered this speech, plans were underway for a retreat that would have brought King together with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. While we will never know what both men would have talked about or what they would have done, I do believe—at least in so far as King is concerned—that he would have undoubtedly spoken about his concept of the Beloved Community.

In this article, we trace arguments for the sacredness of Black life from Sojourner Truth to the Combahee River Collective to the founders of Black Lives Matter, arguing that Black women have consistently drawn on sacred and ritual structures to argue not just that Black life matters but also that Black life has inherent value. As such, we conclude with reflections on Black feminist ethics as an extension of the doctrine of imago dei.

One of the places where there is an assumed manifestation of the Beloved Community is the Black church. However, church hurt is a phenomenon that has plagued the Black community. Marginalization, isolation, and even the adoption of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude have been inferred habits and practices for Black congregants whose sexual lifestyle, mental stability, or sexual or emotional trauma may not fit neatly into the church doctrine. The inability to fit neatly within the doctrinal norms leaves many members of the Black community feeling abandoned spiritually and in a desperate search for belonging and acceptance. Using Black liberation theology, womanist thought, autoethnography, and Afrocentricity as a metatheory, this article seeks to discuss the impact of liberationist ideology and womanist ethics within the practices of an Afrocentric rite of passage community based in Atlanta, Georgia, with a satellite branch in New York, New York.

In an era of #BlackLivesMatter, more attention has been given to the historically disproportionate level of state-sanctioned violence against Black men, along with the health disparities and the corresponding higher mortality rates that impact them and the Black community. In response to these socio-political inequalities brought to the forefront by the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, speeches, and rallies convened around the country. Yet, there is still a need for an intervention that creates a communal culture of sacred space for Black men. This article reports on a case study examining Jazz for Prostate Cancer Awareness, which used a womanist frame for religious health education. Womanism aims to liberate the entire being, including the mind, the body, and the soul, of Black women (and men), which works well as an intervention and an alternative to the status quo public health education strategies.

This article will analyze the social justice activism of Bree Newsome through a womanist rhetorical lens. More specifically, it will look at the symbolic action of removing the Confederate flag from the state Capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina, which initiated the rhetorical crisis of her anti-Confederate flag movement because it confronted racism, hatred, slavery, lynching, and White supremacy. The task of this womanist critique is to expand our understanding of the redemptive self-love tenet displayed through Newsome’s activism that allows an individual to fight for the social justice of others and grants the redemptive opportunity for the activist to either build or build upon the legacy of the deceased/abused person(s).

Viewing Black pain for pleasure and entertainment has not only been held in high regard from the inception of this country but has also recently been infused into communal consumption of Black death on social media. This malevolently charged discursive reality makes the creation of safe embodied religious space a persistent challenge for Black women and men of faith. However, technology also serves as an aid to push forth subversive and supportive digital communities and congregations. Here, the Beloved Community is transformed, and collective liberation again becomes a theological imperative. In this article, I analyze the Pink Robe Chronicles as a digital hush harbor. Considering this space as a womanist rhetorical imaginary that redefines kinship and renegotiates discursive boundaries, I explore how its curator hallowedly holds the precarity of Black pain and juxtaposes it with the power and promise of a deliberately Afrocentric ethic to speak wholeness to those connected by its teleological imperative.

In this study, I explicate Asian-American Buddhist identity discourse and how talk surrounding this religious identity revealed a natural criticism of the current state of Buddhism in the U.S. Using cultural discourse analysis, I unveil how, as participants discussed what it means to be an American Buddhist, they also revealed deeper beliefs about social relationships and how they see themselves placed within the U.S. American religious landscape. Critiques toward Buddhism in the U.S. includes cultural appropriation and commercialization of the religion, as well as the use of the term “Buddhist” to further perpetuate the stereotype of Asian Americans as outsiders and foreigners.

The world has become a fractured place, as philosopher Louis Hodges has written. This fractured state can be confusing and, at times, paralyzing for media professionals, particularly managers, on both professional and personal levels. This article takes an unusual approach by offering hope via one person and one book and one idea: philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich and The Courage to Be. It merges Tillich’s abstract concepts of religion, existentialism, anxiety, and the symbolic nature of God with the concrete dimensions of today’s media world and offers a useful philosophical realm for media managers, academics, and the common person.

When Sarah Bessey walked to the pulpit at South Bend City Church on May 6, 2018, she enacted a role widely debated in evangelical circles: a woman preacher. Analyzing this featured sermon, we explore the ways in which Bessey draws upon and reinvents the styles and strategies women have long employed when preaching within the church. Ultimately, we demonstrate how Bessey weaves together evangelical discourse, the feminine rhetorical style, and the genre of story-sermons, creating a prophetic narrative that calls the church to repent from sins of oppression and to be resurrected into the new life of Jesus feminism.

One of the imprecatory psalms, Psalm 137 is among the most disturbing passages of the Bible, as the psalmist blatantly blesses infanticide. I suggest that the growing interdisciplinary field of trauma studies can provide important vocabulary and perspective to understand the rhetorical technique represented by the imprecatory psalms in general and by Psalm 137 in particular. Suggesting that liturgical rhetoric serves an important narrative function, I emphasize the rhetorical benefits of the incorporation of such disturbing passages into the liturgical practice of contemporary communities of faith, perhaps creating an inclusive liturgy for the disoriented.

When Protestant preachers interpret the Bible, the particular translation can constrain the apparent alignment between sermon and text. To improve alignment, preachers can appeal to the original biblical languages to rewrite the translation. Following the interpretive stases, a classical rhetorical theory of the issues that arise in arguments over textual meaning, this article identifies nine interpretive functions these sermonic appeals can serve. Appearing in diverse theological, political, and cultural Protestant contexts, these appeals increase the text’s interpretive flexibility and strengthen the biblical support for a claim. Examining these appeals raises important questions about preaching, biblical interpretation, and power in Protestantism.