This essay unpacks the evolving form and rhetorical resonance of the popular contemporary Christian worship song “How He Loves,” which troubles norms of mainstream sacred music on several levels. I argue that its violations of lyrical norms give the song rhetorical resonance for young people seeking an “authentic”/romantic experience of God in worship, while its musical form works, with varying success, to rhetorically transform the troubles of earthly existence into windows on divine love. Through Sellnow and Sellnow’s critical lens, I examine three different artists’ lyrical/musical renderings of the song to compare how (well) they bring that illusion to life. I then analyze the video of the third version, showing how the Illusion of Life critical framework could be expanded to examine visual intensity/release in relation to music and lyrics. My analysis highlights the tensions between authenticity and artfulness in contemporary worship music and demonstrates the value of a fine-grained, close-reading approach.

Plato has widely been interpreted as an enemy of rhetoric. His Gorgias is especially used as evidence that he despised rhetoric as a deceitful producer of opinion (doxa) and upheld philosophy as the true art of knowledge (episteme) discovery. However, in his Theaetetus, he complicates the concept of knowledge, and can be interpreted as developing an art of persuasion that is concerned with the production of faith (pistis) rather than knowledge or opinion. The result of rereading Plato as such tempers the disciplinary narrative concerning Plato and strengthens James Kinneavy’s thesis that relates the development of Christian faith with Greek rhetoric. Reevaluating Plato’s epistemology in relation to the concept of pistis not only nuances the discipline’s understanding of Plato, but also challenges advocates of a “Christian rhetoric” to reconsider the relationship of faith and reason in relation to persuasion.

Kathy J. Pulley is a scholar of religion and a leading proponent of women’s rhetorical agency in her denomination of Christianity. She was the first woman to preach a Sunday morning sermon in the presence of women and men in the Churches of Christ since the Stone-Campbell Movement’s split in the early twentieth century. In a religious culture shaped by a history of patriarchy, Pulley combined prophetic and pastoral rhetoric to lead organizational change in an egalitarian direction. This paper analyzes her sermon through lenses of prophetic and feminist rhetoric, integrates literature from rhetoric and homiletics to develop the concept of pastoral rhetoric, and presents implications for ecclesial engagement with social controversies.

This study analyzed the image of Judge Roy Moore as it changed during the 2017 Alabama Special Senate Election. Specifically, this study sought to determine whether the surprising loss in the election, which resulted after allegations that he dated and assaulted teenage girls while serving as an assistant District Attorney, could be attributed to the Pharisee Effect. The analysis concluded that two elements of the Pharisee Effect were in play during the campaign. Specifically, the charges contributed to an image of hypocrisy for Judge Moore, while accentuating the concept of fanaticism that was already associated with his image. As such, the Pharisee Effect appears to be one element that contributed to his eventual loss in the election.

Using a dialogic lens, this study investigated the discursive construction of family articulated by Centennial Park residents who practice plural marriage. In talk, Centennial Park residents marginalize the dominant cultural discourse positioning the nuclear family as the ideal family form by advancing a competing discourse. Specifically, Centennial Park residents advance a discourse, nuclear families are limiting (and thus not ideal), which privileges plural families over traditional cultural models of family. This competing discourse idealizes the capacity building potential of plural families, while positioning the nuclear family as one that is restrictive (i.e., inhibiting the potential of what could be).

This article synthesizes studies of the emotions or passions (pathē) with Burkean logology to argue for a concept of patho-logology, which, consummating in the god-term love, transforms our understanding of Burke’s larger corpus and implies that rhetoric is a connecting link between religion and science. Patho-logology’s companion-concept, terministic-affect screens, allows the description of ways of seeing that involve the pathē. Love is the god-term of a patho-logological terministic-affect screen because “God is love,” illustrating a relationship between Burkean identification and its related term consubstantiality. Patho-logology complements John Hatch’s notion of dialogology, helps people to get along, and unifies the Judeo-Christian-based logology with the Talmudic tradition of not confining logos to propositional logic alone and improves understanding of Aristotelian pisteis.

The gendered evangelical subject is constituted by a discursive formation with a premodern genealogy refracted through a modern epistemology. To support this claim and demonstrate how the formation determines evangelical discourses on gender, the study applies Foucault’s theory of the discursive formation to deconstruct evangelical gender ideology. The formation’s genealogy is traced to the New Testament “household code” and its epistemology situated in the Enlightenment-inspired doctrine of biblical “inerrancy” by which the code is deemed authoritative. How the formation regulates evangelical responses to modern feminism is reviewed, along with recent movements within evangelicalism toward reordering its “biblical” discourse on gender.