This essay identifies nine distinct functions that use of the Bible serves for U.S. presidents. A method for isolating biblical quotations and allusions is first identified and then applied to the presidential discourse of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Each of the nine functions is illustrated, and the implications of their deployment for presidential rhetoric and the American polity are discussed.

This essay advances the argument that religious interest has not decreased in contemporary life, but has been largely relocated to places of privacy, outside of public, legal, and social space uncomfortable with its presence. This split has been reflected in and reinforced by dominant narrative entertainment media practices, complex in their converging nature but consistent in their mainstream erasure of religious affirmation. This context places particular demands on the researcher interested in religion and communication, posing serious legal and social risks for those interested in exploring spiritual topics. This article thus argues that practices of transdisciplinarity are advantageous, hedging back against norms of privacy that restrict inquiry into the ever-important questions of spirituality and religion for the contemporary scholar.

Has the conventional voice of religion been silenced in postmodern film? The emancipating language of postmodernism has found a home among independent filmmakers, those artists who are less constrained by the blockbuster orthodoxy and profit-centered penitence of the mega-studio. Now their alternate rhetorical voices are frequently heard in the mainstream. In some ways the subject of religion is given new breath, as the taboos and talismans of a previous generation are put aside in favor of a less institutionalized version of the role of religion in life. André Øvredal’s Trollhunter is a postmodern take on a pre-modern folktale. The discovery of opposing rhetorical situations in this film creates opportunities to analyze deeper religious meanings in the narrative and the exigency from which it arises and invites a response.

This essay considers the rhetoric of supernatural novelist Anne Rice, who shocked readers when she published a novel about the childhood of Jesus Christ in 2005. In order to quell concerns regarding apparent inconsistencies in her literary subjects, Rice fabricates an original rhetorical persona: the Author-God. The persona transmutes Rice’s mundane interpretation of her work into an offering of mystical experience, compelling readers to accept her authorial perspective with a promise of salvation. Her example reveals the availability of religious rhetorical persona beyond that of the prophet and supports the utility of attending to divine inspiration in rhetorical studies.

This study analyzed the relationships between religiosity, threat, and intergroup contact between Hindus and Muslim immigrants in India. Results showed the following. First, Hindus with high religiosity were more likely to perceive more threat from Muslim immigrants. Second Hindus with high religiosity were more likely to have less contact with Muslim immigrants. Finally, intergroup contact was negatively correlated with the perception of threat from Muslim immigrants. Theoretical implications related to intergroup contact, religiosity, and group vitality are discussed.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the Christian prosperity gospel’s use of the “liberation” idiom and the prophetic rhetorical form in order to discover the prosperity gospel’s significance for efforts at social and political change. Included is a significant discussion of the sociological appeal of the prosperity gospel, its alteration of the traditional prophetic mode, and examination of several leading prosperity preachers. I conclude that prosperity gospel represents a significant alteration of the prophetic mode away from social change and toward an atomization of culture and an implicit defense of status quo social, economic and political structures.

This article examines the nature, function, and implications of the immersively mediated religious practices at a contemporary multi-site church. We focus on explaining the major features of the hyperreal “experience,” as well as the carefully created and maintained images or personae of the church’s lead pastor. We then discuss the major implications of this church’s religious practices, stressing how they strengthen and naturalize the ideological function of mediation, how they truncate authentic relationship, and how they reify consumerism as a framework for understanding life, particularly religious life.