This essay examines David Crowder’s award-winning contemporary worship album A Collision using an expanded Burkeian toolkit. I show that it takes the romantic tendencies in contemporary worship to the end of the line, causing them to collide with carefully planned realism yet eliding the tragicomic social dimension of the gospel. Through purposeful incongruities, Crowder creates ironic awareness of faith’s paradoxes. Through linguistic reflexivity, he conveys his art’s inadequacy to divine worship. Yet A Collision’s romantic core endures, partly matured and tempered by these Burkeian moves. The album thus approaches, but does not arrive at, what Burke called the “poetic ideal.”

This essay analyzes the deployment of freedom and liberty as premises in orthodox culture war argumentation. Specifically, it suggests that recent decades have been host to a marked shift in social issue debates, whereby formerly religious arguments have adopted an increasingly secular, liberal tenor. Though ostensibly concerned with moral questions, activists and interest groups have sought to appropriate the mantle of American freedom, thus fortifying their positions amid the shared ideals of liberal democracy. A timely case study is found in contemporary opposition to same-sex marriage. Here as elsewhere, religious elites who had formerly framed their public statements in accusatory moralreligious terms now increasingly claim to stand in defense of free speech and free religious expression. Though at times justified, this position indicates a sort of rhetorical backpedaling whereby religious speakers defend the right to hold unpopular views rather than attempting to defend the views themselves. I conclude by suggesting a religious politics in the broad sense of the term, advising religious advocates to return to a public practice of their faith that rejects political ambition.

This paper applies rhetorical theory (specifically the rhetorical theorist Michael Leff’s concept of hermeneutical rhetoric) to the “gay debate” in American evangelicalism. Given that liberal and conservative positions arise from contrasting interpretations of the Christian scriptures, which in turn arise from a contest of hermeneutical priorities, I suggest that hermeneutical rhetoric potentially creates interpretive common ground because it does not prioritize historical data over scriptural authority—a hermeneutic method that has been resisted consistently by American evangelicals. Through the specific case study of the 2006 Soulforce Equality Ride at Wheaton College, I demonstrate how hermeneutical rhetoric circumvents stakeholders’ implicit observance of the hermeneutical fault line between liberal-historicism and evangelical-biblicism.

Two studies are presented. The first derives an eight-item Model of Academic Criteria for Direct Divine Communication (MACDDC) from the few existing empirical studies of the phenomenological experience of direct divine communication (DDC). Four serious limitations of the MACDDC, arising from biases in DDC research, are discussed. The second study argues that phenomenological DDC research cannot be fruitfully conducted until agreement is reached on principles for the inclusion/exclusion for study of experiences reported as DDCs. Four epistemological principles, derived from previous literature and interviews with 32 Catholic women religious, are suggested as a starting point for scholarly discussion.