In America and beyond, Roman Catholics have recently taken up the common phrase <personal relationship with Jesus> used by evangelical Protestants. Far from remaining eccentric in a Catholic context, the phrase has been used in recent years at local, national, and international levels in the Roman Catholic Church. Building on the work of Michael McGee and others (McGee, 1975, 1980, 2001; Martin, 1983; Charland, 1987; Larson, 1992; Maines and Bridger, 1992; Condit & Lucaites, 1993; Delgado, 1995, 1999; Moore, 1996; Edwards & Winkler 1997; Cloud, 2004; Palczewski, 2005; Hayden, 2009), we suggest that <personal relationship with Jesus> operates as a popular ideographic phrase within the context of "evangelical Catholics." This observation and analysis is important because it may indicate a shift in religious identity among Catholics that could suggest, among other things, a growing rhetorical convergence with evangelical Protestants. It also points to the ongoing power of ideographs in religious contexts.

Responding to Martin Medhurst’s call for a “fully rounded Christian rhetorical theory,” I claim that a focus on orthodox Christian doctrine provides an auspicious beginning for a strong rhetorical theory. This claim runs counter to the belief that doctrine is incompatible with a non-foundationalist rhetorical epistemology. In establishing this claim, I examine how Christian communication scholars have relied on the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation to build rhetorical theory and how such use typically relies on theological error. Correcting this error leads to a robust Christian rhetoric in which truth is eloquent and persuasion is an act of faithful obedience.

In recent years, religious-themed media about the end of the world offering interpretations of the Book of Revelation have become popular. On television, the CW’s Supernatural featured a storyline that involved a fight between Heaven and Hell, leading to an eventual Apocalypse. We examine how television’s depictions of religion in modern American culture serve as contemporary Christian homilies by exploring this program’s Apocalypse story arc, informed by Revelation 6:2-8. The depiction of a Christian-based story that never featured Christ nevertheless provided the audience with a message about life grounded in Biblical lessons, essentially serving the purpose of a homily that one might hear in a church on a Sunday morning. In addition to broadening our understanding of how homilies function in a mediated world, we discuss how this religious-themed television show has managed to stay on the air when so many others have failed.

This study is the first in the Priest As Teacher series, which applies instructional communication research to the church. To that end, this first study examined Catholic parishioners’ perceptions of their priests’ credibility to see how it related to perceived nonverbal immediacy and socio-communicative orientation (e.g., assertiveness and responsiveness). Perceptions of priests’ credibility were directly related to perceived immediacy, priests’ responsiveness and, to a lesser extent, assertiveness. Parishioners’ perceptions of credibility were key in understanding their own reports of nonverbal responsiveness during mass. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.

The early 18th century rhetoric of Boston minister William Cooper reflects inoculation theory’s two principle components—(1) threat and (2) refutational preemption—in Cooper’s pamphlet, A Reply to the Objections Made Against Taking the Small Pox in the Way of Inoculation from Principles of Conscience, Letter to a Friend in the Country. Faced with religious opposition to medical inoculation, Cooper attempted to use attitudinal inoculation and religious arguments against such anti-medical inoculation rhetoric. We turn to a social scientific model to frame a rhetorical analysis of Cooper’s unique strategies, and the essay concludes with an exploration of contemporary health communication attempts to assuage fears of biological inoculations, with identified similarities with Cooper’s rhetoric. Additionally, we consider implications of Cooper’s arguments composed of intertwined science and scripture.

This study explored the relationship among strength of social identification with religion, mental well-being and intercultural communication apprehension (ICA). Two hundred and eighty-two respondents, comprising primarily of international students, participated in the study. Results of the study revealed that mental well-being, measured in terms of the levels of anxiety and depression, mediated the relationship between social identification with religion and ICA. The results have important implications in terms of the approach that needs to be followed in studying the impact of cultural identities on ICA, specifically, and intercultural communication competence, in general.

This study investigated the influence of communication, job satisfaction, and religiosity on burnout levels of female student leaders at a church-related university. Survey data was collected from a purposive sample of student women serving in some official, paid leadership capacity on campus. Cannonical correlation and multiple regression procedures revealed strong relationships between burnout and role conflict, communication competence, and role ambiguity. An additional regression procedure revealed a positive relationship between job satisfaction and communication competence and satisfaction and an inverse relationship with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Lastly, examination of Pearson’s r correlations revealed statistically significant, moderately strong, inverse associations between intrinsic religiosity and all three measures of burnout included in this study.

Interviews were conducted with 77 Hindu Indian women across socioeconomic classes and occupations to examine the cultural-religious influences that underlie individuals’ understanding of their world of work. Participants indicated that work had meaning if it (a) served Indian society; (b) engaged them in paid employment; (c) enabled standing on one’s own feet; and (d) fulfilled their role-related kartavya (responsibilities, obligations). Findings highlight how the Hindu cultural-religious-spiritual-philosophical constructs of dharma and karma act as non-conscious ideologies in participants’ work values. Such culture-centered meanings of work and attendant societal Discourses (i.e., macro discourses) offer insight into the secularization of religious and philosophical aspects of everyday life in India.

This essay explores Aung San Suu Kyi’s rhetoric, which features Buddhism as an integral way to address, both culturally and politically, postcolonial subjectivity. Suu Kyi’s infusion of religion in political communication demonstrates heuristic interconnections between communication studies of rhetoric and postcolonial discourses. Western educated, and widow to an Englishman, she counters political adversaries’ attempts to frame her as a token Westerner, one who is only Burmese in name or ethnicity. Having mastered Buddhist meditation, her religious affiliation strengthens her ethos. Valuing theoretical intersections between postcolonial studies and communication studies, this case study examines how Suu Kyi, as a postcolonial subject, uses Buddhism advantageously as a rhetorical means in her push to gain human rights and democratic practices and processes for Myanmar’s (Burma’s) stifled political system and its ethnically diverse people.

This paper addresses the first issue of the English-language web-based Al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, which was released in the summer of 2010. The authors contextualize the magazine in the media aspects of the conflict between Al-Qaeda and the West, and examine an article attributed to Usama bin Laden through the lens of Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric. The authors demonstrate that political violence is a media-driven event, and that The New Rhetoric, taken as a method in such a context, becomes a petitio, since the very question raised by Inspire focuses on the definition and nature of the universal audience. This raises quite significant questions abut the nature of methodology at the intersection of communication and religion.