This paper addresses the perennial issue of the role of religious argument in public political debates by proposing “critical distance,” defined as an act of rhetorical imagination that creates a space where both speaker and audience may critique and interrogate the comprehensive worldview of the speaker, as a rhetorical construct useful for both communication and criticism. A careful reading of selected examples of religious rhetoric in public political forums reveals the nature of critical distance. This article isolates three examples from American public address that reveal particular forms of critical distance. In these instances, critical distance presents itself as conditional language, as descriptive language, and finally, in the form of humor. Furthermore, critical distance commends itself to religious communicators, not merely as a liberal pragmatic value, but as a rhetorical norm that can be found in religious discourse itself.

Drawing comparisons between Rev. Jermain W. Loguen’s letters to African American newspapers during the mid-nineteenth century and the Apostle Paul’s letters to churches in Greece and Asia Minor, this manuscript examines Loguen’s employment of “constitutive rhetoric” to spread the “gospel” of abolitionism by mobilizing African American Christians in order to obliterate the sin of slavery. Employing theoretical frames by James Jasinksi and Kenneth Burke, I show how Loguen’s use of letters as “veins” within the organs of African American newspapers circulated information intended to rebuke, praise, and provoke his readers to respond collectively to the exigencies that plagued African Americans.

Communicative means of interacting with the divine are often highly distinctive and deeply meaningful for participants. These linguistic practices embody assumptions about not only the nature of one’s relationship with the divine, but also with other people. This article presents an analysis of communication with the divine during Quaker worship, based both in group silence and “vocal ministry.” Using the ethnography of communication and cultural discourse theory, as well as the concept of participation framework, I explore how communication practices—reflecting certain understandings of message motivation and recipientship—are based in a positive interpretation of human potential.

The purpose of this study was to determine if the use of information communication technology, specifically PowerPoint images, enhanced the effectiveness of the sermon message on congregants’ retention and recall of religious messages. We found that members of a large Protestant church perceived the use of PowerPoint to be efficacious for enhancing understanding, promoting sermon quality, and facilitating retention of information conveyed in the sermon. However, when measuring the actual effect on memory, retention, and recall, PowerPoint did not have a significant effect on members’ actual performance in recalling information from weekly sermons.

This research explores the contribution of Ernst Cassirer to the relationship between communication and religion. Religion, one of Cassirer's fundamental symbolic forms, is read through the phenomenological categories in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics. Communicology is briefly described as the science of embodied discourse. The semiotic logic (phenomenology) beneath Cassirer's dialectical thinking is revealed. Peirce's progressive, reflexive logic of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness proves insightful as a way of comprehending the breadth and depth of Cassirer's symbol of religion in relation to ‘life’ and ‘spirit,’ ‘basis phenomena,’ and myth and religion. We conclude that in religio it is not the symbol that is sacred. Rather, communication is held sacred.

Increasingly, human rights collaboration involves faith-based organizations whose members see social activism as an extension of their religious identities. This raises an immediate tension because collaboration requires negotiation of identities, challenging the convictions that motivate religious believers’ involvement. Thus human rights collaboration offers an important context to explore tensions of identity and religious faith. This study reports on a human trafficking collaboration in Mexico, with a particular emphasis on the communicative tensions of integrating a distinct religious identity while collaborating with others. Grounded Practical Theory is used to identify practical challenges, communicative responses, and situated ideals that constitute this problem domain.

This paper offers a rhetorical criticism of the hymn “Amazing Grace” by John Newton. Specifically it seeks to answer the question of why a song created for religious audiences has such wide appeal beyond the confines of the church. To explore this question, the methodology of Barry Brummett and Kenneth Burke are applied to the hymn’s lyrics, and the theoretical approach of Deanna and Timothy Sellnow are applied to the hymns music. In the end, it is found that “Amazing Grace” offers equipment for living with life’s trials through the homology of the grace anecdote.

Applying ritual theory to practices surrounding sacred images in sixteenth-century European Christianity illustrates an underappreciated power of visual means for constituting and communicating religious belief systems. In addition to constructing belief systems for religious practitioners and enabling expressions of devotion, sacred images facilitate and sometimes dictate changes in religious belief systems. Understanding the promotion of change in religious belief as a distinct, unique power of sacred images is valuable in a religious environment characterized by change through pluralism, conversion, and the spread of religions through media.

This essay examines how Dorothy Day established a diverse readership in the first decade of the Catholic Worker. I argue that Day uses rhetorical transcendence to bring the resources of her religious faith into the public sphere while establishing her discursive ethic of fostering common ground. My analysis demonstrates that Day invented human dignity and social action as ultimate terms that effectively persuaded beyond her own faith community, prompting a new, diverse community of action. As rhetorical invention, transcendence creates discursive spaces in which people with diverse ideologies may act together—spaces that ameliorate public discourse.

Individuals with HIV/AIDS were recruited from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom to complete a survey analyzing the relationship between religiosity and willingness to seek treatment for HIV/AIDS. Willingness to seek treatment is conceptualized as a three-dimensional construct including a patient’s propensity to seek out information about their illness, to be assertive in medical interaction, and to non-adhere to medical advice. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed religiosity to be negatively correlated with nonadherence and positively with seeking out of information and assertiveness. Significant differences also emerged between the three nations on the dimensions of willingness to seek treatment.

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.