Karl Jaspers was among the world’s foremost existentialist philosophers. This article introduces Jaspers’s notion of “listening to” or “reading” spiritually significant symbols in order to encounter the sacred within our natural and material environments. An attempt is made to convey Jaspers’s background, his philosophy of cypher-listening, his place within existential philosophy, his relation to religion, and the relevance of his early existential philosophizing for our own 21st-century era of “existential threat.” Expanding traditional conceptions of “communication” to include human-and-nature and human-and-divine encounters is also encouraged.

The coronavirus pandemic provided opportunity to examine resilience and struggle of people living in lockdown isolation by proposing contract and covenant worldviews as moderating factors in relational communication. A survey completed by 238 individuals indicated that higher scores on religious covenantalism and lower on non-religious contractualism predicted increased well-being and decreased relational struggle. Specifically, “covenanters” were more likely to report higher rates of general coping, perceived social support, interpersonal trust, and satisfaction with life, and lower rates of interpersonal aggression, anxiety, social phobia, and loneliness compared to their “contractor” counterparts. We discuss results in terms of models of relating, struggle and repair, and the role of religious community and communication to buffer pandemic hardships.

Throughout the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney distinguished himself as the most successful evangelical preacher in the United States. Trained as a lawyer before converting to Christianity and its ministry, Finney came to the pulpit with a fiercely rational and accusatory style that placed demands upon his listeners. In formulating his appeal, Finney also fashioned an innovative Protestant theology that challenged New England Calvinism. After establishing that each sinner has the power to self-reform, he spread the message to audiences across the Northeast, sparking a series of revivals that made his reputation. In the 1830s, Finney was asked to explain his method from his New York City pulpit, and did so across twenty-two lectures that detailed his revival strategy. This essay employs Finney’s theory of individual conversion to examine his theory of mass revival, noting the essentially deliberative character of each and recognizing the lasting influence of both on evangelical life in the United States.

The purpose of this study was to conceptualize the role of prayer and relationship with God for parents who experienced the death of a child. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 parents. A thematic analysis was conducted. Results of this study expand on the Relational Prayer Theory by Baesler (1999) and the direct divine communication model suggested by Sigler (2014), including a discussion of receptive prayer as defined by Baesler (1999) in the Relational Prayer Theory and of direct divine communication as defined by Sigler (2014).

Thomas Merton’s “Letters to a White Liberal” identified “dwelling places” in which his readers could engage the struggle for civil rights as part of a larger theological and political confrontation with evil in the world. They revealed this struggle as a “kairotic” moment and demonstrated how an ethos of rhetoric informed by Christian principles and liberal ideals enabled readers to overcome racial oppression. Merton’s ethos of rhetoric continues to serve as a clarion call for white liberals and Christians to transform the ongoing struggle for racial justice into a form of religious and socio-political redemption.

Although silence is often associated with spirituality, not much is known about why spiritual leaders acquire silence or the impact their silence has on their followers. I study the texts that discuss the forty-four-year silence of the Indian mystic Meher Baba and argue that Baba’s silence transformed him into a myth. I conduct a close textual analysis of Baba’s explanations of why he chose silence as well as the accounts of people who personally interacted with Baba to understand what his silence meant to them. Four themes emerged from my investigation: the intimate nature of Baba’s silence, the appeal of a silent God, Baba’s reliance on interpretations that allowed him to transcend textual and temporal limitations, and the legacy created by his mysterious silence. My study concludes that Baba’s influence challenges our reliance on words for persuasion and points to the enthymematic qualities of an artful silence.

The purpose of this essay is to build upon and expand the work of Dr. Frank Thomas’s book How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon and extend the boundaries of prophetic rhetoric to more readily identify militancy within the scope of the sacred. This work will not necessarily delineate how to produce sermonic militancy vis-a-vis rhetorical invention. The work will, instead, honor the instructive nature of sermonic militancy and help us to acknowledge our propensity to erase, reduce, minimize, and demonize more militant rhetorical presentations (sermonic and otherwise) that are necessary for the full scope of Black liberation projects and social movements to be actualized.

Women play important roles in religious organizations, yet they consistently navigate conflicting discourses about their identities and roles in the church. Drawing on poststructuralism, this research explores gendered scripts in small groups and the ways hegemonic discourses limit women’s subjectivities. Through in-depth interviewing (n = 17) and grounded theory, the analysis explores how two dominant discourses are woven into women’s descriptions of their identities and roles in an evangelical church: (a) the Discourse of community and (b) the Discourse of doctrine. Women are engaged in self-subordination and concertive resistance, oscillating between scripts of rationality and emotion. The results demonstrate the power of women’s agency in traditional religious environments and enclave spaces, where dissensus and resistance may occur in evangelical churches.

This analysis examines the third-party support that evangelical leaders David Brody, Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress provided President Donald Trump during the Stormy Daniels scandal. In their defense of Trump, evangelical leaders argued that he represented an imperfect vessel sent to protect evangelical values. During cable news interviews, the leaders relied on the image repair strategies of minimization, transcendence, bolstering, denial, attack accuser, and differentiation. This crisis communication analysis found that evangelical leaders’ defenses of Trump were effective in maintaining evangelical support for the president. Implications are drawn concerning the role of religious voices in public political discourse and how third-party defenses can help rhetors repair their images with targeted audiences.

This article contends that an increase in the use of indirect communication, as defined by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, has the potential to transform how individuals and communities receive messages about faith, up to and including an embodied—or lived out—faith as opposed to rote religion. Through an analysis of the author’s background, conception of faith, development of indirect methods, and a review of recent scholarship there emerges a renewed call within a postmodern age to communicate indirectly. Changing lives is a central desire for Christian communication scholars. As such, consideration of new possibilities for reaching humanity via indirect methods of communication are not only timely but also critical. Identity and effective communication are key elements to Kierkegaard’s extensive writings on faith, and he offers a compelling voice for Christian culture to implement on a broader scale.

Pope Francis has been misunderstood by liberals and conservatives alike, confusing an emphasized pastoral tone and approach for theological departure. This confusion is exacerbated in the United States where the faithful are tempted to understand and evaluate pastoral figures in terms of secular political ideologies. This study extends Blaney’s (2017) media framing study of news coverage of cardinalate appointments by examining commentary about the papal encyclical Laudato Si’ found among readers of the National Catholic Register, the National Catholic Reporter, and The New York Times. Thematic analyses affirm that the faithful of the U.S. church succumb to the same secular parsing as the press.

Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home represents a sweeping call for action on climate change. In this essay, I use hermeneutical rhetoric to explore the rhetorical strategies Pope Francis employed. In particular, I critically analyze each of the six chapters in the encyclical, focusing on the use of the phrase “our common home.” I argue that Pope Francis’s reinterpretation of the relationship among humans, God, and the environment positions efforts to address climate change as a moral imperative.

In his 2015 encyclical, Pope Francis advanced five edicts on global climate change. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Kathryn Yusoff, I seek to contribute to our understanding of contemporary religious and environmental communication by examining the complex racial dynamics of the Anthropocene and the use of universals for political claims to action and justice. Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, I argue, advances a Catholic rhetoric of the Anthropocene. While his intimate letter incites change and action, Pope Francis’s failure to address the specificity of racism in the global climate crisis reinforces criticisms that scholars such as Yusoff and Butler have advanced against universalism and the Anthropocene.

In 2015, while many Americans acknowledged climate change as a threat, a majority did not view climate change as a religious or moral issue and were unaware of the impacts on the world’s poor. Pope Francis delivered his encyclical in this context and, by using familial metaphors, altered climate change perceptions. Evoking Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis used the metaphors of sister, brother, and mother to shift the audience’s perception of threat: Climate change is not an impersonal, distant risk but one that threatens family. Yet the familial metaphor’s limitation has been an inability to encourage sustained climate change action.

Recently, Pope Francis dedicated a Vatican property—the Palazzo Migliori—as a homeless shelter. Pope Francis’s decision marks the culmination of many papal pronouncements, especially his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, which provides a set of principles focused on taking care of both the environment and “the least of our brethren.” In this article, I engage in a rhetorical analysis of the pope’s theological and political framework based on what Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) call the “rhetoric of place” to explore how Pope Francis alters the symbolic meaning of Vatican property to advance social justice.

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home has struck a deep chord with a broad audience. We explore the synergy between the ethical vision of sustainability in the Earth Charter and the encyclical. We position the document within the ecology and media landscapes. Laudato Si’ is remarkable among international statements in its explicit attention to education. We draw out the pivotal importance of education in order for its critical message not to be lost. We argue that education for Laudato Si’ can be advanced in traditional education—formal and non-formal, secular and religious—and in education through the media.