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).