In this article I discuss a dangerous subtext that lies beneath Trump’s visible lack of serious Christian witness. It provides the fuel to a heretical fire that is poised to engulf those Christians whom I will suggest have quite literally made a deal with the Devil without realizing it. My argument is not that Trump is just a radically imperfect vessel for what may be legitimate public policy positions, but rather that he represents a robustly idolatrous brand of political theology that threatens the shared faith of all Christians at an existential level. What Trump represents is not “religion becoming power”, but “power becomes religion.” Trumpism at its core leads to what Saul Newman and others would call “the religion of the state” (or at least the deification of its leader).

As patients continue to adopt a more consumerist approach to healthcare, skills of persuasion are emerging as critical in patient care. Patient perceptions of healthcare providers affect how they attend to and process provider messages, influencing patient understandings and health decisions such as preventive behaviors and medication adherence. Credibility plays an important role in patient perceptions of healthcare providers. Credibility is especially important for nurses, who are at the nexus of the healthcare process, assisting physicians and patients alike. Nurses are expected to treat patients holistically paying attention to patients’ interpersonal needs, while also managing countless other nursing tasks and associated paperwork. Nurses who meet these demands may be viewed as clinically competent or interpersonally competent; however, nursing literature lacks a comprehensive conceptualization of nurse credibility. Because credibility plays a vital role in determining how an audience attends to and processes messages, it is essential to view nursing within the context of communication.

The textbook publishing industry is undergoing what Wired magazine calls a “radical transformation,” and public speaking texts have been no strangers to the technological forces at play. Today, major publishing houses advertise “digital first” and “evergreen” models, offering something closer to a digital public speaking resource bank than a textbook traditionally understood. Literature about the basic communication/public speaking course has discussed the shift into online/hybrid learning and historically varying reactions to e-textbooks, but the current literature lacks a sustained interpretive examination of the communication ethics implications of such transformations. This article is both a pedagogical confession from the standpoint of university instructors and a scholarly investigation into the ethical consequences, both intentional and unintentional, of the transformation to a digital public speaking textbook format. We describe communication ethics literacy from a praxis orientation, attentive to the learning that emerged from seeing, listening, and responding to changes in educational technology at Duquesne University.