One of the problems with applying Maurice Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric to religious communication is that the theory is largely discursive. Yet embodied ritual is often crucial for understanding religious contexts. This study, then, seeks to theorize a constitutive rhetoric of practice, focusing on what Charland calls the ideologies of aesthetic experience. Using the Mennonite cookbook More-with-Less as a case study, I propose that practice, broadly construed, can be a constitutive rhetoric that interpellates the subject into the compressed narratives embodied in everyday actions.

“The Devil and Vaccination,” a satirical take on Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey’s poem, “The Devil’s Thoughts,” appeared in the July 1879 issue of The Vaccination Inquirer and Health Review—a publication that published vaccine-skeptical writings. The poem told the story of the Devil visiting a prison, encountering several people including a father imprisoned for refusing to have one of his children vaccinated. In the present rhetorical analysis, “The Devil and Vaccination” was viewed through the lens of inoculation theory—a theory more commonly used to guide a social scientific approach to the study of resistance to influence (i.e., experimentally tested messaging effects). In this unique conglomeration of religious and health rhetoric, the poem seemed to reject both inoculation as a medical strategy and inoculation as a rhetorical strategy.

Eric McLuhan’s notion of “transformation theory” remains open for interpretation and analysis. This article provides one such perspective by establishing a process of communication for it. Out of the analysis emerges a key insight: Transformation is the basis for effective communication. Through a transformation into the likeness of the medium of communication, one more effectively transmits their message. This insight not only applies to human communication but also to divine communication with “THE medium,” God Himself. Whether in the human or divine realm, transformation is the marker of effective communication.