On June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof walked into Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, South Carolina, with a .45 caliber Glock handgun while members conducted their Wednesday night bible study. After sitting through the mid-week bible study, near the close of the meeting and after praying with them, Roof shot and killed nine people who became known as the Emanuel Nine. Black pain again was on full display in the media and so were calls for forgiveness. In this essay, we examine the rhetoric of forgiveness and how forgiveness, as a trope, performs in public when expressed through black pain. Further, we maintain that the wider public not only expects a rhetoric of forgiveness when racial ghosts of the past (and present) manifest in ways that cause black pain but also those grief-stricken black families must offer the forgiveness in non-threatening and expeditiously ways that ease public consciences. This leads us to examine the rhetoric of (un)forgiveness and how it functions through black pain as well.

In 2012, Chris Stedman, then the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University, published the memoir Faitheist. Stedman (2012) argues that nonreligious people ought to join with people of faith in working toward social justice in the world rather than taking antagonistic positions on religion in the vein of so-called New Atheism. To build his argument, Stedman reflects on his own upbringing in a passively nonreligious family, his teenage conversion to evangelical Christianity, his discovery of his own queer identity, his subsequent acrimonious rejection of religion, and his eventual shift to a less militant atheism that sought commonality with persons of faith. Drawing on scholarship about the role of civility in public discourse and the study of narrative genres, this essay builds the case that Stedman’s narrative includes a number of conversion stories, as well as a coming out story (which shares many features of the conversion narrative genre). The generic (that is, related to genre) patterns that emerge in these various stories cohere to help Stedman make a case for the radical potential of (non)religious civility—amid differences—by finding common ground in shared values.

The Babylon Bee, a Christian parody and satire website launched in March 2016, has quickly gained attention and a large following amongst Evangelical Christians and communities online. This paper argues that the site promotes a specific strain of Evangelicalism that may be understood through the concept of countersymbols developed by Jonathan J. Edwards. Using Edwards’s notions of countersymbols as an organizing concept to analyze the use of parodic and satirical rhetoric, this article argues that The Babylon Bee portrays a vision of the church in contemporary society that may be described as exemplifying the countersymbol of “Sincerity.”

This article contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation on religious rhetoric in American politics by focusing on the role of Anglicanism in promoting political compromise. Using the rhetoric of former U.S. Senator and U.N. Ambassador John Danforth, this article suggests that the dominant theories of religion and politics have failed to consider the significant influence of mainline Protestantism in shaping public discourse in the United States. In doing so, the extant literature has established a false dichotomy between political compromise and sincere religious belief. By turning to questions of underlying virtue, scholars can better understand the significant role of various religious traditions in American politics and political compromise.

One of the most important shifts occurring in the religious landscape is a significant increase in the number of churches that are ordaining and calling women to the ministry. While a tremendous amount of work in communication has studied the differences in speech by male and female speakers, that analysis has not turned to the level of the sermon. Using nearly 900 sermon transcripts collected from pastors of both genders, this paper uses a number of text analysis techniques including natural language processing and sentiment analysis to understand the differences in sermon delivery between the genders. Our findings note that while sermons delivered by males are significantly longer, female speakers are more likely to use first person pronouns and tentative speech than their male counterparts. Overall, our sentiment analysis finds that women are more likely to use positive words; however, sentiment varies dramatically across the entire arc of the sermon.

There are unique rhetorical employments of myths such as mythopoeia that are often overlooked in rhetorical scholarship. In this paper, I argue that C.S. Lewis employed mythopoiesis as he spoke one of the greatest sermonic works of the twentieth century entitled The Weight of Glory. Kilby (1964) contends that mythopoeia through a Lewisonian lens encourages a greater understanding of existence through “picture-making” but, more significantly, issues a “deep call from that Reality” (p. 81). In other words, the employment of mythopoeia by a rhetor is, in a sense, a summons to enter into and experience the myth-world being constructed or, in the case of Lewis, the myth-world of Christianity. Although, collectively, the world experienced one of its greatest travesties during the Second World War, it was at this very exigence that Lewis’s rhetoric provided a summons to experience the world anew through religious communication. Therefore, this essay will examine C. S. Lewis’s sermon The Weight of Glory at Oxford University in 1941 and his employment of mythopoiesis to persuade students to believe in the Christian mythos and thus long for a “far-off country,” thereby giving hope at a desperate moment during the war.