Employing the critical tools of religious communication scholarship, this essay explores Belief in a Just World Theory as a potent discursive source for unquestioned and oppressive norms of thought and speech. For many social scientists, Belief in a Just World Theory is an elegant, parsimonious, and compelling tool for exploring the sources of our most intractable social challenges. And yet, it seems our world maintains no homeostatic orientation toward justice. To reconcile that paradox, we begin this paper by re-positioning Belief in a Just World Theory as an unfalsifiable pseudo-science drawing rhetorical strength from a reservoir of religious discourse. We then analyze the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as a theoretically rich and politically urgent source of reconciliation, before concluding with a discussion of the wider implications that can be culled from our analysis for building and advancing the stock of knowledge in communication and religion.

Textual analysis was conducted in order to examine the usage of and messages communicated through mission statements found on the websites of traditionally Black Methodist denominational churches. The churches sampled are in the ten United States cities Forbes cited as being the best economically for African Americans. Although online/web presence was low among churches in the test, findings suggest thematic similarities among the publicly available mission statements. Practical suggestions include training church leaders to craft and communicate effective mission statements and implementing best practices for developing a strategic online/web presence in order to achieve greater organizational goals of access and relevance in a changing society.

A 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report after a two-year investigation documented numerous incidents of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and the cover-up of these crimes by those in positions of leadership. Framing is a critical aspect of crisis response. Framing involves selecting and emphasizing certain attributes of an issue. This article examines the response of one Jesuit university in its attempt to frame itself and the sexual abuse crisis. The value of understanding frameworks for crisis assessment and response, public relations functions, and thinking through an organization’s mission and social legitimacy provides a comprehensive approach that can help an organization properly address a crisis.

Religious congregations are prominent in American life as both gatherings of religious people and as community resource. We explore how congregations communicate these multiple identities through qualitative content analysis of clergy interviews and congregational websites. Findings suggest that congregations emphasize religiosity even as they articulate community service and highlight congregations as outside, inside, and constituting community. Although congregations are transparent with respect to their religiosity, we suggest that ambiguity serves not just as a function of multiple identities but as indicative of organizations that justify their work in spiritual terms to multiple audiences.

In 2019, Joy Ladin published The Soul of the Stranger, a book that offers a transgender critical reading of the Torah along with Ladin’s personal reflections as a transgender member of a Jewish community with a background in Torah observance. This essay offers an analysis of The Soul of the Stranger, arguing that Ladin constructs a transgender Jewish tradition in the text. Ladin disavows the ostensible incompatibility of trans and Jewish experiences by showing how her reading of Genesis and Jonah accords with rather than departs from traditional rabbinic approaches to Jewish texts in two key ways: by reinterpreting apparent binaries in the creation narratives and by explaining biblical figures’ trans-related experiences. Ladin’s reimagining of foundational Jewish texts forecloses transphobic Torah interpretations by refusing to allow potential detractors to set the terms of the conversation. By appealing to Jewish tradition and, thereby, simultaneously constituting it, Ladin imagines and creates a trans-inclusive Judaism framed on its own terms rather than in opposition to voices of exclusion.