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.

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.

This paper argues that the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan can persuasively be viewed as a holy war prosecuted on behalf of American-style liberalism. To make this argument, it develops a framework for understanding holy war as an issue of communication and draws on the work of Émile Durkheim, Patrick Deneen, James K. A. Smith, and Judith Shklar to situate liberalism as a religion. It then details how U.S. presidents proclaimed and prosecuted holy war in Afghanistan in five acts, showing how the conflict developed as a (liberal) religious war under Bush and continued until the August 2021 U.S. military withdrawal.

This study examines the effects of deductive and inductive preaching in a church setting. A sermon fulfills Bitzer’s description of a rhetorical event in context, exigence, and nature of utterance (1968). A series of deductive and inductive sermons was preached to gauge the preferences of listeners and impact of these rhetorical events on their lives. Two focus groups, as well as six interview subjects, participated in this qualitative study through pretests, post-tests, and interviews. Findings contribute to the field of communication by exploring ramifications of inductive and deductive preaching and the effects of each in a congregation situated in an increasingly biblically illiterate culture, specifically in the context of Churches of Christ.

Haredi Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of New York have been aggressively targeted by anti-vax groups. Reaching the Haredim with misinformation is facilitated by the very accommodations used to keep the lifestyle separate and incorruptible. Actually, most rabbis, the experts on Jewish law, advocate for vaccination, and this comes straight from the communication of scripture. Despite the fact that the principles of a fundamentalist religion can complicate some life decisions, an understanding of religious law and a rabbi’s interpretation of scripture as the ultimate authoritative sources may best counter medical misinformation, both for the group itself and the public’s impressions of them.

This essay analyzes the form of Hillsong Los Angeles’s live Sunday services and Hillsong California’s digital services using Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic analysis. Specifically, it extends Burke’s concept of the “representative anecdote” to accommodate the sequence of formal choices made in Hillsong church services. Furthermore, it considers the dialectical interactions of this underlying narrative, the material aspects of the service, and ritual enactments of the discourse therein. The essay offers a processual look at how one of the most popular global church movements articulates an organizationally coherent message in a local setting and also contributes to our understanding how millennial-led ministries influence the contemporary religious marketplace.

This essay examines Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley’s adoption of the Persona of the Humble Teacher while presenting a Bible study about sexuality to Alfred Street Baptist Church. The Persona of the Humble Teacher is a newly identified rhetorical persona that can be useful in discussions about debated topics within Christianity. In examining the methodology, the Humble Teacher uses rhetorical theology to bridge the educational gap between persons with opposing views. The goal is to increase the listeners’ consciousness by moving the listeners toward a deeper understanding of one another. In exploring the rhetoric of the Humble Teacher, I argue that Wesley develops the rhetorical situation as outlined in the seminal article “The Rhetorical Situation” by Lloyd Bitzer. Wesley uses both constitutive and invitational rhetoric to create the boundaries necessary for healthy dialogue. Given the Black church’s lack of discourse around LGBTQIA issues, religious leaders can adopt the Persona of the Humble Teacher as exemplified by Pastor Howard-John Wesley to engage in dialogue about sexuality and other taboo topics within the church.

Despite the Mormon Church having policies and doctrines that discriminate against 2SLGBTQIA+ folks, some queer people choose to stay in the organization. This study explores how collective forgetting is used as a strategy among queer Mormons as they navigate Othering. By employing a critical thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 15 queer and actively involved members of the Church, this research examines the tensions of remembering and forgetting discrimination and traces how official religious rhetoric influences interpersonal and identity decisions. Discussions on how the findings connect with whiteness and anti-queerness are presented within the context of the Church. Limitations and future paths of study are offered.

In this study, we identify the privacy rules of people with religious beliefs different from the exclusivist Christian religious beliefs of their family members. Sixteen individuals with significantly different religious beliefs than their exclusivist Christian family members were interviewed to discern the privacy rules guiding their decisions regarding their religious belief revelations. An analysis of interview transcripts demonstrated that participants created privacy rules about what information about their religious beliefs to reveal and how to reveal information about their religious beliefs. Results are considered in light of preceding literature on religious belief revelation and privacy management.

This narrative study investigated the perceived experience and navigation of identity gaps in intrafaith Protestant dating relationships. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 self-identified Christians. Guided by the communication theory of identity, the analyses revealed identity-rooted dilemmas that disrupted the ideal Christian relationship trajectory. Under two identity gap motifs, four themes were uncovered: personal identity dissonance via enacted identity, perceived partner identity dissonance, church prescriptions and expectations, and intimacy boundary regulation and synchronization dilemmas. Three communication strategies were identified as attempts to navigate identity gaps: reinforcing faith-based identity awareness, practicing multiple interaction pathways, and tracking and sustaining third-party viewpoints.