During her brief life in the early nineteenth century, the Persian poet and theologian Táhirih advocated for a spiritual revolution. Authorities executed her for heresy in 1852. After death, Táhirih attracted admirers around the world; Western writers—especially women—have interpreted her history to argue for gender equality, religious renewal, and global interdependence. This Middle Eastern preacher has established a posthumous pulpit in the United States, as members of the Bahá’í Faith there have authored a dozen books about her. After introducing Táhirih’s rhetorical rebellions, this essay demonstrates her transnational influence by analyzing her afterlives in U.S. Bahá’í discourse.

This paper grounds the popular discussions of mindfulness in the U.S. that frame it as a self-help technique in the primary discourses of the Buddha, and cautions against an appropriation of mindfulness as an individualistic and a pragmatic tool. Specifically, I focus on the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (The Foundations of Mindfulness) that is part of the “long collection,” Digha Nikaya (DN), which includes a detailed discussion of the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path that explore the problem of suffering and liberation from suffering in human experience. The noble eightfold path offers a framework for the systematic training of mental faculties through three groups that are interrelated: virtue, concentration, and discernment. Mindfulness is part of the concentration group, which is part of a training that equally emphasizes virtue (moral discipline) and wisdom (discernment). Finally, I discuss communicative and epistemological implications of mindfulness discourses that present ways of knowing and beingin-the-world beyond self-centeredness.

This article examines liturgy through a responsiveness-oriented rhetorical analysis. Responsiveness is an emerging conception of rhetoric that brings focus to how people change their own habits. For Christians, this article finds that liturgical call-and-response can develop people’s rhetorical responsiveness because the scriptedness of responding simplifies what people should do/say, putting more emphasis on people’s participation and their willingness to be drawn in. These findings are then extended through examining two moments in a larger project, which show that liturgy can be adapted for antiracist rhetorical work outside of worship services, in that liturgy allows people to listen, participate without dominating, and subordinate themselves to a common spiritual goal. Overall, this article contributes to work on religious rhetoric, race, and rhetorical theory.

When a mission ends, missionaries must make sense of their experiences, themselves, and their lives going forward. This process of sensemaking and its implications for religious organizations’ communication with members who occupy terminal roles is the focus of this study. Based on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with former missionaries in one organization, two distinct and divergent patterns of missionaries’ sensemaking and role exit emerged. Finisher sensemaking involved deidentification with vocational ministry, leaving the sending organization, and (re)constructing multiple identities through an arduous process of identity work. Conversely, bypasser sensemaking drew upon the sending organization as a resource to sustain a deep identification with vocational ministry. Thus bypassers positioned themselves as essential members and reidentified with new roles in the organization. The ongoing study of communication in/about terminal roles in religious and other totalistic organizations is discussed as well as practical implications for organizations and their members.

Recent research has revealed a prominent ‘political parallelism’ phenomenon in the coverage of Islam and Muslims. The studies have evidenced that the coverage of Islam and Muslims is widely influenced by the ideological leanings of the newspapers. This paper is set to explore whether the ideological differences of the Australian newspapers are reflected in the coverage of Islam and Muslims during January 1, 2016, to March 31, 2017. Employing Van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square and lexicalization approaches within the CDA paradigm, this study examined editorials from two leading Australian newspapers. The findings have validated the existence of the ‘political parallelism’ discourse in the editorial contents of the selected newspapers representing Islam and Muslims.

In light of the number of immigrants globally as well as in the U.S., it is important to learn how immigrants are assimilating into their host communities. Social capital is a promising lens through which to view this phenomenon. In this paper, we present the case study of a Korean immigrant church in Northern Virginia that has been a good model of a successful immigrant church. The church’s success stems from church leaders’ understanding of the gap between first- and second-generation Korean church members.

After the publication of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, a group of four Cardinals prepared and shared five questions—dubia (“doubts”)—with the Pope and the public. The dubia focus on the content in one footnote in one chapter of the document. While a critique of Amoris Laetitia and the dubia is not this paper’s focus, the cultural dynamics at play are, because they are instrumental in how the conflict surrounding Amoris Laetitia developed. Using Hall’s (1977, 1984) taxonomy about high- and low-context cultures with Ting-Toomey’s (1985, 2006) application of Hall’s taxonomy to conflict in intercultural communication situations, this paper examines (a) why the dubia were initiated and continued from Cardinals, who hail from low-context cultures, (b) why the Pope, who hails from a high-context culture, has not formally and thoroughly responded, and (c) how the high-context organizational culture of the Vatican helped to fuel matters. This paper concludes with ways to avoid similar intercultural communication problems within the Church’s hierarchy in the future. For communication and religion, the case illustrates the importance of intercultural dynamics in resolving debates about doctrine and teaching, including the role of organizational culture in such debates.

Studies of organized religion in the United States often approach the intersection of faith and marketization forces as representing either a new opportunity for American congregations to remain culturally relevant or a harbinger of the end of religion’s social influence altogether. I suggest that a more nuanced understanding of this tension requires “revisualizing” how it plays out in discursive and material ways in the everyday life of faith-based organizations. By using photovoice to investigate the organizational identity of a nondenominational congregation (NDC), this article illustrates an American church paradoxically attempting to construct a community-based identity by enacting enterprising communication processes.

Kenneth R. Chase has defended a robust Christian rhetorical theory based on the doctrine of the incarnation and called for further investigation into historical resources for such a rhetoric. I offer George Herbert’s rhetoric of the rural pastor as such a resource. Herbert weds a Christian approach to audience (derived from Augustine) to a thoroughly incarnational rhetoric extending beyond the pulpit to the parson’s household and way of life. As such, he offers a model of incarnational rhetoric that challenges histories of rhetoric premised upon a simple opposition between philosophy and rhetoric.

Often, faith-based organizations are unprepared for crisis situations; and when they occur, disaster for the organization soon follows. Using an analysis of the situational crisis communications theory (SCCT) by Timothy Coombs, this paper will illustrate the impact of crisis events to faith-based organizations. This paper will then provide direction to changes for communication planning to be used in faith-based organizations by using Matthew Seeger’s Best Practices in Crisis Communication: An Expert Panel Process. This direction, provided with best practice examples, should assist faith-based organizations in preparing a strategic crisis communications plan.

This essay studies the TLC channel reality show My 600 Pound Life as a manifestation of the religious ritual of pilgrimage. The influence of popular culture upon religion, and of religion upon popular culture, is well established. Of special interest is the study of ritual, a highly formal discourse and practice. Because of its formal nature, ritual may be found across both sacred and secular texts and practices. Discourses may perform a ritual function vicariously for an audience. When a ritual is of religious origin, it appeals to an audience’s sense of religious meanings and authority. One central ritual pattern, of religious origin but found widely in secular discourse and practice, is the pilgrimage. This essay explains the major formal components of a pilgrimage, and then using a method of rhetorical homology, identifies My 600 Pound Life as formally a pilgrimage. The ideological commitments induced in an audience through formal appeal are discussed in this particular case. The essay shows the value of looking for religious form in the secular, the value of studying pilgrimage specifically, and the value of the method of rhetorical homology.

Recently, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced unprecedented public attention in what has been termed “The Mormon Moment.” While there has been an increased media focus on the religion, research into how Mormons perceive that attention is lacking, especially regarding the attention directed toward recent political candidate Mitt Romney. The purpose of this research is to fill the gap by analyzing the Mormon community’s perspectives of Mitt Romney. The current study uses Q-methodology and personal interviews to access Mormon’s perceptions of the media and politics. Results indicate that Mormons fall into four perceptual categories, indicating greater diversity within the Mormon community previously recognized.

Because of the role religion plays in upholding socio-political arrangements in Jordan, we argue that Jordanian Protestants, as a religious minority, can be productively understood as a religious counterpublic. Given the explicitly Islamic nature of Jordanian national identity, their unique mode of counterpublicity seeks to simultaneously maintain a distinct religious identity while also compensating for Jordanian Protestants’ deviance from the prevailing religious norms via overt displays of national loyalty. This compensatory mode of counterpublicity is visible through Jordanian Protestants’ public displays and symbols, public sermons and statements, and on social media.

This paper explores the origins of media ecology as defined by Neil Postman. It clarifies the extent to which McLuhan and Korzybski influenced its development, and discusses specific strengths and weaknesses of the theory as a vehicle for study. Finally, this paper explores Judeo-Christian influences upon media ecology, briefly examines the place of media ecology in church history beginning with Luther, and finally offers fresh applications of Postman’s ideas to three particular aspects of the everyday practice of the Christian faith.

Faith-based organizations often provide resources to low-income populations. In the religion literature, this is seen as a key element of the social capital of religion for these populations. However, this qualitative study finds a different element in how low-income people experience social capital. In focus groups, this study finds a surprising number of references to God and spirituality, but not faith-based organizations, among a sample of low-income people, many experiencing homelessness, when talking about resources available through their social networks. This study finds a population so estranged from resources they can trust that they substitute God as they understand Him as their only source of social capital. These participants described communication with God as a way to access resources through kind strangers who may decide to be generous with them as a result of God’s intervention.

The reign of England’s Mary Tudor has long been examined by historians for her regime’s extensive use of propaganda to attempt to convert her populace from Protestantism to Catholicism. These explorations, however, ignore the regime’s employment of other communications strategies, particularly public relations, as key components of its conversion efforts. This paper furthers the discussion of how propaganda and public relations are differentiated and examines and reinterprets the Marian government’s activities from a public relations perspective with the goal of continuing to establish a more comprehensive history of public relations and to explore the impact of public relations activities versus pure propagandistic techniques.

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.