Thomas Merton’s “Letters to a White Liberal” identified “dwelling places” in which his readers could engage the struggle for civil rights as part of a larger theological and political confrontation with evil in the world. They revealed this struggle as a “kairotic” moment and demonstrated how an ethos of rhetoric informed by Christian principles and liberal ideals enabled readers to overcome racial oppression. Merton’s ethos of rhetoric continues to serve as a clarion call for white liberals and Christians to transform the ongoing struggle for racial justice into a form of religious and socio-political redemption.

Although silence is often associated with spirituality, not much is known about why spiritual leaders acquire silence or the impact their silence has on their followers. I study the texts that discuss the forty-four-year silence of the Indian mystic Meher Baba and argue that Baba’s silence transformed him into a myth. I conduct a close textual analysis of Baba’s explanations of why he chose silence as well as the accounts of people who personally interacted with Baba to understand what his silence meant to them. Four themes emerged from my investigation: the intimate nature of Baba’s silence, the appeal of a silent God, Baba’s reliance on interpretations that allowed him to transcend textual and temporal limitations, and the legacy created by his mysterious silence. My study concludes that Baba’s influence challenges our reliance on words for persuasion and points to the enthymematic qualities of an artful silence.

The purpose of this essay is to build upon and expand the work of Dr. Frank Thomas’s book How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon and extend the boundaries of prophetic rhetoric to more readily identify militancy within the scope of the sacred. This work will not necessarily delineate how to produce sermonic militancy vis-a-vis rhetorical invention. The work will, instead, honor the instructive nature of sermonic militancy and help us to acknowledge our propensity to erase, reduce, minimize, and demonize more militant rhetorical presentations (sermonic and otherwise) that are necessary for the full scope of Black liberation projects and social movements to be actualized.

Women play important roles in religious organizations, yet they consistently navigate conflicting discourses about their identities and roles in the church. Drawing on poststructuralism, this research explores gendered scripts in small groups and the ways hegemonic discourses limit women’s subjectivities. Through in-depth interviewing (n = 17) and grounded theory, the analysis explores how two dominant discourses are woven into women’s descriptions of their identities and roles in an evangelical church: (a) the Discourse of community and (b) the Discourse of doctrine. Women are engaged in self-subordination and concertive resistance, oscillating between scripts of rationality and emotion. The results demonstrate the power of women’s agency in traditional religious environments and enclave spaces, where dissensus and resistance may occur in evangelical churches.

This analysis examines the third-party support that evangelical leaders David Brody, Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress provided President Donald Trump during the Stormy Daniels scandal. In their defense of Trump, evangelical leaders argued that he represented an imperfect vessel sent to protect evangelical values. During cable news interviews, the leaders relied on the image repair strategies of minimization, transcendence, bolstering, denial, attack accuser, and differentiation. This crisis communication analysis found that evangelical leaders’ defenses of Trump were effective in maintaining evangelical support for the president. Implications are drawn concerning the role of religious voices in public political discourse and how third-party defenses can help rhetors repair their images with targeted audiences.

This article contends that an increase in the use of indirect communication, as defined by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, has the potential to transform how individuals and communities receive messages about faith, up to and including an embodied—or lived out—faith as opposed to rote religion. Through an analysis of the author’s background, conception of faith, development of indirect methods, and a review of recent scholarship there emerges a renewed call within a postmodern age to communicate indirectly. Changing lives is a central desire for Christian communication scholars. As such, consideration of new possibilities for reaching humanity via indirect methods of communication are not only timely but also critical. Identity and effective communication are key elements to Kierkegaard’s extensive writings on faith, and he offers a compelling voice for Christian culture to implement on a broader scale.