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.

This study investigates how first-time religious missionaries use communication to readapt to life outside the mission field after returning home. The findings suggest that returning missionaries used communication to facilitate the reentry. In-depth qualitative interviews with 14 Christian missionaries revealed three common experiences: reconciling the missionary identity, reentering the social context, and transitioning to the post-missionary life, as well as four types of communication used to facilitate the reentry: storytelling, disclosing, connecting with God, and silencing. These findings provide insight into the experience of returning missionaries, their spiritual development, and use of communication.

Social media sites such as Facebook allow for the easy extension and support of imagined community within online spaces. This study seeks to examine the role of imagined community and framing in portrayals of Islam and Muslims within the comments of public media pages on Facebook. A comparative analysis of comments on news articles from conservative, mainstream, and liberal media sources was conducted to understand the quantity and content of Islamophobic comments on these pages. Comments on eight of the most popular conservative Facebook pages (seven news sites and that of President Donald Trump) were analyzed, and an online rating system was used to consider how far right a source is considered. Both the qualitative and quantitative data suggest imagined community exists within commenters on conservative media Facebook pages, particularly those rated further on the political right, reinforcing the use of Islamophobic rhetoric.

Grounded in narrative inquiry and framed by narrative theoretical perspective, the present study addresses the following research questions: (a) How does a church and associated church foundation practice religious affinity fraud? and (b) What are the communication challenges and experiences families may undergo when a church and associated church foundation practice religious affinity fraud on their vulnerable family members? An in-depth narrative inquiry exploring one church’s practice of religious affinity fraud on a family serves as a cautionary tale for other families to make them aware of the deceptive strategies used by charismatic church leaders to steal from the elderly and help minimize the chances of this misdeed happening to their family. Findings provide an entry point for cultural change in church communities where affinity fraud is prevalent. They also provide insight to families, researchers, and lawmakers so they can better understand how they can effectively communicate with and safeguard the elderly population.

Three in ten Americans believe that the Bible is the Word of God and should be taken literally, word for word. Surveys and studies show this contingent of literalists is composed primarily of evangelicals and, for White evangelicals in particular, that biblical literalism is a strong predictor of their conservative politics. The present essay, based on a case study of an evangelical church observed over three years, argues that biblical literalism is not only a belief but also a culture. Further, literalist culture is constructed and sustained by interwoven discourses that dynamically circulate across the macro, meso, and micro levels of speaking practice in the evangelical social system.

Thomas Berry, geologian, has been called one of the leading commentators on religion and the environment. This paper compares Berry’s writings with Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’. Pope Francis and Berry both use the root metaphor of integral ecology that implies a connection and reciprocity with the universe. However, Berry focuses on the rights of the earth that has existed billions of years before humankind. Humans are part of the earth community. Pope Francis focuses on social relations between human beings and the consequences for the environment because of egoism and begins his analysis with the past 20 centuries. Berry does not disagree but gives a special place to the earth and believes once respect is given to the earth social problems will be solved. Pope Francis wants to awaken a dialogue, where Berry believes we have become locked into reified stories, some of them from the Judeo-Christian interpretation of the Bible. Berry uses the metaphor of a “new story.” His story leads to cosmogenesis, or a new created order. For both writers, the challenge is implementation before it is too late for the human community.

Karl Jaspers was among the world’s foremost existentialist philosophers. This article introduces Jaspers’s notion of “listening to” or “reading” spiritually significant symbols in order to encounter the sacred within our natural and material environments. An attempt is made to convey Jaspers’s background, his philosophy of cypher-listening, his place within existential philosophy, his relation to religion, and the relevance of his early existential philosophizing for our own 21st-century era of “existential threat.” Expanding traditional conceptions of “communication” to include human-and-nature and human-and-divine encounters is also encouraged.

The coronavirus pandemic provided opportunity to examine resilience and struggle of people living in lockdown isolation by proposing contract and covenant worldviews as moderating factors in relational communication. A survey completed by 238 individuals indicated that higher scores on religious covenantalism and lower on non-religious contractualism predicted increased well-being and decreased relational struggle. Specifically, “covenanters” were more likely to report higher rates of general coping, perceived social support, interpersonal trust, and satisfaction with life, and lower rates of interpersonal aggression, anxiety, social phobia, and loneliness compared to their “contractor” counterparts. We discuss results in terms of models of relating, struggle and repair, and the role of religious community and communication to buffer pandemic hardships.

Throughout the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney distinguished himself as the most successful evangelical preacher in the United States. Trained as a lawyer before converting to Christianity and its ministry, Finney came to the pulpit with a fiercely rational and accusatory style that placed demands upon his listeners. In formulating his appeal, Finney also fashioned an innovative Protestant theology that challenged New England Calvinism. After establishing that each sinner has the power to self-reform, he spread the message to audiences across the Northeast, sparking a series of revivals that made his reputation. In the 1830s, Finney was asked to explain his method from his New York City pulpit, and did so across twenty-two lectures that detailed his revival strategy. This essay employs Finney’s theory of individual conversion to examine his theory of mass revival, noting the essentially deliberative character of each and recognizing the lasting influence of both on evangelical life in the United States.

The purpose of this study was to conceptualize the role of prayer and relationship with God for parents who experienced the death of a child. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 parents. A thematic analysis was conducted. Results of this study expand on the Relational Prayer Theory by Baesler (1999) and the direct divine communication model suggested by Sigler (2014), including a discussion of receptive prayer as defined by Baesler (1999) in the Relational Prayer Theory and of direct divine communication as defined by Sigler (2014).

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.