This study argues that accounts of rhetoric in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy must take his religious thought seriously. Using his anthropology lectures and religious writings, I diagnose the role of inclination and self-focus in the egoistical orientations that Kant sees as plaguing human interaction, as well as the social vices that appear once humans are in community with others. This article explores how religious community represents a social solution to these social problems inherent in human interaction, and how religious activity serves as rhetorical means for reorienting humans away from the motives of self-focus. Kant’s advocacy of activities such as sermons employing religious narratives and symbols, as well as ritual behaviors such as prayer and church-going, illuminates the specific role of rhetorical activity in moral cultivation.

“Emerging church” writer Brian McLaren has been at the vanguard of efforts to rethink Christian faith beyond the evangelical/liberal divide. This essay applies aspects of Bakhtin’s thought to shed light on McLaren’s approach to Scripture in A New Kind of Christianity. A Bakhtinian reading of McLaren’s hermeneutic shows his “new kind of Christianity” to be a quest for divine “novelness,” facilitated by entering into the heteroglossia and polyphony of Scripture. I argue that Bakhtin’s centrifugal/centripetal dialectic offers a richer understanding of McLaren’s approach and the tensions between him and traditional evangelicals than a left-wing/right-wing dichotomy.

This paper argues that communication inquiry can be understood as a spiritual practice. Specifically, it looks at three paradigms of communication inquiry: classical scientific, interpretive, and critical. It identifies the spiritual traditions that align with each paradigm and shows how understanding each paradigm from a spiritual perspective can improve the practice of inquiry. Understanding communication inquiry as spiritual also helps address the problem of interparadigmatic incommensurability. This paper closes by identifying common components of spiritual inquiry across the three paradigms.

This article accomplishes three primary objectives. (1) It critiques Baesler’s Relational Prayer Model (RPM), explaining how that model focuses on human prayer behavior and therefore cannot account for communication from the divine, a phenomenon here called “direct divine communication” (DDC). (2) It argues that DDC cannot be considered a prayer event per se and thus requires its own, nonprayer model. (3) It combines basic transmission communication model components and basic constructivist communication concepts to build a DDC model (DDCM) that begins to explain how individuals interpret “worldly” phenomenological experiences into “other-worldly” communication events with deeply personal, spiritual meaning.

When John Paul II died in 2005, his funeral became a media event, an area Dayan and Katz explored in the early 1990s. Catholicism and the life of the Pope have gone mainstream: The Catholic hierarchy is challenged to present an image of the sacred that can withstand the profane prodding of the media. How, then, can the sanctity of religious events be preserved in their media coverage? Is the confluence of mass media and a sacred event such as a religious figure’s funeral really sacred anymore? This paper analyzes footage from John Paul II’s funeral with this question in mind.