This study investigated the influence of communication, job satisfaction, and religiosity on burnout levels of female student leaders at a church-related university. Survey data was collected from a purposive sample of student women serving in some official, paid leadership capacity on campus. Cannonical correlation and multiple regression procedures revealed strong relationships between burnout and role conflict, communication competence, and role ambiguity. An additional regression procedure revealed a positive relationship between job satisfaction and communication competence and satisfaction and an inverse relationship with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Lastly, examination of Pearson’s r correlations revealed statistically significant, moderately strong, inverse associations between intrinsic religiosity and all three measures of burnout included in this study.

Interviews were conducted with 77 Hindu Indian women across socioeconomic classes and occupations to examine the cultural-religious influences that underlie individuals’ understanding of their world of work. Participants indicated that work had meaning if it (a) served Indian society; (b) engaged them in paid employment; (c) enabled standing on one’s own feet; and (d) fulfilled their role-related kartavya (responsibilities, obligations). Findings highlight how the Hindu cultural-religious-spiritual-philosophical constructs of dharma and karma act as non-conscious ideologies in participants’ work values. Such culture-centered meanings of work and attendant societal Discourses (i.e., macro discourses) offer insight into the secularization of religious and philosophical aspects of everyday life in India.

This essay explores Aung San Suu Kyi’s rhetoric, which features Buddhism as an integral way to address, both culturally and politically, postcolonial subjectivity. Suu Kyi’s infusion of religion in political communication demonstrates heuristic interconnections between communication studies of rhetoric and postcolonial discourses. Western educated, and widow to an Englishman, she counters political adversaries’ attempts to frame her as a token Westerner, one who is only Burmese in name or ethnicity. Having mastered Buddhist meditation, her religious affiliation strengthens her ethos. Valuing theoretical intersections between postcolonial studies and communication studies, this case study examines how Suu Kyi, as a postcolonial subject, uses Buddhism advantageously as a rhetorical means in her push to gain human rights and democratic practices and processes for Myanmar’s (Burma’s) stifled political system and its ethnically diverse people.

This paper addresses the first issue of the English-language web-based Al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, which was released in the summer of 2010. The authors contextualize the magazine in the media aspects of the conflict between Al-Qaeda and the West, and examine an article attributed to Usama bin Laden through the lens of Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric. The authors demonstrate that political violence is a media-driven event, and that The New Rhetoric, taken as a method in such a context, becomes a petitio, since the very question raised by Inspire focuses on the definition and nature of the universal audience. This raises quite significant questions abut the nature of methodology at the intersection of communication and religion.