This essay considers Phillip E. Johnson’s “Wedge Strategy” for Intelligent Design (ID) advocacy, assessing his contribution to an eighty-year history of public education controversy. Starting with the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and culminating in the 2005 case of Kitzmiller v. Dover in Dover, Pennsylvania, this ancestry discloses interesting developments in rhetorical strategy. Though past studies have considered the creation–evolution debates as confrontations between religion and science, this piece is primarily interested in how these contests frame the opposition between liberality and illiberality. As Johnson and his allies asserted that ID was true, they were just as adamant that it would set people free. In making this claim, they drew on rhetorical resources previously employed by advocates of evolution, refashioning theistic appeals to positive liberty in the negative frame of academic freedom, and hoping thereby to affect a reversal of roles with their scientific critics. Important to discussions of public school science curricula, this analysis is also revelatory about liberal discourse writ large.

Research on spirituality at the end of life is extensive. Most research prescribes why care workers should talk with patients and their families about spirituality, who should talk with them, and how care workers should do it. Few studies address the experiences of discussing religion with families at the end of life. In this study, semistructured interviews with nurses, patient advocates, chaplains, and social workers (n = 65) described their experiences of religious discussions with family members. Generally, families seek spiritual reassurance for their decisions, including that their decisions align with the will of God and their religion.

This article interprets a live electronic music DJ performance by Armin van Buuren at Ultra Music Festival 2019 in Miami as a religious, rhetorical text. It considers the methods of van Buuren and why he appeals to a younger generation that is seeking spirituality outside of traditional religion. Electronic music has long been identified by scholars as having a spiritual ethos, and van Buuren’s style epitomizes what is described as “technoshamanism.” His performance and the behavior of the audience can be described as religious behavior and manifests the dogma of the electronic music scene: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.

Drawing on insights from revivalist Jonathan Edwards, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and communication theory about inoculation, I examine Hell Houses, haunted house–style events designed to scare audiences into becoming Christians. Performances rely on inoculation to demonize outgroups and reinforce in-group commitment. While scholars identify Edwards as a rhetorical ancestor of Hell House tactics, inoculation reinforces in-group identity in a way that fits Edwards’s critique of “counterfeit love”—excessive in-group affection. The counterfeit love Hell Houses promote is bolstered by what Nietzsche termed ressentiment, Christian morality’s oppositional antagonism. Deconversion narratives from ex-Hell House actors suggest that reifying an oppositional group identity may ultimately undermine evangelistic goals.

While Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Lawson are credited as the forces behind the Memphis sanitation strike, local faces galvanizing the movement are infrequently studied. The sacred rhetoric of African Methodist minister Rev. Henry Logan Starks—known as the “Gentle Giant” and trained in the tradition of holy defiance, transformative resistance, and Black liberation—is remembered and recalled as theologically transformative and prophetically provocative. Using ideological criticism, this essay will analyze the phrase “You are somebody” as an example of prophetic rhetoric and rhetorical re-conditioning.

Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805–1844) set the doctrinal table of Mormonism through his revelations, other writings, and oral discourse. Despite the unorthodox nature of Smith’s ideas and his initial lack of oratorical skills, the church he founded has flourished despite determined opposition. This essay reviews Smith’s rhetorical development, including a review of the doctrinally rich King Follett Discourse through the critical lens of Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm, to account, at least in part, for the appeal of Smith and his ideas.

This article examines a specific Tunisian Muslim woman’s nude protest on social media and its misinterpretation by FEMEN, a Ukrainian radical feminist activist group intended to protect women’s rights. I argue that, although digital media seems to offer more inclusivity in the material world, subaltern bodies who use technology to transmit their message still cannot be heard. Thus, I offer actor-network theory as a different framework for tracking these types of conflicts, one that allows for intersectionality and non-Western religions to be recognized and acknowledged. Finally, I conclude that flexible solidarity is the logical relation of religion-as-networked-performance.

The theoretical clash between the sacred and the profane is one of the most compelling aspects of the way humans use discourse in the pursuit of truth. Rene Descartes’ method, understood as an attempt to rebuild a body of knowledge by calling all that is known into question, demonstrates this dynamic. As Descartes disavows all previously held assumptions, he makes a deliberate caveat to exempt his faith in God from suspicion. In this essay, I argue that the separation of Descartes’ faith from his method is a meaningful illustration of reasoning from the sacred. I demonstrate that a key role of the sacred is to shape the way a person reasons, even as a sacred belief can hold a vaunted, protected position in that person’s worldview. This status of a belief is characterized by two distinct logical structures: separation and security. Finally, based on this analysis, I explicate a few ways that this type of separation has telling implications for our contemporary moral discourse.

This essay examines David Crowder’s award-winning contemporary worship album A Collision using an expanded Burkeian toolkit. I show that it takes the romantic tendencies in contemporary worship to the end of the line, causing them to collide with carefully planned realism yet eliding the tragicomic social dimension of the gospel. Through purposeful incongruities, Crowder creates ironic awareness of faith’s paradoxes. Through linguistic reflexivity, he conveys his art’s inadequacy to divine worship. Yet A Collision’s romantic core endures, partly matured and tempered by these Burkeian moves. The album thus approaches, but does not arrive at, what Burke called the “poetic ideal.”

This essay analyzes the deployment of freedom and liberty as premises in orthodox culture war argumentation. Specifically, it suggests that recent decades have been host to a marked shift in social issue debates, whereby formerly religious arguments have adopted an increasingly secular, liberal tenor. Though ostensibly concerned with moral questions, activists and interest groups have sought to appropriate the mantle of American freedom, thus fortifying their positions amid the shared ideals of liberal democracy. A timely case study is found in contemporary opposition to same-sex marriage. Here as elsewhere, religious elites who had formerly framed their public statements in accusatory moralreligious terms now increasingly claim to stand in defense of free speech and free religious expression. Though at times justified, this position indicates a sort of rhetorical backpedaling whereby religious speakers defend the right to hold unpopular views rather than attempting to defend the views themselves. I conclude by suggesting a religious politics in the broad sense of the term, advising religious advocates to return to a public practice of their faith that rejects political ambition.

This paper applies rhetorical theory (specifically the rhetorical theorist Michael Leff’s concept of hermeneutical rhetoric) to the “gay debate” in American evangelicalism. Given that liberal and conservative positions arise from contrasting interpretations of the Christian scriptures, which in turn arise from a contest of hermeneutical priorities, I suggest that hermeneutical rhetoric potentially creates interpretive common ground because it does not prioritize historical data over scriptural authority—a hermeneutic method that has been resisted consistently by American evangelicals. Through the specific case study of the 2006 Soulforce Equality Ride at Wheaton College, I demonstrate how hermeneutical rhetoric circumvents stakeholders’ implicit observance of the hermeneutical fault line between liberal-historicism and evangelical-biblicism.

Two studies are presented. The first derives an eight-item Model of Academic Criteria for Direct Divine Communication (MACDDC) from the few existing empirical studies of the phenomenological experience of direct divine communication (DDC). Four serious limitations of the MACDDC, arising from biases in DDC research, are discussed. The second study argues that phenomenological DDC research cannot be fruitfully conducted until agreement is reached on principles for the inclusion/exclusion for study of experiences reported as DDCs. Four epistemological principles, derived from previous literature and interviews with 32 Catholic women religious, are suggested as a starting point for scholarly discussion.

This essay advances the argument that religious interest has not decreased in contemporary life, but has been largely relocated to places of privacy, outside of public, legal, and social space uncomfortable with its presence. This split has been reflected in and reinforced by dominant narrative entertainment media practices, complex in their converging nature but consistent in their mainstream erasure of religious affirmation. This context places particular demands on the researcher interested in religion and communication, posing serious legal and social risks for those interested in exploring spiritual topics. This article thus argues that practices of transdisciplinarity are advantageous, hedging back against norms of privacy that restrict inquiry into the ever-important questions of spirituality and religion for the contemporary scholar.

This essay identifies nine distinct functions that use of the Bible serves for U.S. presidents. A method for isolating biblical quotations and allusions is first identified and then applied to the presidential discourse of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Each of the nine functions is illustrated, and the implications of their deployment for presidential rhetoric and the American polity are discussed.

Has the conventional voice of religion been silenced in postmodern film? The emancipating language of postmodernism has found a home among independent filmmakers, those artists who are less constrained by the blockbuster orthodoxy and profit-centered penitence of the mega-studio. Now their alternate rhetorical voices are frequently heard in the mainstream. In some ways the subject of religion is given new breath, as the taboos and talismans of a previous generation are put aside in favor of a less institutionalized version of the role of religion in life. André Øvredal’s Trollhunter is a postmodern take on a pre-modern folktale. The discovery of opposing rhetorical situations in this film creates opportunities to analyze deeper religious meanings in the narrative and the exigency from which it arises and invites a response.