This study analyzed the relationships between religiosity, threat, and intergroup contact between Hindus and Muslim immigrants in India. Results showed the following. First, Hindus with high religiosity were more likely to perceive more threat from Muslim immigrants. Second Hindus with high religiosity were more likely to have less contact with Muslim immigrants. Finally, intergroup contact was negatively correlated with the perception of threat from Muslim immigrants. Theoretical implications related to intergroup contact, religiosity, and group vitality are discussed.

This article examines the nature, function, and implications of the immersively mediated religious practices at a contemporary multi-site church. We focus on explaining the major features of the hyperreal “experience,” as well as the carefully created and maintained images or personae of the church’s lead pastor. We then discuss the major implications of this church’s religious practices, stressing how they strengthen and naturalize the ideological function of mediation, how they truncate authentic relationship, and how they reify consumerism as a framework for understanding life, particularly religious life.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the Christian prosperity gospel’s use of the “liberation” idiom and the prophetic rhetorical form in order to discover the prosperity gospel’s significance for efforts at social and political change. Included is a significant discussion of the sociological appeal of the prosperity gospel, its alteration of the traditional prophetic mode, and examination of several leading prosperity preachers. I conclude that prosperity gospel represents a significant alteration of the prophetic mode away from social change and toward an atomization of culture and an implicit defense of status quo social, economic and political structures.

This essay considers the rhetoric of supernatural novelist Anne Rice, who shocked readers when she published a novel about the childhood of Jesus Christ in 2005. In order to quell concerns regarding apparent inconsistencies in her literary subjects, Rice fabricates an original rhetorical persona: the Author-God. The persona transmutes Rice’s mundane interpretation of her work into an offering of mystical experience, compelling readers to accept her authorial perspective with a promise of salvation. Her example reveals the availability of religious rhetorical persona beyond that of the prophet and supports the utility of attending to divine inspiration in rhetorical studies.

Direct references to the biological inferiority of individuals or groups of people have almost completely disappeared from mainstream public discourse. In an era where hierarchies of power cannot be justified by appealing to the inherent inferiority of any race, gender, or sexual orientation, power must be dispensed and withheld through more genteel forms of discourse. The concept of Othering is commonly employed in the humanities and social sciences as a forceful but subtle substitute. Othering refers to a discursive process of separating We from Other as a means of constructing hierarchies of power. Although scholars from a variety of disciplines have explored these forms, this article offers a fresh perspective on the Othering process by analyzing the relationship between marriage and the construction of exclusive communities. Specifically, we cite the Old Testament book of Ezra, where we find an unusually narrow definition of a Jew. There, the We and the Other are defined not by genealogy or kinship but by the experience of exile in Babylon. The insiders, the We, had been to Babylon, the Others had not. The term “Holy Seed” is used for this group, which in Ezra’s view comprises Jews. Even if a woman married a Jew and had children by him, she was not considered part of the We, and must be expelled. Ultimately, we use the relationship between Othering and marriage in the book of Ezra to inform other contemporary forms of Othering that operate in our current historical moment.

This article analyzes the rhetorical strategies of a nineteenth-century American professor of sacred rhetoric, Austin Phelps, in his opposition to the Spiritualist movement. Phelps’s approach encapsulates the most effective arguments used by a class of thinkers who were liberally educated, held great respect for science, and for whom biblical accounts of demonic activity continued to shed valid light upon modern-day phenomena. His booklet Spiritualism: The Argument in Brief (1871) employs elements of legal reasoning, especially a stasis approach—finding the “stopping points” in a judicial case—and apophatic strategy: using definition by negation to convince an audience to accept the rhetor’s definition of a key concept or term. “Counselor” Phelps grounds his arguments and conclusions in common experience, historical consciousness, commonly held religious belief, moral obligation, and professional duty. Far from being an unsophisticated rant about devils, Phelps’s treatment of Spiritualism was a high point of reasoned, classically argued discourse in the special domain of religious rhetoric: the supernatural.

This article explores the ways in which metaphors are constructed and extended in the foundational Quiverfull text, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ by Rick and Jan Hess. Although biblical metaphors are used throughout the text, careful analysis reveals that those metaphors are in fact grounded in secular reasoning that taps into to popular cultural anxieties regarding national and economic security.

Kagura is one of the oldest forms of Shinto folk performing arts in Japan. Performed as part of local religious festivals, it is considered to be a means of communicating with kami (deities). This article offers an ethnographic study of WASHINOMIYA SAIBARA KAGURA to explore the communicative dimensions of Shinto. The purpose is twofold: (a) to seek religious conditions that allow the Japanese to communicate about kami; and (b) to add an East Asian cultural insight into our understanding of intercultural communication and religion. The study demonstrates the ways the members of the kagura group communicate about the kagura and how the group shares the kami, focusing on the interaction during the kagura practices.

A number of studies across disciplines have examined the influence of popular music on identity; however, comparative study of Christian music genres, which are clearly racially marked, is lacking. Based on Tajfel and Turner’s social identity perspective, this article examines the ways in which Black listeners of Black gospel and White listeners of Contemporary Christian music (CCM), evaluate themselves and one another. Although there have been popular speculations about these differences, there is no empirical evidence of these assumptions. Findings suggest that while in-group members are generally more favorable toward their music than the out-group, privilege allows for Black listeners to be more open toward White majority music while the opposite is not true.

This article examines how George Whitefield’s and Jarena Lee’s spiritual autobiographies employ Methodist hymns in order to constitute a transnational evangelical community. Using James Jasinski’s theoretical frame of “constitutive rhetoric” and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concepts of “presence” and “communion,” I show how these ministers deploy hymns in order to integrate disparate Christian communities by inviting readers to reenact vicariously their conversion experiences and faith-based journeys and invoking the presence of God through “I”-centered and Christ-centered psalms that transform the individual evangelical’s reading activity into a collective worship experience.

Most previous studies have focused on married couples and their general tendency to forgive. They have often ignored other relationship types. Past research has also focused on attitudes toward forgiveness without studying the actual reactions after experiencing the transgression. Therefore, this study explored if religion has an influence on how dating and married couples react to transgressions. Do they forgive, or do they seek revenge? Two hundred sixteen adults (123 married and 93 dating) completed a survey administered through a medium-sized research university in the southeastern United States. Results showed that after experiencing a specific transgression, married individuals who are religious are more likely to forgive the partner and less likely to seek revenge. Dating couples would forgive their partners to the same extent but for different reasons. Among both dating and married participants, religiosity is positively related to the avoidance of revenge.

Yoga’s popularity prompts concern about the extent to which cultural appropriation compromises its original philosophy. This interpretive analysis explores how nonIndian yoga instructors negotiate religion and spirituality in their classrooms and daily lives. In doing so, I consider yoga as a commodity articulated within the frameworks of transculturation, cultural appropriation (Rogers, 2006), and symbolic displacement (Wilson, 2012). Findings indicate that yoga is discursively detached from its religious origins and linked to an abstract and expansive spiritualism. Instructors also hope to initiate spiritual engagement among students through physical practice. These findings are contextualized with regard to cultural appropriation, ownership, and hybridity.

Since 2006, a rural Georgia church has successfully produced and nationally distributed three feature length films. Each movie has shown higher production quality and box office profits than the last. The current research uses a perspective from Quentin Schultze to examine how this “tribal” medium is received by the larger mainstream press. In examining critics’ reviews, the investigation suggests that the films were viewed negatively, but that justifications for displeasure were not traditional aesthetic flaws. Instead, much of the focus was on the fact that the films were preachy and allowed limited polysemy. Such findings raise interesting questions about mainstream press acceptance of overtly religious media messages.

Despite the proliferation of online interaction through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), religious organizations like churches have fallen behind in their adoption. Lagging rates of ICT integration in these organizations have created a number of challenges for many Christian denominations as membership numbers have declined. The present paper seeks to identify the dialectic tensions with which religious leaders of churches in one denomination, the United Methodist Church, struggle as they attempt to integrate new ICTs into their congregations. Through interviews with pastors and youth directors (N=27), three dialectic tensions were revealed, creating difficult challenges for organizational administration as they attempt to negotiate competing needs. The organizational approaches taken to ICT adoption and integration were influenced by the resolution of each dialectic.

“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 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.

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.