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.

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.