While many individuals identify as Catholic and feminist, these two identities are often seen as incompatible because of stark differences in origin, beliefs, and political orientation. To understand this potential conflict better, this study uses a structuration view of identification to explore how individuals who identify as Catholic and feminist navigate tensions associated with these seemingly irreconcilable identities. Analysis reveals two strategies by which participants discursively navigate Catholicism and feminism: (1) highlighting endurance; and (2) minimizing difference. These strategies support and extend theory by revealing the tenuous, but enduring nature of involuntary identities, and showcasing transcendent possibilities.

Plato has widely been interpreted as an enemy of rhetoric. His Gorgias is especially used as evidence that he despised rhetoric as a deceitful producer of opinion (doxa) and upheld philosophy as the true art of knowledge (episteme) discovery. However, in his Theaetetus, he complicates the concept of knowledge, and can be interpreted as developing an art of persuasion that is concerned with the production of faith (pistis) rather than knowledge or opinion. The result of rereading Plato as such tempers the disciplinary narrative concerning Plato and strengthens James Kinneavy’s thesis that relates the development of Christian faith with Greek rhetoric. Reevaluating Plato’s epistemology in relation to the concept of pistis not only nuances the discipline’s understanding of Plato, but also challenges advocates of a “Christian rhetoric” to reconsider the relationship of faith and reason in relation to persuasion.

Kathy J. Pulley is a scholar of religion and a leading proponent of women’s rhetorical agency in her denomination of Christianity. She was the first woman to preach a Sunday morning sermon in the presence of women and men in the Churches of Christ since the Stone-Campbell Movement’s split in the early twentieth century. In a religious culture shaped by a history of patriarchy, Pulley combined prophetic and pastoral rhetoric to lead organizational change in an egalitarian direction. This paper analyzes her sermon through lenses of prophetic and feminist rhetoric, integrates literature from rhetoric and homiletics to develop the concept of pastoral rhetoric, and presents implications for ecclesial engagement with social controversies.

This essay unpacks the evolving form and rhetorical resonance of the popular contemporary Christian worship song “How He Loves,” which troubles norms of mainstream sacred music on several levels. I argue that its violations of lyrical norms give the song rhetorical resonance for young people seeking an “authentic”/romantic experience of God in worship, while its musical form works, with varying success, to rhetorically transform the troubles of earthly existence into windows on divine love. Through Sellnow and Sellnow’s critical lens, I examine three different artists’ lyrical/musical renderings of the song to compare how (well) they bring that illusion to life. I then analyze the video of the third version, showing how the Illusion of Life critical framework could be expanded to examine visual intensity/release in relation to music and lyrics. My analysis highlights the tensions between authenticity and artfulness in contemporary worship music and demonstrates the value of a fine-grained, close-reading approach.

This article synthesizes studies of the emotions or passions (pathē) with Burkean logology to argue for a concept of patho-logology, which, consummating in the god-term love, transforms our understanding of Burke’s larger corpus and implies that rhetoric is a connecting link between religion and science. Patho-logology’s companion-concept, terministic-affect screens, allows the description of ways of seeing that involve the pathē. Love is the god-term of a patho-logological terministic-affect screen because “God is love,” illustrating a relationship between Burkean identification and its related term consubstantiality. Patho-logology complements John Hatch’s notion of dialogology, helps people to get along, and unifies the Judeo-Christian-based logology with the Talmudic tradition of not confining logos to propositional logic alone and improves understanding of Aristotelian pisteis.

The gendered evangelical subject is constituted by a discursive formation with a premodern genealogy refracted through a modern epistemology. To support this claim and demonstrate how the formation determines evangelical discourses on gender, the study applies Foucault’s theory of the discursive formation to deconstruct evangelical gender ideology. The formation’s genealogy is traced to the New Testament “household code” and its epistemology situated in the Enlightenment-inspired doctrine of biblical “inerrancy” by which the code is deemed authoritative. How the formation regulates evangelical responses to modern feminism is reviewed, along with recent movements within evangelicalism toward reordering its “biblical” discourse on gender.

This study analyzed the image of Judge Roy Moore as it changed during the 2017 Alabama Special Senate Election. Specifically, this study sought to determine whether the surprising loss in the election, which resulted after allegations that he dated and assaulted teenage girls while serving as an assistant District Attorney, could be attributed to the Pharisee Effect. The analysis concluded that two elements of the Pharisee Effect were in play during the campaign. Specifically, the charges contributed to an image of hypocrisy for Judge Moore, while accentuating the concept of fanaticism that was already associated with his image. As such, the Pharisee Effect appears to be one element that contributed to his eventual loss in the election.

Using a dialogic lens, this study investigated the discursive construction of family articulated by Centennial Park residents who practice plural marriage. In talk, Centennial Park residents marginalize the dominant cultural discourse positioning the nuclear family as the ideal family form by advancing a competing discourse. Specifically, Centennial Park residents advance a discourse, nuclear families are limiting (and thus not ideal), which privileges plural families over traditional cultural models of family. This competing discourse idealizes the capacity building potential of plural families, while positioning the nuclear family as one that is restrictive (i.e., inhibiting the potential of what could be).

In this study, I explicate Asian-American Buddhist identity discourse and how talk surrounding this religious identity revealed a natural criticism of the current state of Buddhism in the U.S. Using cultural discourse analysis, I unveil how, as participants discussed what it means to be an American Buddhist, they also revealed deeper beliefs about social relationships and how they see themselves placed within the U.S. American religious landscape. Critiques toward Buddhism in the U.S. includes cultural appropriation and commercialization of the religion, as well as the use of the term “Buddhist” to further perpetuate the stereotype of Asian Americans as outsiders and foreigners.

When Sarah Bessey walked to the pulpit at South Bend City Church on May 6, 2018, she enacted a role widely debated in evangelical circles: a woman preacher. Analyzing this featured sermon, we explore the ways in which Bessey draws upon and reinvents the styles and strategies women have long employed when preaching within the church. Ultimately, we demonstrate how Bessey weaves together evangelical discourse, the feminine rhetorical style, and the genre of story-sermons, creating a prophetic narrative that calls the church to repent from sins of oppression and to be resurrected into the new life of Jesus feminism.

The world has become a fractured place, as philosopher Louis Hodges has written. This fractured state can be confusing and, at times, paralyzing for media professionals, particularly managers, on both professional and personal levels. This article takes an unusual approach by offering hope via one person and one book and one idea: philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich and The Courage to Be. It merges Tillich’s abstract concepts of religion, existentialism, anxiety, and the symbolic nature of God with the concrete dimensions of today’s media world and offers a useful philosophical realm for media managers, academics, and the common person.

When Protestant preachers interpret the Bible, the particular translation can constrain the apparent alignment between sermon and text. To improve alignment, preachers can appeal to the original biblical languages to rewrite the translation. Following the interpretive stases, a classical rhetorical theory of the issues that arise in arguments over textual meaning, this article identifies nine interpretive functions these sermonic appeals can serve. Appearing in diverse theological, political, and cultural Protestant contexts, these appeals increase the text’s interpretive flexibility and strengthen the biblical support for a claim. Examining these appeals raises important questions about preaching, biblical interpretation, and power in Protestantism.

One of the imprecatory psalms, Psalm 137 is among the most disturbing passages of the Bible, as the psalmist blatantly blesses infanticide. I suggest that the growing interdisciplinary field of trauma studies can provide important vocabulary and perspective to understand the rhetorical technique represented by the imprecatory psalms in general and by Psalm 137 in particular. Suggesting that liturgical rhetoric serves an important narrative function, I emphasize the rhetorical benefits of the incorporation of such disturbing passages into the liturgical practice of contemporary communities of faith, perhaps creating an inclusive liturgy for the disoriented.

In a speech given to students at Grosse Pointe High School on March 14, 1968, just three weeks before his death, Martin Luther King addressed the uprisings that consumed America during this time. During the same time that King delivered this speech, plans were underway for a retreat that would have brought King together with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. While we will never know what both men would have talked about or what they would have done, I do believe—at least in so far as King is concerned—that he would have undoubtedly spoken about his concept of the Beloved Community.

In this article, we trace arguments for the sacredness of Black life from Sojourner Truth to the Combahee River Collective to the founders of Black Lives Matter, arguing that Black women have consistently drawn on sacred and ritual structures to argue not just that Black life matters but also that Black life has inherent value. As such, we conclude with reflections on Black feminist ethics as an extension of the doctrine of imago dei.

In an era of #BlackLivesMatter, more attention has been given to the historically disproportionate level of state-sanctioned violence against Black men, along with the health disparities and the corresponding higher mortality rates that impact them and the Black community. In response to these socio-political inequalities brought to the forefront by the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, speeches, and rallies convened around the country. Yet, there is still a need for an intervention that creates a communal culture of sacred space for Black men. This article reports on a case study examining Jazz for Prostate Cancer Awareness, which used a womanist frame for religious health education. Womanism aims to liberate the entire being, including the mind, the body, and the soul, of Black women (and men), which works well as an intervention and an alternative to the status quo public health education strategies.

One of the places where there is an assumed manifestation of the Beloved Community is the Black church. However, church hurt is a phenomenon that has plagued the Black community. Marginalization, isolation, and even the adoption of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude have been inferred habits and practices for Black congregants whose sexual lifestyle, mental stability, or sexual or emotional trauma may not fit neatly into the church doctrine. The inability to fit neatly within the doctrinal norms leaves many members of the Black community feeling abandoned spiritually and in a desperate search for belonging and acceptance. Using Black liberation theology, womanist thought, autoethnography, and Afrocentricity as a metatheory, this article seeks to discuss the impact of liberationist ideology and womanist ethics within the practices of an Afrocentric rite of passage community based in Atlanta, Georgia, with a satellite branch in New York, New York.

Viewing Black pain for pleasure and entertainment has not only been held in high regard from the inception of this country but has also recently been infused into communal consumption of Black death on social media. This malevolently charged discursive reality makes the creation of safe embodied religious space a persistent challenge for Black women and men of faith. However, technology also serves as an aid to push forth subversive and supportive digital communities and congregations. Here, the Beloved Community is transformed, and collective liberation again becomes a theological imperative. In this article, I analyze the Pink Robe Chronicles as a digital hush harbor. Considering this space as a womanist rhetorical imaginary that redefines kinship and renegotiates discursive boundaries, I explore how its curator hallowedly holds the precarity of Black pain and juxtaposes it with the power and promise of a deliberately Afrocentric ethic to speak wholeness to those connected by its teleological imperative.

This article will analyze the social justice activism of Bree Newsome through a womanist rhetorical lens. More specifically, it will look at the symbolic action of removing the Confederate flag from the state Capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina, which initiated the rhetorical crisis of her anti-Confederate flag movement because it confronted racism, hatred, slavery, lynching, and White supremacy. The task of this womanist critique is to expand our understanding of the redemptive self-love tenet displayed through Newsome’s activism that allows an individual to fight for the social justice of others and grants the redemptive opportunity for the activist to either build or build upon the legacy of the deceased/abused person(s).