After the publication of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, a group of four Cardinals prepared and shared five questions—dubia (“doubts”)—with the Pope and the public. The dubia focus on the content in one footnote in one chapter of the document. While a critique of Amoris Laetitia and the dubia is not this paper’s focus, the cultural dynamics at play are, because they are instrumental in how the conflict surrounding Amoris Laetitia developed. Using Hall’s (1977, 1984) taxonomy about high- and low-context cultures with Ting-Toomey’s (1985, 2006) application of Hall’s taxonomy to conflict in intercultural communication situations, this paper examines (a) why the dubia were initiated and continued from Cardinals, who hail from low-context cultures, (b) why the Pope, who hails from a high-context culture, has not formally and thoroughly responded, and (c) how the high-context organizational culture of the Vatican helped to fuel matters. This paper concludes with ways to avoid similar intercultural communication problems within the Church’s hierarchy in the future. For communication and religion, the case illustrates the importance of intercultural dynamics in resolving debates about doctrine and teaching, including the role of organizational culture in such debates.

Studies of organized religion in the United States often approach the intersection of faith and marketization forces as representing either a new opportunity for American congregations to remain culturally relevant or a harbinger of the end of religion’s social influence altogether. I suggest that a more nuanced understanding of this tension requires “revisualizing” how it plays out in discursive and material ways in the everyday life of faith-based organizations. By using photovoice to investigate the organizational identity of a nondenominational congregation (NDC), this article illustrates an American church paradoxically attempting to construct a community-based identity by enacting enterprising communication processes.

Kenneth R. Chase has defended a robust Christian rhetorical theory based on the doctrine of the incarnation and called for further investigation into historical resources for such a rhetoric. I offer George Herbert’s rhetoric of the rural pastor as such a resource. Herbert weds a Christian approach to audience (derived from Augustine) to a thoroughly incarnational rhetoric extending beyond the pulpit to the parson’s household and way of life. As such, he offers a model of incarnational rhetoric that challenges histories of rhetoric premised upon a simple opposition between philosophy and rhetoric.

Often, faith-based organizations are unprepared for crisis situations; and when they occur, disaster for the organization soon follows. Using an analysis of the situational crisis communications theory (SCCT) by Timothy Coombs, this paper will illustrate the impact of crisis events to faith-based organizations. This paper will then provide direction to changes for communication planning to be used in faith-based organizations by using Matthew Seeger’s Best Practices in Crisis Communication: An Expert Panel Process. This direction, provided with best practice examples, should assist faith-based organizations in preparing a strategic crisis communications plan.

This essay seeks to identify a groundwork for an ethics of death in response to existential questions that concern moving forward after the loss of a loved one. In doing so, considering perspectives on death from Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Josef Pieper, ethical implications of death are revealed and lead to identifying the coordinates of leisure, faith, and resilience coming together to weave a faith-based resilience. Faith-based resilience prepares one to be able to respond to an ethics of death in ways that forge new meaning after the death of a loved one disrupts personal existential meaning.

Finland's Winter War (1939–40) against the Soviet Union had been defensive, but the so-called Continuation War that broke out in June 1941 was not. This offensive operation demanded thorough justification, because neither the troops nor the public were unanimous about embarking on an offensive campaign in alliance with Nazi Germany. The Lutheran clergy were important in legitimizing the war because priests had formal power deriving from the peculiar relationship between the Finnish state and the Lutheran Church, whereby they were de jure officials of the state as well as of the church. Drawing on Christian and biblical imagery to support the war, they reached a receptive audience, as nearly 96 per cent of Finns belonged to the Lutheran Church. This article uses Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to analyze how the Lutheran clergy constructed their authority rhetorically during the Continuation War 1941–1944, strategically shifting the grammatical and theological foundation of that authority as the war progressed.

This narrative study examines the lived experience of leaving a church and the members’ communication of dissatisfaction as part of that experience through participant stories. Situated within Jablin’s (2001) organizational exit framework, this study included interviews (N = 22) with former members of multiple denominations of Christian churches. Results suggest several theoretical implications. First, the findings of this study suggest that narrative of the exit experience is excluded from grand organizational narratives within faith communities. Second, as members exit a faith community, they experience a tension between wanting to express dissent and a pressure to leave silently. Third, findings challenge current models of organizational exit, suggesting a view of exit that is tied both to organizational form and to the reach of the organization into the members’ lives.

This article argues that a model for Christian participation in political debate can be gleaned from the work of Richard John Neuhaus. I articulate key characteristics of this model, then use it to evaluate Christian rhetoric favoring Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR). I find that while Christian pro-CIR rhetoric exemplifies a Neuhausian approach in many ways, it falls short with regard to its eschatological vision. Nonetheless, I argue that a Neuhausian model has the potential to revitalize Christian rhetoric in the public sphere and American political rhetoric as a whole.

Despite the Supreme Courts’ June 26, 2015, ruling, which nationally legalized same-sex marriage, many conservative evangelical Protestants continue to oppose equal marriage rights for LGBT couples. Through a content analysis of online sermon transcripts, this project examines major themes in American conservative evangelical Protestant pastors’ rhetoric surrounding LBGT rights and marriage. Using framing theory and subcultural identity theory, three primary themes emerge from this sermon rhetoric: 1) alienating the LGBT community as a dangerous out-group, 2) enhancing in-group evangelical Protestant identities by emphasizing solidarity, and 3) mobilizing those identities to call for political action. The study’s results and implications for future research are discussed at length.

Religious faith is rooted in the teachings of sacred, and often ancient, texts. These texts are taught from, talked about, and integrated into the core of religious organizing and personal meaning-searching for citizens around the world. In many cases, a larger religious entity dictates and utilizes the various sacred texts of a faith to communicate with and teach local members of that faith. This article examines the relationships between religious organizations, local members, and Christian church texts by combining the methodological concerns of Institutional Ethnography with Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony in order to understand how religious texts are invoked as sacred by organizational members in talk about their congregation, and how they are created and recreated through storytelling.

Films are a way to communicate the human experience, sometimes uniquely representing the current mood of a populace or political movement of the time. This research explores how the film The Messenger, released during the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, portrayed the religious and spiritual elements of American society and the experience of the soldier during wartime. It did this by employing a study of dialogue, signs, and symbols popularized by scholar Robert Bellah and his theory of the American Civil Religion. This article explores how both overt and embedded messages of religion and spirituality are intrinsically tied with the American military experience.

This article frames Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ as papal media ecology, religious communication that invites interpretations using media ecology. First, a media ecological analysis of Laudato Si’ articulates concerns about the global, environmental impact of the technocratic paradigm. Second, Martin Heidegger’s definition for ge-stell is examined to consider the effects of technology on existence. Third, Heidegger’s methods for rejecting ge-stell are compared to Pope Francis’ plans for replacing the technocratic paradigm. Pope Francis offers a superior approach because a combined top-down and bottom-up approach in a community committed to social change is more likely to enact a paradigm shift.

The emergence of the early Quaker movement in England has been well documented. This paper focuses on Quakers’ confrontation with the establishment and with both Christian mainstream writers and other dissenting Christians. My discourse-analytic case study makes use of corpus-based techniques to uncover how Quakers and their adversaries spoke and wrote about themselves in relation to the other. I draw on theoretical studies within the field of pragmatics to show how these two groups unconsciously used markers of clusivity and stance. Results indicate a strong sense of Quaker separateness within seventeenth-century society, with implications for religious minorities today.

The pilgrim’s view is a foundational lens on human communication that operates as an alternative to information centered models and symbolic constitutive views of communication. We draw together thinkers on pilgrimage in a discussion that foregrounds the significance of shared paths as embodied narratives in a movement towards justice and the good life. Such a vision for communication engages with and builds upon the work of the Rev. James W. Carey in his conceptualization of a ritual view of communication that explicitly addresses religious community. A concept of pilgrimage is emboldened in this essay by recourse to theologians, most notably William T. Cavanaugh.

Guided by the common ingroup identity model (CIIM; Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000; Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993), this study utilized a sample of undergraduate students (N = 175) who identified as Catholic or non-Catholic, and who were assigned randomly to one of the three homily conditions (i.e., “you” language, “we Christians” language, or “we everyone” language). Consistent with predictions, the results indicated that, compared to non-Catholics, Catholics had significantly more positive perceptions of the priest, as did individuals—Catholic and non-Catholic—who read the “we Christians” language homily as compared to those who read the “you” language homily.

This article explores an understudied aspect of Jewish rhetoric—restrictions against speaking lashon hara (evil speech, libel, gossip)—to contribute to the field’s understanding of Jewish rhetorical traditions. In reading Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan’s (1838-1933) treatise Chafetz Chaim (1873), this article shows how Jewish speech laws function as an ontological, nonagonistic, and ethical community-oriented rhetoric. In reading the Chafetz Chaim, this article shows that Kagan’s exigency in compiling the speech laws was in response to anti-Semitism and Enlightenment era Haskalah Judaism. The dialogic rhetoric found in Chafetz Chaim provides ethical and methodological lessons for contemporary rhetorical scholars, lessons that resonate with important twentieth century Jewish rhetorics.

Few would argue with the notion that teachers play an important role in shaping student learning. Best practices suggest we do so by positively influencing affect (motivation based on perceived relevance/utility), cognition (comprehension/ understanding), and behavior (performance/application). Grounded in the theoretical paradigms of Freire, Greenleaf, and Bandura, we contend that teachers have a moral obligation to influence not only students' minds, but also their hearts in ways that encourage them to grow into morally grounded servant-leaders as they interact in the world beyond the academy. We recommend several pedagogical strategies based on Greenleaf’s ten servant leadership principles and propose potential implications.

This essay considers the use of the word “I” in Christian sermons. Preachers commonly use “I” in three ways: 1) in reference to themselves; 2) as they stand in for the listener or share the stories of others; and 3) as they stand in for God. The essay examines why the word should be employed in each voice and how these uses and stances offer rhetorical risks and benefits. An ethical framework of love and liberty is developed as a series of norms by which uses of “I” can be guided. The ethical uses of “I” are examined in turn, inviting preachers to use the power of this small word to help identify with hearers rather than to coerce belief or action.