Religious congregations are prominent in American life as both gatherings of religious people and as community resource. We explore how congregations communicate these multiple identities through qualitative content analysis of clergy interviews and congregational websites. Findings suggest that congregations emphasize religiosity even as they articulate community service and highlight congregations as outside, inside, and constituting community. Although congregations are transparent with respect to their religiosity, we suggest that ambiguity serves not just as a function of multiple identities but as indicative of organizations that justify their work in spiritual terms to multiple audiences.

Textual analysis was conducted in order to examine the usage of and messages communicated through mission statements found on the websites of traditionally Black Methodist denominational churches. The churches sampled are in the ten United States cities Forbes cited as being the best economically for African Americans. Although online/web presence was low among churches in the test, findings suggest thematic similarities among the publicly available mission statements. Practical suggestions include training church leaders to craft and communicate effective mission statements and implementing best practices for developing a strategic online/web presence in order to achieve greater organizational goals of access and relevance in a changing society.

Employing the critical tools of religious communication scholarship, this essay explores Belief in a Just World Theory as a potent discursive source for unquestioned and oppressive norms of thought and speech. For many social scientists, Belief in a Just World Theory is an elegant, parsimonious, and compelling tool for exploring the sources of our most intractable social challenges. And yet, it seems our world maintains no homeostatic orientation toward justice. To reconcile that paradox, we begin this paper by re-positioning Belief in a Just World Theory as an unfalsifiable pseudo-science drawing rhetorical strength from a reservoir of religious discourse. We then analyze the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as a theoretically rich and politically urgent source of reconciliation, before concluding with a discussion of the wider implications that can be culled from our analysis for building and advancing the stock of knowledge in communication and religion.

In 2019, Joy Ladin published The Soul of the Stranger, a book that offers a transgender critical reading of the Torah along with Ladin’s personal reflections as a transgender member of a Jewish community with a background in Torah observance. This essay offers an analysis of The Soul of the Stranger, arguing that Ladin constructs a transgender Jewish tradition in the text. Ladin disavows the ostensible incompatibility of trans and Jewish experiences by showing how her reading of Genesis and Jonah accords with rather than departs from traditional rabbinic approaches to Jewish texts in two key ways: by reinterpreting apparent binaries in the creation narratives and by explaining biblical figures’ trans-related experiences. Ladin’s reimagining of foundational Jewish texts forecloses transphobic Torah interpretations by refusing to allow potential detractors to set the terms of the conversation. By appealing to Jewish tradition and, thereby, simultaneously constituting it, Ladin imagines and creates a trans-inclusive Judaism framed on its own terms rather than in opposition to voices of exclusion.

Howard Thurman is attuned to bodies under threat. In this article, I argue that his use of vignettes offers a distinctive rhetorical strategy for addressing collective trauma. Through closely examining “The Third Component,” a sermon preached in 1958, I display his distinctive contribution to working with traumatic memories. In relying on a third memory—a memory of communing in the Presence of total regard—he connects religious experience to the somatic efforts to heal bodies from trauma. I make the case that, for Thurman, the work of racial justice depends on spiritual practices to hone attention and enable the awareness necessary for the work.

Building on Fraser’s account of religious persuasion through indirection, this essay explores how instrumental music can communicate faith, as demonstrated in a groundbreaking album by guitarist Phil Keaggy. I argue that while music functions as pure persuasion in its unfolding form, it can also facilitate ordinary persuasion on matters of faith by evoking particular impressions of religious pathos, ethos, and/or mythos, which may be reinforced in liner notes. When Keaggy, a pioneer of Jesus music, made an album of original instrumentals, a spiritually-themed story was added to ensure acceptance by that audience. This story conveys faith indirectly, while the music itself somewhat evokes the ethos and pathos of the gospel. After the story was dropped in the reissued album, key qualities of Keaggy’s music and ethos helped sustain his art’s potential to convey spiritual meaning. For communication scholars, discerning such potential requires closereading and/or audience studies.

The United States has witnessed a public display of outrage toward critical race theory (CRT). This opposition has been buoyed by White evangelical Christian polemics. I conducted a discourse-historical analysis of 21 statements, reflecting a diversity of voices within evangelical discourse (ED). First, ED constructs CRT as both bereft of theoretical validity and evil. Second, the discourse inverts the objectives of CRT by claiming those goals for its own. Third, ED seeks to strip CRT of its transformative and emancipatory power. Fourth, ED constructs CRT in ways that diffuse accountability. Finally, ED questions the faith of Christians who seek to learn from CRT. Reflection is offered for how CRT and Christianity might conspire together toward the aims of addressing racial inequity.

In response to an era defined by narrative contention and polarized communication, an increasing number of scholars have called for renewed attention to a Christian rhetorical theory. Such a theory would have to enable the Christian rhetor to articulate the definitive goods and values promoted by a Christian narrative, to identify points of difference with competing narratives, and to ground argument within philosophical reasoning that engages universal and transcendent truths. Therefore, this article suggests that a vibrant Christian rhetorical theory must be complemented by dialectic. Through an analysis of the dialectical topics of Boethius in De topicis differentiis alongside his “masterpiece of rhetorical philosophy” (Verene 2020, 333), The Consolation of Philosophy, dialectic is revealed as a valuable aid to the Christian rhetor seeking to ground argument in philosophical reasoning while being responsive to context, contingency, and difference in the current historical moment.

Faculty members face a great deal of uncertainty when hired by an institution. With a new work environment and unfamiliar processes, a faculty member can experience stress when starting a new position. To reduce possible feelings of isolation and dissatisfaction, colleges and universities can create onboarding programs that focus on specific needs that should be addressed. Faculty members hired to universities that align with their religious orientations may have nuanced retention and satisfaction experiences. This case study uses Jablin’s organizational assimilation theory (OAT) to understand how faculty members’ onboarding process affects their assimilation in religious colleges and seeks to understand additional factors that may lead to the overall satisfaction of new faculty members.

In the speech code of American evangelicalism, the symbolic term “Christian worldview” and its companion term “biblical worldview” are ubiquitous. Speech codes theory (SCT) holds that symbolic terms simply and quickly communicate complex ideas, values, and meanings that are taken for granted in the shared culture of a speech community. Symbolic terms accomplish this work by activating community members’ cognitive schemata or shared mental organization of cultural knowledge. The present study elaborates the historical and contemporary ideas, values, and meanings tacitly conveyed by “Christian worldview,” reports field observations of a one-year “worldview” small group Bible study and interprets this symbolic term as a defining marker of American evangelical culture. SCT holds that a distinctive culture manifests a distinctive speech code of socially constructed meanings that shape its cultural life. The study argues that the symbolic terms “Christian worldview” and “biblical worldview” shape American evangelical culture life according to meanings essential for interpreting that culture and for the discursive constitution of evangelical subjectivity.

Margaret Thatcher made history in 1979 when she became the first woman prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom. Unlike many of her predecessors, Thatcher regularly drew on her religious faith in her rhetoric and her approach to shaping policy. This article argues that Margaret Thatcher’s public speeches, memoirs, and official biographies of her life, when taken together, offer a coherent statement of her understanding of Christianity that we call a rhetorical theology. Thatcher’s rhetorical theology offers a justification for her fiercely individualistic public policies from within her articulated religious perspective. We analyze fragments of discourse by and about Thatcher that we argue constitute her rhetorical theology: an understanding of Christianity that offers a muted British version of the prosperity gospel to justify conservative economic and social policies.

This article clarifies and extends “going nowhere correctly” (Arnett, 2010) as a metaphor for religious communication scholarship. The temporal context of “going nowhere correctly” is clarified by analyzing Augustine’s philosophy of time in Confessions. The existential conditions are clarified by analyzing the play Waiting for Godot. I propose that in practical religious discourse, “going nowhere correctly” implies a religious discourse of speaking while dwelling, which amounts to a form of epideictic rhetorical discourse. Further, I propose that a turn to this epideictic discourse remedies some problems in contemporary religious communication.

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was the title of a 1922 sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick, announcing a question that fueled public dispute in the fundamentalist–modernist controversy in 1920s America. The question persists today, but this article turns to the metaphors of apocalyptic rhetoric and routine cynicism to suggest a deeper question energizing fundamentalist and antifundamentalist rhetoric: What does the future of faith look like in an era of cynicism? This article brings a philosophical hermeneutic approach to Fosdick’s sermon as well as the rebuttals of John Roach Straton and Clarence Edward Macartney. Macartney’s distinctive form of apocalyptic rhetoric, this article argues, offers a possible way to counter fundamentalism’s dangers without tacitly accepting its methodological premises of marginalization and polarization.

Even in academic spaces, the ontology of plagiarism is contested, but it is even more so in Protestant evangelical contexts. Thus the very notion of plagiarism in the academy—and now in religious spaces—is unclear and may be subject to criticisms of power and questions of who gets to define what plagiarism means. In this article, we aim to elucidate the reemerging conversation about plagiarism in sermonic discourse captured in the 2021 #Sermongate scandal. We introduce the systematic, histo-cultural factors which have worked to shape these ontological beliefs about sermonic plagiarism and advocate for a general set of plagiarism standards.

Thomas Merton’s “Letters to a White Liberal” identified “dwelling places” in which his readers could engage the struggle for civil rights as part of a larger theological and political confrontation with evil in the world. They revealed this struggle as a “kairotic” moment and demonstrated how an ethos of rhetoric informed by Christian principles and liberal ideals enabled readers to overcome racial oppression. Merton’s ethos of rhetoric continues to serve as a clarion call for white liberals and Christians to transform the ongoing struggle for racial justice into a form of religious and socio-political redemption.

Although silence is often associated with spirituality, not much is known about why spiritual leaders acquire silence or the impact their silence has on their followers. I study the texts that discuss the forty-four-year silence of the Indian mystic Meher Baba and argue that Baba’s silence transformed him into a myth. I conduct a close textual analysis of Baba’s explanations of why he chose silence as well as the accounts of people who personally interacted with Baba to understand what his silence meant to them. Four themes emerged from my investigation: the intimate nature of Baba’s silence, the appeal of a silent God, Baba’s reliance on interpretations that allowed him to transcend textual and temporal limitations, and the legacy created by his mysterious silence. My study concludes that Baba’s influence challenges our reliance on words for persuasion and points to the enthymematic qualities of an artful silence.

The purpose of this essay is to build upon and expand the work of Dr. Frank Thomas’s book How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon and extend the boundaries of prophetic rhetoric to more readily identify militancy within the scope of the sacred. This work will not necessarily delineate how to produce sermonic militancy vis-a-vis rhetorical invention. The work will, instead, honor the instructive nature of sermonic militancy and help us to acknowledge our propensity to erase, reduce, minimize, and demonize more militant rhetorical presentations (sermonic and otherwise) that are necessary for the full scope of Black liberation projects and social movements to be actualized.

This analysis examines the third-party support that evangelical leaders David Brody, Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress provided President Donald Trump during the Stormy Daniels scandal. In their defense of Trump, evangelical leaders argued that he represented an imperfect vessel sent to protect evangelical values. During cable news interviews, the leaders relied on the image repair strategies of minimization, transcendence, bolstering, denial, attack accuser, and differentiation. This crisis communication analysis found that evangelical leaders’ defenses of Trump were effective in maintaining evangelical support for the president. Implications are drawn concerning the role of religious voices in public political discourse and how third-party defenses can help rhetors repair their images with targeted audiences.

Women play important roles in religious organizations, yet they consistently navigate conflicting discourses about their identities and roles in the church. Drawing on poststructuralism, this research explores gendered scripts in small groups and the ways hegemonic discourses limit women’s subjectivities. Through in-depth interviewing (n = 17) and grounded theory, the analysis explores how two dominant discourses are woven into women’s descriptions of their identities and roles in an evangelical church: (a) the Discourse of community and (b) the Discourse of doctrine. Women are engaged in self-subordination and concertive resistance, oscillating between scripts of rationality and emotion. The results demonstrate the power of women’s agency in traditional religious environments and enclave spaces, where dissensus and resistance may occur in evangelical churches.

This article contends that an increase in the use of indirect communication, as defined by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, has the potential to transform how individuals and communities receive messages about faith, up to and including an embodied—or lived out—faith as opposed to rote religion. Through an analysis of the author’s background, conception of faith, development of indirect methods, and a review of recent scholarship there emerges a renewed call within a postmodern age to communicate indirectly. Changing lives is a central desire for Christian communication scholars. As such, consideration of new possibilities for reaching humanity via indirect methods of communication are not only timely but also critical. Identity and effective communication are key elements to Kierkegaard’s extensive writings on faith, and he offers a compelling voice for Christian culture to implement on a broader scale.