In 1866, Mary Baker Eddy claimed to receive a divine revelation, one concerning a new scientific principle—namely, that matter was unreal. Over time, this revelation became perfectly clear to Eddy, but convincing others of its truth demanded a careful, sophisticated rhetoric. This essay adds to existing scholarship on the early Christian Science church by exploring the work of an organization charged with communicating Eddy’s revelation—the Christian Science Board of Lectureship. I argue that the Board of Lectureship drew people into Eddy’s revelation by empowering them as agents in a new intellectual culture. At a time when mainstream science, medicine, and theology were becoming increasingly specialized and inaccessible to ordinary Americans, the Board of Lectureship’s message of agency rendered popular audiences integral to the truth of Christian Science. In the end, Eddy’s lecturers advanced a new rhetoric of revelation—one based not on faith and transcendence but on the practical, intellectual efforts of ordinary people.

Amos Kiewe (2011) provides a significant intellectual and practical service to the field of communication and to those seeking to understand evil that commences with the eclipse of the Other. His rhetorical analysis of anti-Semitism continues to unmask the marginalization and rejection of the different. The tone and purpose of his work originates in the title of Kiewe’s (2011) book, Confronting Anti-Semitism: Seeking an End to Hateful Rhetoric. This essay engages his didactic insights in three basic ways. First, I highlight particular parts of Kiewe’s book, engaging his project chapter by chapter. Second, while exploring this perspective, I offer comments that conclude each chapter description. Finally, I offer a response from the standpoint of three Jewish scholars central to my own work, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Martin Buber (1878– 1965), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). I underscore macro arguments from each of these three scholars in order to explicate my response to Kiewe’s discernments.

Set atop the highest point in the nation’s capital, The Washington National Cathedral is the sixth largest cathedral in the world. It has become a central site for the high holy rituals of American civil religion, hosting presidential funerals, National Day of Prayer services, and the tombs of national luminaries. Drawing on archival research, this essay situates the cathedral within a history of religious competition and national tension. The essay concludes that the cathedral’s roots lie largely in the fecund rhetorical soil of nineteenth-century nativism, the cultural prejudice that emerged in reaction to Roman Catholicism’s remarkable growth during that period. The essay further argues that nativism is an oft-overlooked yet defining type of civil-religious rhetoric.

In Clarendon, Texas, a debate emerged over the material (re)presentation of Christianity in the form of 10-foot crosses morally mapping the cultural landscape. To analyze the rhetoric of moral mapping, we examine how the transcendental embodiment of faith structures the landscape and mediates the ideological subject in order to assess the material function of Clarendon’s crosses. The disassociation between the interpretation of the Clarendon community as “Christian” and the complex reality of what it means to be an ideological subject constituted through—or apart from—religious identification necessitates a theoretical frame that addresses the crosses as structuring and structured experiences.

This paper analyzes the rhetorical exchange between the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which is responsible for safeguarding Catholic doctrine, and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization of U.S. Catholic nuns, concerning charges that the LCWR’s practices deviated from official Catholic teaching. The essay examines how each rhetorical entity addressed the other in a distinct rhetorical voice. The doctrinal genre explains the rhetorical approach of the Church hierarchy, whereas the prophetic voice and the deliberative voice illustrate how the women of the LCWR chose to respond to the censure by balancing their advocacy for a more responsive Church with their fidelity to Catholicism. I argue that although the LCWR’s rhetorical amalgam succeeded in ensuring a mutually satisfactory dialogue with the Vatican representatives, public statements about the resolution of this controversy reflect the ability of the doctrinal voice to subsume prophetic and deliberative voices, revealing an ongoing tension between the hierarchical and communal visions of the Church.

Empirical research has found religious affiliation as one of the most important identity and mental health pillars for individuals; however, the common phrase for religious identification: “I am spiritual, not religious” is on the rise in young adults in the United States. Thus, there is a quintessential need for research on religion and communication in this context. Even though there has been little scholarly attention to the role of religion as an inhibitor for communication, communication apprehension scholarship has been providing robust empirical evidence to support this association such as religious receiver apprehension (RRA). RRA is conceptualized as the anxiety or fear associated with receiving either real or anticipated communication about religion with people of other religions. After validating the RRA scale as both generally valid and reliable in the context of this upward trend, 455 young adult participants completed surveys regarding their religious communication behaviors. Findings suggest a relationship between religious receiver apprehension and one’s religious communication apprehension; in other words, the anxiety related to receiving different religious information than one’s religious beliefs also results in higher levels of communicating about one’s religious beliefs. Furthermore, religious receiver apprehension was negatively related to one’s tolerance for religious disagreements as well as one’s attitude towards evangelism, but also for individuals’ religious commitment. Similarly, it is worth considering that the overall majority of participants indicate to belong to particular religious affiliations, as well as identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious”; this contradiction mirrored in reduced religious commitment seems to reflect an ideology of religious entrepreneurialism, which seems to be more likely tethered to the neoliberalist logic of individualization rather than a new empathetic understanding of religious pluralism, which is better explained as “believing and not belonging.”

This autoethnographic account chronicles my academic and religious/spiritual path to becoming a professor of Communication. Spiritual influences and significant life events related to prayer, education, teaching, and research serve as sign posts marking the way. The journey begins with a child scientist experimenting with life—and an adolescent discovering the joy of reading through an illness. The journey continues with a crisis in undergraduate years followed by indoctrination stories of graduate school. Securing and retaining an academic position in Communication reveals the complexities of negotiating research and teaching in higher education. After tenure and promotion, a concurrent spiritual awakening begins a two decade “prayer research journey.” Finally, the journey continues with the most recent transition, moving from a social science research orientation to a new methodological orientation toward scholarship called autoethnography. Questions for meditation and reflection periodically punctuate the journey as a way to engage with the reader and facilitate reflection for life praxis.

This essay studies the TLC channel reality show My 600 Pound Life as a manifestation of the religious ritual of pilgrimage. The influence of popular culture upon religion, and of religion upon popular culture, is well established. Of special interest is the study of ritual, a highly formal discourse and practice. Because of its formal nature, ritual may be found across both sacred and secular texts and practices. Discourses may perform a ritual function vicariously for an audience. When a ritual is of religious origin, it appeals to an audience’s sense of religious meanings and authority. One central ritual pattern, of religious origin but found widely in secular discourse and practice, is the pilgrimage. This essay explains the major formal components of a pilgrimage, and then using a method of rhetorical homology, identifies My 600 Pound Life as formally a pilgrimage. The ideological commitments induced in an audience through formal appeal are discussed in this particular case. The essay shows the value of looking for religious form in the secular, the value of studying pilgrimage specifically, and the value of the method of rhetorical homology.

Recently, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced unprecedented public attention in what has been termed “The Mormon Moment.” While there has been an increased media focus on the religion, research into how Mormons perceive that attention is lacking, especially regarding the attention directed toward recent political candidate Mitt Romney. The purpose of this research is to fill the gap by analyzing the Mormon community’s perspectives of Mitt Romney. The current study uses Q-methodology and personal interviews to access Mormon’s perceptions of the media and politics. Results indicate that Mormons fall into four perceptual categories, indicating greater diversity within the Mormon community previously recognized.

Because of the role religion plays in upholding socio-political arrangements in Jordan, we argue that Jordanian Protestants, as a religious minority, can be productively understood as a religious counterpublic. Given the explicitly Islamic nature of Jordanian national identity, their unique mode of counterpublicity seeks to simultaneously maintain a distinct religious identity while also compensating for Jordanian Protestants’ deviance from the prevailing religious norms via overt displays of national loyalty. This compensatory mode of counterpublicity is visible through Jordanian Protestants’ public displays and symbols, public sermons and statements, and on social media.

This paper explores the origins of media ecology as defined by Neil Postman. It clarifies the extent to which McLuhan and Korzybski influenced its development, and discusses specific strengths and weaknesses of the theory as a vehicle for study. Finally, this paper explores Judeo-Christian influences upon media ecology, briefly examines the place of media ecology in church history beginning with Luther, and finally offers fresh applications of Postman’s ideas to three particular aspects of the everyday practice of the Christian faith.

The reign of England’s Mary Tudor has long been examined by historians for her regime’s extensive use of propaganda to attempt to convert her populace from Protestantism to Catholicism. These explorations, however, ignore the regime’s employment of other communications strategies, particularly public relations, as key components of its conversion efforts. This paper furthers the discussion of how propaganda and public relations are differentiated and examines and reinterprets the Marian government’s activities from a public relations perspective with the goal of continuing to establish a more comprehensive history of public relations and to explore the impact of public relations activities versus pure propagandistic techniques.

Faith-based organizations often provide resources to low-income populations. In the religion literature, this is seen as a key element of the social capital of religion for these populations. However, this qualitative study finds a different element in how low-income people experience social capital. In focus groups, this study finds a surprising number of references to God and spirituality, but not faith-based organizations, among a sample of low-income people, many experiencing homelessness, when talking about resources available through their social networks. This study finds a population so estranged from resources they can trust that they substitute God as they understand Him as their only source of social capital. These participants described communication with God as a way to access resources through kind strangers who may decide to be generous with them as a result of God’s intervention.

In light of the number of immigrants globally as well as in the U.S., it is important to learn how immigrants are assimilating into their host communities. Social capital is a promising lens through which to view this phenomenon. In this paper, we present the case study of a Korean immigrant church in Northern Virginia that has been a good model of a successful immigrant church. The church’s success stems from church leaders’ understanding of the gap between first- and second-generation Korean church members.