Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century: Pluralism in a Postsecular Age

by Michael-John DePalma (Editor), Paul Lynch (Editor), Jeff Ringer (Editor), Jonathan Alexander (Afterword), Patricia Bizzell (Contribution by)

Overview

Expanding the scope of religious rhetoric  

Over the past twenty-five years, the intersection of rhetoric and religion has become one of the most dynamic areas of inquiry in rhetoric and writing studies. One of few volumes to include multiple traditions in one conversation, Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century engages with religious discourses and issues that continue to shape public life in the United States.  

This collection of essays centralizes the study of religious persuasion and pluralism, considers religion’s place in U.S. society, and expands the study of rhetoric and religion in generative ways. The volume showcases a wide range of religious traditions and challenges the very concepts of rhetoric and religion. The book’s eight essays explore African American, Buddhist, Christian, Indigenous, Islamic, and Jewish rhetoric and discuss the intersection of religion with feminism, race, and queer rhetoric—along with offering reflections on how to approach religious traditions through research and teaching. In addition, the volume includes seven short interludes in which some of the field’s most accomplished scholars recount their experiences exploring religious rhetorics and invite readers to engage these exigent lines of inquiry.  

By featuring these diverse religious perspectives, Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century complicates the field’s emphasis on Western, Hellenistic, and Christian ideologies. The collection also offers teachers of writing and rhetoric a range of valuable approaches for preparing today’s students for public citizenship in our religiously diverse global context.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809339167
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	11/10/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Michael-John DePalma, professor of English and director of professional writing and rhetoric at Baylor University, is the author of Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America: Austin Phelps at Andover Theological Seminary. He is also coeditor of Mapping Christian Rhetorics: Connecting Conversations, Charting New Territories.  

Paul Lynch, associate professor of English at Saint Louis University, is the author of After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching and coeditor with Nathaniel Rivers of Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition (SIU Press).  

Jeff Ringer is an associate professor of rhetoric, writing, and linguistics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse: The Religious Creativity of Evangelical Student Writers and coeditor of Mapping Christian Rhetorics.  

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 8. RACE AT THE INTERSECTION OF RHETORIC AND RELIGION, ANDRE E. JOHNSON

My interest in the academic study of prophetic rhetoric started while I was a student in my Ph.D. program. I had already decided to study prophetic rhetoric and selected my figure, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. Then the 2008 presidential campaign brought my study to the forefront. During the Democratic primary, clips from Barack Obama’s former pastor Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright surfaced. In them, audiences heard pastor Wright condemn the United States government and critique the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Throughout the many comments through the media from politicians, pundits, and pollsters, one thing stood out to me. Many people who offered comments simply did not understand the elements of the African American prophetic tradition. Even people in my own department were “concerned” over Wright’s “comments.” However, for me and others who knew about this prophetic tradition, Wright’s words were of no concern at all.  

While my academic interest in prophetic rhetoric started while I was a student in the Ph.D. program, my interest in prophetic discourse—speaking truth to power—went back further. In short, I also serve as a pastor of a Black church. What this means is that I come from and out of a tradition that produced prophetic rhetors—Allen, Stewart, Turner, Wells, Du Bois, Terrell, King, Hamer, X, and Davis—throughout American history. Not to see them studied as exemplars of prophetic rhetoric, or their rhetoric seriously examined within the larger frame of religious discourse, was disconcerting. As I continued to research the field, I was shocked to discover just how white it was. 

For instance, when James Darsey published his foundational work, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America in 1997, many in the field of communication—especially those who studied religious rhetoric—held the work in high regard. Steven Browne wrote that Darsey’s book was a “richly textured, sometimes dazzling, always provocative study of the prophetic tradition in American culture." James Andrews went even further. He called the book “important” and wondered aloud how anyone who “purports to study public address in America—from a historical or contemporary standpoint—can ignore it." Those who would read this book would see an “intricate and compelling argument laid out, evidence convincingly assembled, and theory-based criticism skillfully enacted by a scholar who can blend wit, erudition, and passion." Darsey continued to receive praise for the book, winning the prestigious Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address as well as the Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the Winans/Wichelns Award from the National Communication Association. 

This, however, is not to say that others did not notice the whiteness of Darsey’s work, but they would all come from historians and not communication or rhetorical scholars. For example, Robert H. Craig in his review of the book celebrated that Darsey’s “historical study of American rhetoric is an intriguing, well-written, and fascinating treatment of an unexplored dimension of American life,” while at the same time criticized Darsey for limiting the prophetic and radical tradition to “Euro-American males.” Craig astutely notes, “if one of the defining characteristics of the biblical prophets is their ceaseless demand for divine justice, then to limit the American radical rhetorical tradition to Euro-American males does an injustice to the radicality of the very biblical tradition that gives rise to the prophetic voice." Craig wondered about the “public witness individuals such as Mother Jones, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and César Chavez, among a host of others, to ask to what degree their inclusion might expand our understanding of a distinctive tradition otherwise so carefully delineated by James Darsey.  

In his critique of Darsey’s work, Edward Countryman wondered how Darsey could sum up the entirety of the mid-nineteenth century with one figure—Wendall Phillips—and leave out “Douglass, King, and many other figures of real power out of the picture.” Mark Pittenger, in his review of the book, also wondered how Darsey could leave Martin Luther King Jr., other civil rights leaders, and even Cornel West out of the tradition.

According to the many rhetorical and communication scholars, Darsey had produced a crucial work that provided the foundation to all who would follow. Indeed, the publication of The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America led many rhetorical scholars to deem prophecy worthy of study. However, it also did something else. It provided the framework and foundation for future studies in prophetic rhetoric, and many of these studies, as Anthony Stone and I have argued elsewhere, “negates the contributions of African-American scholars and those who study African-American prophetic rhetoric." It is this “lack of attention by scholars,” we contend, that “lead[s] many to understand prophetic rhetoric only from a white (male) European framework that understands the people as the New Israel and grounded in the ideals of freedom, individualism, and ‘called people of God.’” Further, we surmise that it is this “oversight that impedes scholars from seeing that the African American version of prophetic rhetoric is profoundly different." 

An example of this is Kristen Lynn Majocha’s “Prophetic Rhetoric: A Gap Between the Field of Study and the Real World.” In this “brief survey” of the scholarship of prophetic rhetoric, she argues that her essay will “exhaustively uncover how ‘prophetic rhetoric’ has been discussed in the current literature.” Though she does mention Cornell West and Michael Eric Dyson as contributing to the study of prophetic rhetoric—only by calling specific figures “prophetic”—her essay is heavily influenced by Darsey. Moreover, Majocha contends that we do not know “how to uncover prophetic rhetoric,” or “how to test for prophetic rhetoric." 

However, it is not only Majocha. Since 1997, according to a search for “prophetic rhetoric” in Communication & Mass Media Complete, much of what we know about prophetic discourse draws heavily from Darsey. Examples include Amos Kiewe’s “Theodore Herzl’s The Jewish State: Prophetic Rhetoric in the Service of Political Objectives,” David M. Timmerman’s “Christian Pacifism and the Prophetic Voice: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Peace Address,” Richard Benjamin Crosby’s “‘Which is the Wisest Course?’: Political Power and Prophetic Agency in Nineteenth-Century Mormon Rhetoric,” Michael Souders’ “The Prophetic Imagination and the Rhetoric of ‘Freedom’ in the Prosperity Gospel,” Leland Spencer’s “Bishop Leontine Turpeau Current Kelly: Toward an Ironic Prophetic Rhetoric.” I believe this is what Houdek gets at when he speaks of this as a “structural problem." We can only cite who and what we know, and if that is already embedded in whiteness, we will continue to replicate that. I knew even in my time as a graduate student that I wanted to do something more with prophetic rhetoric than to reproduce “whiteness.” Surely, Black people adopted prophetic personas, and they had to differ from what the canon was teaching me. Therefore, I sat out on the quest to find and name that tradition.  

[END OF EXCERPT]

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Martin Camper
Introduction: Michael-John DePalma, Paul Lynch, and Jeff Ringer
Section 1: Interrogating Rhetorics
1. “To Do Things in a Good (Decolonial) Way: Putting Indigenous Rhetorics and Rhetorics of Religion in Conversation,” by Lisa King
Interlude: Patricia Bizzell
2. “Feminist Rhetorical Historiography and Religion,” by Lisa Zimmerelli
Interlude: Beth Daniell
3. “‘Joy Anyway!’ Narratives of Harm and Flourishing at the Intersections of Religious and LGBTQ+ Rhetorics,” by TJ Geiger, III
Interlude: Beverly Moss
4. “We Are Not Born for Ourselves Alone: Jesuit Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century,” by John Brereton and Cinthia Gannett
Interlude: Laurent Pernot
Section 2: Inventing Rhetorics
5. “Creating Pathways for Ethical (Inter)Actions: New Directions for Jewish Rhetorics,” by Janice W. Fernheimer
Interlude: Patricia Roberts-Miller
6. “Rhetoric and Buddhism Unchained,” by Kurt Spellmeyer
Interlude: Elizabeth Vander Lei
7. “Engaging with Arab-Islamic Religious Rhetorics: Why It Matters to Rhetorical Studies,” by Rasha Diab
Interlude: Robert Yagelski
8. “Race at the Intersection of Rhetoric and Religion,” by Andre E. Johnson
Afterword: Jonathan Alexander

Contributors
Index 

Editorial Reviews

Exceptional, even necessary, reading—not only as a starting place for those interested in broadening discussions of rhetoric and religion but for those seeking to challenge their own thinking about the coherence of the ‘rhetorical tradition.’”—Roger Thompson, author of Emerson and the History of Rhetoric 

“Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century: Pluralism in a Postsecular Age confirms the centrality of religious rhetorics to our discipline and to our nation's civic health. The book's exceptionally argued chapters and compelling interludes masterfully engage Indigenous, Jewish, Arab-Islamic, and Buddhist perspectives and think intersectionally about religion's connection to race, culture, gender, and sexuality. This collection is a must read for teachers and students of rhetoric who must see critical engagements with religion as key concerns for pluralism.”—Jessica Enoch, author of Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work 

“This excellent collection is an inclusive, pluralistic example of the next stage in rhetoric’s contribution to the religious turn in the human sciences. The essays provide valuable general accounts of current approaches to reconceiving the interdisciplinary study of traditional religious rhetorics. Also included are chapter interludes with engaging narratives of how authors entered the field.”—Steven Mailloux, author of Rhetoric's Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics 

“With Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century: Pluralism in a Postsecular Age, DePalma, Lynch, Ringer, and their contributors continue a set of important conversations—not only about the role of religion in rhetoric, but also about the hybridity of rhetorical tradition(s) writ large. Deliberately building on previous work about rhetoric and religion and by challenging monolithic perspectives, the volume's essays and unique commentary interludes will encourage, if not demand, other useful scholarship to benefit the field of rhetoric and composition.”—Deborah H. Holdstein, author of Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition and coauthor of Judaic Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition

“At this contentious cultural moment, when religious identity is used to draw political boundaries and encourage factionalism, the diverse and illuminating contributions to this volume complicate flattened conceptions of religion in the US and call for renewed appreciation of scholarship rooted in faith. This compelling collection dismisses acts of token tolerance and instead embraces rhetorical contemplation, interanimation, and resonance in the search for religious plurality. Readers come away both critical of shortsighted academic condescension aimed at religion and equipped to incorporate religious rhetoric into classroom discussions—a remarkable achievement.”—Lynée Lewis Gaillet, coeditor of Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

“The coeditors of Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century: Pluralism in a Postsecular Age offer a kaleidoscope of insight into the persuasive and rhetorical impact of differing religious traditions, announcing for the reader the good, the bad, and the problematic inherent within the rhetorical power of religious influence. I recommend this work as a touchstone for conversation about a perennial topic of unification and dispute, religion.”—Ronald Arnett, author of Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope: Contemporary Implications of the Scottish Enlightenment 

From the Publisher