Religious Communication Association
Biographic Data
| ID | 9632352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Religious Communication Association |
| GIVEN NAMES | Religious Communication |
| FAMILY NAME | Association |
| SIGNATURE | ASSOCIATION R C |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 135 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 135 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
“Be Persistent Whether the Time Is Favorable or Unfavorable”
Though the literature on crisis/risk/disaster communication is voluminous, there is little research related to crisis communication in local churches and none specific to congregations within the Wesleyan/Arminian tradition. Most crisis scholarship applied to religious organizations or churches has utilized situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) and/or has focused on crisis fallout in churches with celebrity pastors. This paper argues tha…
Language as a Blessing
We are narrative beings. We have a story for everything. Our dominant language narrative, the one found in all disciplines, including communication studies, claims that language is a tool born of evolutionary necessity. In other words, evolutionary pressures supposedly made for the invention of language. The evolutionary origins supposedly reflect the fact humans are, in the words of Richard Dawkins (1976), nothing but “survival machines,” doing …
The Atheist Dilemma
In this response to Spencer’s essay, I highlight how our two essays have distinct aims and purposes. Our contrasting interpretations and arguments reflect how differing goals, imprecise definitions of the literature on atheists/atheism, and conflicting prioritizations of context can lead to opposing perspectives over the current state of scholarly attention to atheists in the field. Additionally, I argue that Spencer’s literature review functions…
Between Faith & Fate
In 2019 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine claimed autocephaly, gaining jurisdictional autonomy from the Russian Orthodox Church. Calling upon rhetorical theories of liturgy, ritual, and sensation, this paper analyzes how the deeply personal, spiritual, and sensorial experiences of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy were restaged in order to facilitate this process. Not only did these changes articulate the further separation of the two churches, but they a…
Ratzinger, Truth, and Postmodernity
This essay explores how philosophy of communication can pursue truth while attending to difference and multiplicity in postmodernity. Using the method of interpretive inquiry outlined by Ronald C. Arnett (2007), the essay looks to Joseph Ratzinger (1927–2022), who was Pope Benedict XVI, as an exemplar practitioner of philosophy of communication emboldened with truth claims. The metaphors that emerge from Ratzinger’s life and works include reasona…
Atheism and Rhetorical Studies
In a recent essay, rhetorical studies scholar Kristina Lee argued that the field of rhetoric has largely ignored atheists, and that the few articles that do address atheism either reinforce harmful stereotypes or dismiss atheists’ contributions to public discourse. This article echoes Lee’s call for additional research about atheists’ rhetorical activity but troubles Lee’s claims about the paucity of rhetoric articles about atheism and the allege…
Scientific and Technological Transformation of Humans
Throughout human history, heroes with superhuman skills and strength were admired and worshipped. In our modern age, many individuals revel in comic books and movies about superheroes who can fly, see through walls and mountains, lift enormous weight, and perform many other deeds and exploits that ordinary humans cannot. At the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, interest in the superhuman is beginning to take a new form. Rather th…
Faith-Based Podcasts
Podcasting, as a new form of media and communication, has become increasingly popular in recent years. As the number of podcasts and listeners continue to rise, the media industry has started to recognize podcasts as a viable and profitable form of communication. Presently, popular podcast topics include comedy, entertainment, news, and sports. Faith-based or religious podcasts have been consistently a popular topic, as well. To contribute to the…
Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics in Digital Theology
Demonstrating the contemporary religious aesthetic amid the growth of digital theological productions, the short film production initiatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are noteworthy considering their outreach scope and production quality. These elements of a theological aesthetic can be understood through Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics due to the theory’s open-ended prescription for narrative didactics, which assist…
Transcendent Ecologies
This essay investigates the role of religion in the development of modern obstetrics, forging a connection between rhetoric of health and medicine and rhetoric of religion. To study this convergence, I combine Kenneth Burke’s “terministic screens” with Jenny Edbauer’s “rhetorical ecologies.” In particular, I analyze a variety of mid-nineteenth-century texts on midwifery/obstetrics to demonstrate how writers communicated within a transcendent ecol…
The Voice of the People
The Empty Signifier and the Communicative Construction of Religion
This paper particularizes religiously based conflict by applying dimensional analysis as examples of how concepts acquire distinctiveness. Furthermore, the goal is to explain how the category “religion” utilizes signifiers to assign content to the idea of religion. The paper utilizes the concept of an empty signifier, which is a signifier that lacks clear, fixed meaning but is subject to the interpretation of the individuals who encounter it. Fiv…
God, Grades, and Graduation
Popular Culture and Religion
Extending previous studies using the method of homological analysis, the paper shows formal parallels between the Roman Catholic rite of exorcism and the popular cable show Dr. Pimple Popper. These parallels have rhetorical significance. Homologies between sacred and secular texts borrow the spiritual force of the sacred while the secular reinscribes sacred forms, often out of audience awareness. The paper suggests ways to expand the study of suc…
Rebranding the American Catholic Church from a Classical Rhetorical Perspective
This work represents an attempt to reimagine the American Catholic brand fractured by the clergy sexual abuse scandals and their official cover-up to save the Church from public embarrassment and humiliation, using Isocrates’ theory of self-defense and self-representation as found in his Antidosis. Built over centuries of service in America, the Catholic Church and its brand enjoyed a high moral authority in American society. However, such a mora…
New England Elijah
This article argues that Bernie Sanders operates as a prophetic figure in the mold of the prophet Elijah as recounted in 1 and 2 Kings. Specifically, it shows how Sanders and Elijah share five common elements that are central to their prophetic discourse: theatrical style, oppositional ethos, environmental apocalypticism, raising disciples, and honored legacy. In demonstrating these shared rhetorical elements, this article intervenes in arguments…
Megachurch Misconduct
This article analyzes the rhetoric of Pastor Matt Chandler and the elder board of The Village Church in Texas to introduce the concept of a rhetoric of presumed forgiveness, a strategy of transcendence in the rhetorical genre of apologia, as a vital form of public address. Critiquing the sermon where Chandler’s leave was announced demonstrates how The Village Church manipulates their congregation by evoking the spiritual concept of forgiveness an…
The Rhetoric of NXIVM
The Human Potential Movement influenced a wide variety of highly respected institutions and organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the intellectual and religious teachings that directed and guided the movement and the strategic techniques designed to induce intense experiences in members and participants still persist today in client cults and other seemingly secular contexts like the coaching industry. NXIVM and its subsidiaries we…
A Rhetoric of Equivalence in White Christian Women’s Advice Ministries
The Christian women’s advice ministry is a longstanding, popular segment of the Christian book industry—which is a historically white industry. Analyzing a representative sample of lifestyle advice books by Baker Publishing Group, we identify a pervasive rhetorical appeal that we term the “rhetoric of equivalence.” Specifically, we demonstrate how this discourse constructs a chain of equivalences from white women’s laborious self-control to their…
After Workism
Pre-pandemic accounts of “workism” critiqued Americans’ quasi-religious devotion towards their jobs as sources of meaning and community. In the early 2020s, however, Gen Z and millennial employees have improvised vocational postures counter to such workist tendencies. After interviewing 47 rising professionals about their workplace communication, I track their practices of attunement, silence, and detachment in response to workist beliefs. Borrow…
Instructional Communication in U.S. Evangelical Christian Youth Ministries
One primary goal of youth ministry programs is to teach adolescents about a given faith and, in doing so, to foster active and ongoing lifelong engagement in spiritual life. Although youth ministry settings differ from conventional classrooms in some ways, their fundamental objective of teaching and learning is the same. In this sense, youth ministers function as “teachers” and adolescents as “students.” This exploratory study examines youth mini…
Evangelical Celebrity and the Third Persona
Negotiating Culture and Religious Taboos toward Maternal Health Choice and Utilization in Rural Ghana
Culture and religion are important elements that shape behavior. But how does society navigate the challenges these pose to development? This study examined the cultural significance of the religious taboo on birthing in the Mafi-Dove community in southern Ghana. Using focus groups with participants, the study examined the taboo’s impact on communication for maternal health choice and utilization, and how women navigate the risks associated with …
Contemplative Action/Actionable Contemplation
By consulting argumentative schema from Chaïm Perleman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric and applying it to twenty-first century Roman Catholic spiritual guidebooks, this article traces the symbiotic relationship between reasonable spirituality and contemplative action. First, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s associative schemes are analyzed within contemporary contemplative texts to trace the rhetorical reasonability. The article then…
The Rhetorical Quadrilateral
Since the critical turn in the 1980s, rhetoric has maintained its methodological legitimacy by emphasizing the critic’s reflexivity. But complicated questions have emerged related to teaching rhetorical methods, critical autobiography, and standards of critical judgment. This essay explores those issues by synthesizing the Wesleyan Quadrilateral’s reason, tradition, scripture, and experience with what we introduce as the Rhetorical Quadrilateral.…
I Was Saved at an Early Age
The author conducted four years of ethnographic fieldwork among American fundamentalists as a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services at some 200 churches in 17 states. By examining three fundamentalist practices—forms of personal address, the public sharing of conversion testimonies, and the annual Christmas program—the author illustrates how fundamentalist cultural assumptions about the nature of persons, how they should be linke…
Locus of Control, Parasocial Interaction and Usage of Radio or TV Ministry Programs
In this exploratory study, 191 students at a Deep Southern university were surveyed about their locus ofcontrol and use of religious media. Given that this was the first research into the relationship between this personality trait and religious media use, only research questions were advanced on this subject. Questions were raised as to whether internally or externally-oriented individuals would use religious media more extensively, have greater…
Locus of Control, Parasocial Interaction and Usage of Radio or TV Ministry Programs
In this exploratory study, 191 students at a Deep Southern university were surveyed about their locus ofcontrol and use of religious media. Given that this was the first research into the relationship between this personality trait and religious media use, only research questions were advanced on this subject. Questions were raised as to whether internally or externally-oriented individuals would use religious media more extensively, have greater…
Silencing the Lambs
In the wake of the 2002 Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, the response of the Holy See served to frustrate and confound supporters and detractors alike. Although thought to he a poorly conceivedpublic relations strategy, the Papal response to this American crisis was never designed to repair its image but instead to reassert its role as the ultimate representative of the Divine will; maintain pastoral authority over congregants; and to silenc…
Religion in the Box
This article presents findings from the survey and focus group discussions on cultural adaptation through televangelical Christian programs among Metro Manila audiences conducted in 2004. Conditions appear to he favorable for religious television programs as venues for evangelization and discipleship in the Philippines. HoM/ever, consumption of these programs remains limited where viewership patterns are irregular at best. Moreover, there appears…
Evangelical Pilgrimage
This article examines narratives of college students applying for participation in various short-term mission trips at a Christian college. In examining the themes, rhetoric and concepts these students employed, we argue that they enter these various trips - whether service or evangelism -as a kind of pilgrimage. Looking just at these expectations and rhetorical strategies of the students, we frame our analysis in terms of Victor and Edith Turner…
I Was Saved at an Early Age
The author conducted four years of ethnographic fieldwork among American fundamentalists as a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services at some 200 churches in 17 states. By examining three fundamentalist practices—forms of personal address, the public sharing of conversion testimonies, and the annual Christmas program—the author illustrates how fundamentalist cultural assumptions about the nature of persons, how they should be linke…
Human Rights Collaboration and the Communicative Practice of Religious Identity
Increasingly, human rights collaboration involves faith-based organizations whose members see social activism as an extension of their religious identities. This raises an immediate tension because collaboration requires negotiation of identities, challenging the convictions that motivate religious believers’ involvement. Thus human rights collaboration offers an important context to explore tensions of identity and religious faith. This study re…
“You Are Somebody”
While Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Lawson are credited as the forces behind the Memphis sanitation strike, local faces galvanizing the movement are infrequently studied. The sacred rhetoric of African Methodist minister Rev. Henry Logan Starks—known as the “Gentle Giant” and trained in the tradition of holy defiance, transformative resistance, and Black liberation—is remembered and recalled as theologically transformative and prophetica…
A Crisis of Faith
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 …
Rewriting the Bible
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 serv…
Why Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be Is a Philosophical Guide for 21st-Century Media Managers . . . and Everyone Else for that Matter
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, existen…
This Music Is My Religion
This article interprets a live electronic music DJ performance by Armin van Buuren at Ultra Music Festival 2019 in Miami as a religious, rhetorical text. It considers the methods of van Buuren and why he appeals to a younger generation that is seeking spirituality outside of traditional religion. Electronic music has long been identified by scholars as having a spiritual ethos, and van Buuren’s style epitomizes what is described as “technoshamani…
Narrative Apologetics
MLK and the Meeting That Never Was
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 don…
Prophetic Imagination and Racial Inertia
Andrew Peterson’s contemporary worship song “Is He Worthy?” quickly gained popularity through its call-and-response format, praise of a worthy Redeemer, and celebration of a Church made up of members from every culture. However, his video was criticized for lacking any people of color, and subsequent videos by Chris Tomlin and Shane & Shane displayed the same lack of diversity. Applying Walter Brueggemann’s conceptual framework to “Is He Worthy,”…
Prophesying a Feminist Story
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…
The Sacredness of Black Life
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
Recognizing the Imago Dei in Employee Publics
This article reviews several converging scholarship fields—internal communication, leadership, and workplace culture—coupled with the biblical principle of the imago dei (people’s intrinsic value stemming from being made in God’s image) to offer two propositions. First, Christian public relations scholars/faculty can integrate their faith into their research, grounding their understanding and practice of “excellent” public relations in the concep…
A Womanist Rhetorical Vision for Building the Beloved Community
W(holy) Awareness
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 …
Religious Talk at Work
This qualitative study investigated how individuals managed their religious identity at work. Christians, non-Christians, and non-religious (n = 320) from across the United States took an online, open-ended questionnaire. Rich information emerged from the data concerning the why and how of religious disclosure, what happened after disclosure, and what strategies should be used for the most positive disclosure outcomes. The findings suggested a re…
Discerning Dangerous Affections in Hell Houses
Drawing on insights from revivalist Jonathan Edwards, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and communication theory about inoculation, I examine Hell Houses, haunted house–style events designed to scare audiences into becoming Christians. Performances rely on inoculation to demonize outgroups and reinforce in-group commitment. While scholars identify Edwards as a rhetorical ancestor of Hell House tactics, inoculation reinforces in-group identity in a…
America’s Dark Theologian
Religion Online
Islamic Terrorist Radicalization through Online Jihadist Magazines
This study is a conceptual analysis of the role that online jihadist magazines play in the process of Islamic terrorist radicalization. This topic is essential because it demonstrates how successful jihad propagandists have been at finding new ways to radicalize new and potential recruits—often a young target audience—into the Salafist-jihadist doctrine. The four specific magazines examined are Al-Qaeda’s Inspire, ISIS’s Dabiq and Rumiyah, and Al…
Spiritual Reassurance
Research on spirituality at the end of life is extensive. Most research prescribes why care workers should talk with patients and their families about spirituality, who should talk with them, and how care workers should do it. Few studies address the experiences of discussing religion with families at the end of life. In this study, semistructured interviews with nurses, patient advocates, chaplains, and social workers (n = 65) described their ex…
Philosophy (62 works) · Sociology (55 works) · Political science (33 works) · Art (30 works) · Rhetoric (29 works) · Theology (29 works) · Epistemology (28 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Law (26 works) · History (23 works)