Sacred Rhetoric Research Articles

Preaching Outside the Temple: On the Literary Witness of James Baldwin as the Word Made Public

It was the late Bishop Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, former minister of the First Church of God in Christ of Brooklyn, New York, who said of the late famed novelist/essayist James Baldwin that “he was America’s inside eye on the Black Holiness and Pentecostal Churches”. Though Baldwin admitted that the culture and ethos of the African-American Pentecostal church were “highly significant and indelibly imprinted upon him”, according to Baldwin, his faith community’s “naiveté about life appalled him and drove him away”. While Baldwin left behind the church of his youth, never to return, for the remainder of his writing career, the “backslidden” minister’s literary musings continued to be informed (in both style and content) by the formative religious tradition that he left behind. Though several studies have been undertaken that examine Baldwin’s significance to various aspects of the study of African-American religion and culture, precious little has been written regarding Baldwin’s continuing engagement of the idiom of African-American preaching, the idiom which cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson has nominated as the “jewel in the crown of Black Sacred Rhetoric”. While many studies of Baldwin include the fact that Baldwin was a preacher’s son and that Baldwin himself preached for a time during his youth, the account is yet to be given of how Baldwin’s writings continued to employ the rhythms, grammar, tones, and textures of the Black sacred rhetorical tradition, especially from beyond the borders of the African-American church. This essay seeks to expose not only how Baldwin self-consciously continued to stand in the rhetorical trajectory of the African-American preaching tradition, but the attempt is also to reveal how the writer secularizes the idiom, providing the Black Holiness preacher a hearing from beyond the church. Through a focus on Baldwin as a Black sacred rhetorician, sermonizing from beyond the church, this essay participates in the nearly 100-year-old conversation instigated by the early African-American literary and cultural critic James Weldon Johnson in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), regarding the neglected significance of the sermon and the preacher in African-American literature and Black expressive cultures. Baldwin’s sermonic is here examined as a highly distinctive mode of Black public theologizing.

Risk and the everyday: potentialities, gendered mobilities and women’s worlds in Banaras

This ethnographic study is an exploration of risk as an everyday practice that women undertake to actualize their mobilities and social worlds in the city of Banaras, renowned as a sacred urban city in Northern India. The scholarship about this site has typically not centered on women’s experiences, knowledge, and lives, in narrating the overwhelming sacred rhetoric of the city. This paper contributes to the extant scholarship on gender, risk, corporeality, and urbanity by establishing a dialogue between risk theories embedded in institutional management discourse, emerging from Western contexts, and the lived and embodied risk practices of women in the global South. Risk, as conceptualized in this paper, presents a grounded discussion of women’s active and conscious modes of being emplaced in myriad sites in urban cities through their mobilities. In essence, the paper draws links between the potentiality of everyday risk-taking and women’s mobilities. This is achieved through interrogating the embedded notions of ‘respectable’ femininity, honor, fear, and violence, through ethnographic accounts of having observed, interacted with, and interviewed women from diverse socio-economic backgrounds in the city. In doing so, the paper argues that women attempt to enable themselves and recreate their worlds in a patriarchal urban setting through various intersectional forms of risk-taking, namely, what I denote ‘imposed’ and ‘chosen’ varieties, which intersect in complex ways. Therefore, the paper highlights women’s risk-taking as potentializing the everyday but also views this as a practice that sustains them as inhabitants of Banaras.

Third Cohort Begins Unique Ph.D. Program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric

Third Cohort Begins Unique Ph.D. Program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric

Risk

AbstractRisk as a term invokes a sense of uncertainty and danger. Risk in androcentric discourses operates on gender binary modes postulating male and masculine as active risk‐takers; embedded in themes that rarely account for women's knowledge, opinions, and decisions. In this paper, I oppose such notions and propose risk as a feminist keyword—a term that provides potential to women's everyday worlds and presents women as active technicians of their own lives. Risk in its feminist rendition emerged in my ethnographic fieldwork in Banaras (North India). Banaras is a Hindu holy city that has obscured its women inhabitants and their experiences in its sacred rhetoric. In mapping women's worlds in Banaras, by privileging lived and embodied experiences, risk surfaced as an integral part of the everyday for women to contemplate their ways of being vis‐à‐vis the control, containment and violence deployed by patriarchy and its custodians. The paper argues that risk‐taking exists in ordinary domains and is not restricted to unique situations. It is taken by women to actualize their worlds through corporeal, experiential, and sensorial knowledge. Thus, risk as a feminist keyword provides unique ways to comprehend everyday insistences and resistances by marginal bodies.

Joseph Evans, The Art of Eloquence: The Sacred Rhetoric of Gardner C. Taylor

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Wilderness, Freedom, Firearms: Sacred Rhetoric at the 53rd Parallel

This article analyzes National Rifle Association past–president Charlton Heston’s 2000 speech to the British Columbia Wildlife Federation. Narrating a shared mythology, Heston mapped a bridge between the two groups by dovetailing three ideas: wilderness, freedom, and firearms – each of which ostensibly transcends national borders. By exploring how Heston engaged a foreign audience dedicated to wildlife conservation, the paper examines the capacity of sacred rhetoric to generate shared ideological ground and thereby both expand, and demarcate, a community’s contours.

“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 prophetically provocative. Using ideological criticism, this essay will analyze the phrase “You are somebody” as an example of prophetic rhetoric and rhetorical re-conditioning.

Black Sacred Rhetoric: Katie Cannon and the Power of Memory

Black Sacred RhetoricKatie Cannon and the Power of Memory Stephen G. Ray Jr (bio) I begin by noting that as with all biblical scholars—or better yet, writers of sacred scripture—Katie Cannon began her sacred discourses with the recitation of her table of ancestors. Specifically, with Mary Nance Lytle in Mecklenburg County in the state of North Carolina in the sometimes-divided United States of America.1 Her genealogy began with a woman who, like the ancestors of Nana Peazant in the film Daughters of the Dust, "chose to survive" so that the tribes born of the family she pieced back together after slavery might have something with which to build a future. I begin here, because reflecting on any public discourse as sacred rhetoric requires that it be anchored in a web of history, witness, and conviction. So, to reflect on the particular discursive deployment of sacred rhetoric by Katie Geneva Cannon of Kannapolis, North Carolina, requires such an anchoring. It requests, as well, attention to the specific points of finite. This requirement comes from the nature of sacred rhetoric being the language by which human beings describe their relationships with and response to the particular reality they conceive as being the ultimate reality. Put another way, sacred rhetoric is the words used by discrete human beings to talk about their walk with God. Notice of this particular web brings me to my first point: The discursive use of sacred rhetoric by Katie Cannon was a speech-act of recognizing the divine subjectivity of not one, but a universe of human beings who had such status in their own time. The recognition of their subjecting in relation to a God whose subjectivity is in a mutually constitutive relationship serves rhetorically as a hand that appears from nowhere to inscribe SACRED on the memory and lives of [End Page 127] these people "forgotten" to history. Moreover, this particular enactment of sacred discourse unmasks the demonic subjugation of a faith that requires a woman to piece her family back together because its practitioner had sanctioned their sale as chattel.2 So, as its first moment, this enactment of sacred rhetoric in the public discourse of Katie Cannon: 1) restores the divine subjectivity of those made in the image of God but ensnared in the wickedness of slavery, and 2) unmasks the demonic subjection of the Christian faith to the powers of this world mediated through corrupted notions or relationality inscribed through the notion of race. In our shared tradition, Reformed, we would refer to this as the ministerial office of priest and prophet, respectively. The second point to which I bring our attention is the quality of Katie's enactments of sacred rhetoric to break the mesmerizing glance of fallen intellectuality as it colonizes the mind and appropriates ideational objects rightly conceived of as sacred and renders them utterly profane. Put another way, her sacred rhetoric exposed the normative structures of the academy that allow/ed courses to be taught on the agony and suffering of the Passion, which explicitly disallowed the agony and suffering of enslaved divine subjects as having any capacity to illumine what time of the cross really means. Her work and deployment of sacred rhetoric service/ed then to expose the falsity of the estrangement of the heart and mind which characterizes so much of life in the academy. Throughout this, all-too-brief presentation, I have referred to the work of Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon as sacred rhetoric without making explicit connections to preaching. I have done so because I want to suggest, finally, that rhetoric which takes life in the public square and restores the divine subjectivity of the least among us; liberates faith made captive to the demonic structures of its day; and binds up the heart broken from the mind is divine discourse made flesh. And so it was with Katie Geneva Cannon of the tribe of Mary Nance Lytle of Mecklenburg County in the State of North Carolina in the sometimes United States of America. [End Page 128] Stephen G. Ray Rev. Dr. Stephen G. Ray Jr. is president of Chicago Theological Seminary (a seminary related to the United...

Tuskegee as Sacred Rhetoric: Focal Point for the Emergent Field of African American Religion and Health.

Scholars in African American religion engage the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as the focal point of the African American experience in institutional medicine. Seeking a way forward from this history and its intentional evil, the author proposes to position Tuskegee as a form of Lynch's culturally contextual sacred rhetoric to make use of its metaphoric value in the emerging field of African American religion and health. In this broader meaning-making frame, Tuskegee serves as a reminder that African American religious sensibility has long been an agential resource that counters abuse of the Black body. It also acknowledges the complex decisions facing African American clinical trial participants.

Exhortation and Sympathy in the Paul’s Cross Jeremiads

ABSTRACTThis article considers affective rhetoric by examining the idea of exhortation. Appealing to the emotions in sacred rhetoric was not a strategy opposed to reasoned argument (as it often figures in secular rhetoric); rather, feelings of love for God and sympathy for one’s fellow Christians were among the virtues that preachers sought to rouse in their hearers. Nor were the emotions and the reason rigidly separated in homiletic theories; the preacher persuaded through argument, rhetorical figures and the vehemence that his own spiritual conviction created. These links between argument, example and affection in persuasion are best demonstrated in the exhortation, which uses all the resources that the preacher had at his disposal to move his hearers towards godliness. One of the most significant means of persuasion was for the preacher to create a sympathetic bond between himself and the hearers. He addressed them as thinking and feeling members of a Church in which they all shared an interest. This aspect of affective rhetoric is best seen in the Paul’s Cross Jeremiads, a sermon genre particularly associated with exhortation and characterised by vehement appeals to a sense of common purpose.

Indicting the Devil: Austin Phelps’s Fight Against Spiritualism

This article analyzes the rhetorical strategies of a nineteenth-century American professor of sacred rhetoric, Austin Phelps, in his opposition to the Spiritualist movement. Phelps’s approach encapsulates the most effective arguments used by a class of thinkers who were liberally educated, held great respect for science, and for whom biblical accounts of demonic activity continued to shed valid light upon modern-day phenomena. His booklet Spiritualism: The Argument in Brief (1871) employs elements of legal reasoning, especially a stasis approach—finding the “stopping points” in a judicial case—and apophatic strategy: using definition by negation to convince an audience to accept the rhetor’s definition of a key concept or term. “Counselor” Phelps grounds his arguments and conclusions in common experience, historical consciousness, commonly held religious belief, moral obligation, and professional duty. Far from being an unsophisticated rant about devils, Phelps’s treatment of Spiritualism was a high point of reasoned, classically argued discourse in the special domain of religious rhetoric: the supernatural.

The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Persuasion

The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Persuasion

The Influence of Theology on the Rhetorical Theory of Austin Phelps

ABSTRACTStudies in the history of rhetoric can be enriched by paying more attention to the relationship between theological belief and rhetorical theory. This article describes ways in which theology shaped the rhetorical theory of Austin Phelps (1820–1890), the fifth Bartlet professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary, America's first graduate school of theology and a premiere institution for rhetorical education during the nineteenth century.

The Influence of Theology on the Rhetorical Theory of Austin Phelps

Studies in the history of rhetoric can be enriched by paying more attention to the relationship between theological belief and rhetorical theory. This article describes ways in which theology shaped the rhetorical theory of Austin Phelps (1820–1890), the fifth Bartlet professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary, America's first graduate school of theology and a premiere institution for rhetorical education during the nineteenth century.

Womanists as Prophetic Preachers

This article explores the sermon event from a womanist orientation for prophetic preaching. A womanist orientation in prophetic preaching refers to sermons that address social justice issues, critiques the ethical practices of the tradition in which the preaching is performed, and includes a paradigm for listeners to critique the emancipatory praxis in the sermon. This particular orientation for preaching is a critical hermeneutic and homiletic framework broadening the conversation about preaching beyond the sermon content to include the audience and the context. A womanist orientation in prophetic preaching takes seriously the language used in the sermon, the ethical implications of the language of the text, and the application of the text in the faith community. This approach builds on Katie Cannon's womanist analysis of Black preaching that examines oppressive language in Black sacred rhetoric and extends the critique to include an examination of logos, heterosexism, theological language, and emancipatory praxis.

Rhetorical Education for the Nineteenth-Century Pulpit: Austin Phelps and the Influence of Christian Transcendentalism at Andover Theological Seminary

This archival study examines the rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy of Austin Phelps, an accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. In disclosing Phelps's contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy at the first graduate seminary in the United States, this article highlights the ways that Phelps's melding of American transcendentalist thought and Christian orthodoxy enabled him to adapt nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy in important ways. By demonstrating the extent to which Phelps's discussions of practical rhetorical wisdom and experiential preaching complicate documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the nineteenth century, this research aims to bring out a layer of the curriculum that other histories of writing instruction during the nineteenth century have not thoroughly investigated.

Buddhist Scriptures as Literature: Sacred Rhetoric and the Uses of Theory, by Ralph Flores

Buddhist Scriptures as Literature: Sacred Rhetoric and the Uses of Theory, by Ralph Flores. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. viii + 223 pp., $65.00 (hb), $18.95 (pb), $18.95 (eb). ISBN 978-0-7914-7339-9 (hb), 978-0-7914-7340-5 (pb), 978-0-7914-7883-7 (eb).

The Absolutist Advantage: Sacred Rhetoric in Contemporary Presidential Debate

Sacred rhetoric invokes nonnegotiable convictions rather than reasoned consequences. This form of rhetoric, grounded in transcendent authority and moral outrage, provides an electoral advantage by inspiring greater political engagement and valorizing candidates in the eyes of voters. A study of the language employed in contemporary presidential debates from 1976 to 2004 illustrates that while Democrats made sacred appeals in a few political domains, Republicans employed sacred rhetoric more frequently across a broad range of issues. Democrats have relied more heavily on projected numbers and plans rather than protected values and bounds, often yielding to Republicans an absolutist advantage.

Book Review: Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric

Book Review: Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric

Austin Phelps and the Spirit (of) Composing: An Exploration of Nineteenth-Century Sacred Rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary

This paper highlights the largely unacknowledged theoretical and pedagogical contributions of Austin Phelps, the accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and teacher of rhetoric, in two ways: First, it demonstrates that Phelps's methods of instruction depart from the documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the mid-nineteenth century in that he endeavors to teach the sermon as a form of civic engagement. Second, it shows how Phelps's discussions of the unconscious in the process of composing and his insights into the role of emotion in the writing process anticipate aspects of the process movement in Composition Studies.