Volume 15, Issue 1
Christopher J. Oldenburg
In addition to previewing the articles published in this specific issue of the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, this article presents a theme to better read these articles.
Keywords: Conceit of Freedom, Religious Rhetoric, Religious Discourse
Men Don’t Retreat: Freedom and Sovereignty in Christian Rhetoric
Sarah Kornfield
Sage Mikkelsen
Prominent Texas pastor Jonathan “JP” Pokluda conflates freedom and sovereignty in his pastoral advice, positioning freedom as that which comes after victory. Rather than retreat and find oneself pinned down, trapped, isolated, and annihilated, this masculine rhetoric promises that with victory, one is “free” to live as one wants. Analyzing the consequences of imagining freedom as being sovereign over a large terrain won through battle, this essay makes three contributions to the scholarship on Christian appeals to freedom. First, we demonstrate how these appeals to freedom reassert hierarchies of exclusion and control. Second, synthesizing across the literature on Christian appeals to freedom, we identify and articulate three topoi within this discourse: (1) a battle between good and evil; (2) an emphasis on God as having created and therefore defined or determined beings’ true natures; and (3) a central concern with gender roles. Finally, we demonstrate how the metaphors, equivocations, symbolism and tone within Christian appeals to freedom—even, or perhaps especially in their banal form as pastoral advice—invite believers into a worldview in which (white) Christian men are the rightful or natural rulers of the United States.
Keywords: Evangelical, Freedom, Gender, Masculinity, Sovereignty
James W. Vining
In 2022, Rev. Dr. William Barber led more than 100,000 people in the Mass Poor People’s and Low Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. The event was a rebirth of the Poor People’s Campaign initiated by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before his death in 1968. Like the 1968 campaign, Barber attempted to solidify a diverse coalition to call attention to and demand action to reduce the plight of poor Americans, and like King, Barber framed the undertaking as an act of prophetic public lament. In this study, I uncover highlights of Barber’s conception of prophetic public lament, including elements previously unseen in prophetic rhetoric scholarship. First, Barber insisted that poor and oppressed people should have the opportunity to publicly lament for themselves. Second, Barber claimed that public lament by poor and oppressed persons was not only cathartic but had significant functional potential. Finally, Barber emphasized the transcendent nature of public lament. This essay’s analysis of Barber’s use and description of prophetic public lament provides insights for both rhetorical scholars and social movement rhetors.
Keywords: Lamentation, Mass Poor People’s and Low Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington, Poor People’s Campaign, Prophetic Lament, Social Movement Rhetoric, William Barber
Brandon Knight
In January 2022, the archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, participated in the Walk for Life West Coast, a pro-life rally in San Francisco. Cordileone’s homily encouraged attendees to continue in their protest of abortion, which, he argued, was motivated by knowledge of the true, heavenly wisdom from above. The rally occurred a few months following a published epistle on abortion in which the archbishop reasons with members of his diocese using casuistry, or practical reasoning. At the rally, however, the archbishop’s rhetoric shifts completely. Whereas the epistle exhorts adherents of their public responsibility to oppose abortion, the WLWC homily employs prophetic rhetoric even comparing abortion to the pagan child-sacrifices of the Old Testament. Casuistic and prophetic rhetoric, Cathleen Kaveny argues, are two organic forms of discourse within Catholicism, especially when internal negotiations on moral issues like abortion occur. In this article, I argue that whereas Cordileone’s early discourse displays patient casuistic rhetoric with members of his diocese, he, ultimately, transitions to the prophetic voice in his WLWC homily because of Catholic pro-choice adherents with political standing and influence like the-then Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Acting in the lineage of the prophets, Cordileone uses a rhetorical chemotherapy to save the body of Christ and uphold the culture of life.
Keywords: Abortion; Casuistry; Catholicism; Homiletics Prophetic Rhetoric; Rhetorical Criticism
Christopher J. Wernecke
In this essay, I reveal the presence and power of the warrior-priest archetypal metaphor in American cancer and COVID-19 rhetorics. The warrior-priest’s role in these rhetorics is that of an obfuscating agent of ideology operating to maintain the hegemony of capitalism in our healthcare system. Through the fusion of religious and martial metaphors, the warrior-priest archetype emerges to misplace agency, divert attention, and justify capitalistic systems of power in American healthcare. By examining the popular Reddit community r/HermanCainAward, the crowdsourcing website GoFundMe, and a “viral” cancer story, this essay demonstrates how the warrior-priest accomplishes these ideological goals. Finally, this essay’s conclusion functions as a reflective space as I first contemplate my findings as a former cancer patient before then discussing the efficacy of two potential correctives to the warrior-priest archetypal metaphor in American cancer and COVID discourses.
Keywords: cancer rhetoric; COVID-19; archetypal metaphor; ideology; capitalism
The Gate of the Exonerated: Religious Rhetoric, Memory, and Restorative Justice
Christopher J. Oldenburg
My essay provides a rhetorical analysis of the 2022 public installation of the Gate of the Exonerated, an entrance to New York’s Central Park that represents the city’s remorse for the 1989 wrongful conviction of the teenagers known as the Central Park Five. The unveiling ceremony marked the twentieth anniversary of the five men’s exoneration. In focusing on both the secular and sacred symbolism of the Gate, I argue the event functions as a religious, exculpatory-encomium honoring wrongly convicted people through the Burkean strategies of transvaluation and exorcism by misnomer. Such a rhetoric constitutes a public act of contrition, a collective, corrective commemoration, thereby demonstrating religious rhetoric’s capacity to demand institutional accountability, admission of guilt, contrition, and vindication for social injustices.
Keywords: Gate of the Exonerated, Religious Rhetoric, Central Park Five, Memory, Restorative Justice