Obama in Selma: Deixis,rhetorical vision,and the “true meaning of America”

I argue that Barack Obama’s immediate, imaginary, and discursive deictic references to the actions and character of ordinary citizens, specific geographical markers within the “landscape of American history,” and sacred moments in U.S. history extended and enlarged the relational, spatial, and temporal contours of the national narrative in his 2015 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. In so doing, the president offered a compelling (re)definition of patriotism, civic responsibility, and “the true meaning of America.” More broadly, I argue for an expanded notion of deixis within rhetorical scholarship. Beyond a linguistic “pointing” to bodies, places, and objects within the audience’s immediate vicinity, I detail how indexicals bring various images before the eyes of the audience, link individual texts to their political, historical, social, and cultural contexts, and direct our attention to the most important parts of the national narrative even as they deflect our attention from other parts of the story. Ultimately, I suggest that deixis illuminates theories of rhetorical vision in ways that have gone unnoticed, and it is only when we recognize the psychological and cognitive effects of deictic speech that we can fully appreciate the central role phantasia plays in persuasion, deliberation, and moral judgment.     

THE BASIS OF JAMES W. FOWLER'S UNDERSTANDING OF FAITH IN THE RESEARCH OF WILFRED CANTWELL SMITH: AN EXAMINATION FROM AN EVANGELICAL PERSPECTIVE

This article focuses on the influence of Wilfred Cantwell Smith's presentation of the nature of faith on James W. Fowler's faith-development paradigm. Smith contended that, in the pre-modern era, terms translated by the English words “faith” and “believe” denoted a personal allegiance that did not require assent to any objective assertions. Two difficulties with Smith's research are highlighted: 1) In the premodern era, the terms translated as “faith” and “believe” denoted both personal allegiance and objective assent. 2) Although “faith” and “believe” primarily indicated personal allegiance in the premodern era, the primacy of personal allegiance within faith does not preclude the presence or the necessity of objective assent. The author suggests that, although Christian faith and Fowlerian stage-development are two distinct phenomena, the reality to which Fowler referred as “faith” describes the psychical context for Christian faith. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this concept, suggesting that Christian faith emerges from Fowlerian stage-development, but that the content and development of both phenomena remain essentially distinct.     

Religious Education: The Depth of the Field

This article responds to sociologist Christian Smith's claim that many teenagers today have lost traditional religious faith and instead espouse a new and erroneous faith in God the “Cosmic Therapist.” The author challenges this claim by comparing two of Smith's chief complaints vis-à-vis teen faith to established portraits of adolescent faith. The comparison reveals that despite differences significant continuities exist between adolescent faith “then” and “now,” a finding that underscores the inherently (but not exclusively) developmental nature of religious faith. The article concludes by affirming Christian Religious Education as a dynamic process of bringing “life to faith and faith to life” with humility, compassion, and hope.     

A Forward Look in Religious Education

This article describes six constitutive “senses” of the “Christian educator's imagination.” These dispositions toward knowing, being, and doing characterize competent leadership in educational ministry. They include a sense for vocational empowerment, a sense for teaching and learning, a sense for seeking God's presence; a sense for the contours of one's own soul, a sense for “what makes persons’ tick, and a sense for institutional leadership. The author contends that scholars of Christian religious education should seek to cultivate these senses in their students.     

PROTECTing the figure of innocence: child pornography legislation and the queerness of childhood

In US v. Williams (2008), the Supreme Court upheld the PROTECT Act; this law's “pandering provision” prohibits the distribution and solicitation of child pornography, but does not distinguish between real child pornography and “virtual” child pornography (images that are digitally created or manipulated and do not depict a real child). Situating this case at the intersection of rhetorical studies of the law and queer studies, I read the Court's opinions as rhetorical and cultural texts that circulate a strategic figuration of the child that emphasizes its sexual purity, vulnerability, and whiteness, and disavows the queerness of childhood desires. I argue that the Court's decision virtualizes the figuration of the child through the performative “collateral speech” act, ultimately conflating virtual materials with real children. Furthermore, I contend that the language of the law, as it taxonomizes and disciplines illicit desires, also expresses desire through its passionate figurations of childhood innocence and adult sexual morality.     

Rejecting Dialogue for Perspective: Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and John Calvin’s Divine Pedagogy

James Estep's integration of Vygotsky's work on the Zone of Proximal Development into Christian education and pedagogy falls short of a distinctly evangelical form of integration. Using Ken Badley's schemata of Integration of Faith and Learning, this article distinguishes Estep's “paradigmatic” integration from a more thoroughgoing “perspectival” integration. Perspectival integration best displays the connections between Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and evangelical thinking by using the divine accommodation of John Calvin, as described in the work of Arnold Huijgen.     

“A Widespread Loss of Confidence:” TARP,Presidential Rhetoric,and the Crisis of Neoliberalism

This article analyzes the circulation of the term “confidence” as a prominent signifier for neoliberal logics, taking George W. Bush’s response to the economic crisis in Fall 2008 as a case study. It traces the public circulation of confidence in previous presidential administrations and notes that much like previous administrations, Bush’s response to the crisis was rooted in confidence. Bush identified a loss of confidence as the underlying cause of the economic crisis, and his focus on the need to restore lost confidence allowed him to violate his traditionally conservative principles in order to save the free market. Additionally, Bush’s reliance on the term in the context of the economic crisis articulated the nation-state to the national economy through neoliberalism as a prevailing economic logic.     

Transmitting Faith in the Republic:Muslim Schooling in Modern Plural France

This article explores and analyzes private Muslim schooling in France using ethnographic research performed in 2013–2014 in Lille-, Lyon-, and Paris-based Muslim schools. The article discusses the course content and the interpretations of Islam that are taught, demonstrating how French republican values are fused together with Islam to promote a specific brand of French Muslim citizenship and identity. I argue that Muslim schools should be seen as part of the process of the normalization of Muslim-based civic engagement and that they represent a particular response to France's new plurality that reinterprets the boundaries of “French” and “Muslim.”     

THE VANISHING MAGIC WAND

Futurists “wave a magic wand,” insinuating thereby that tabula rasa is a psychic and sociological option. “If there were no Bureau, what would the Jewish community do?” “If there were no Jewish community, what would the world's Jews do?” “If there were no world… ?” On the surface, it's an innocuous strategy: a way to probe assumptions, a way to hone a definition of needs. Examined closely, however, it is a flawed way to explore reality. At worst, it is a device to encourage a preconceived outcome.     

Strategies for Faith Engagement Within One's Career: The Role of Uganda Christian University in Preparing Students for Postgraduation Life

This article examines the role of Uganda Christian University (UCU) in devising strategies for the sustenance of Christian faith in one's career for the betterment of the society despite its social ills. The current theme of UCU is “A Complete Education for a Complete Person.” As a Christian university, UCU seeks to provide a positive educational experience and a strong biblical foundation for all that God will call upon its graduates to do in the years that follow. A biblical worldview should see God as the source of truth in all academic disciplines; after all, God not only made all things but he knows them intimately. Given the hostile and challenging social, political, and economic environment of Africa, and Uganda in particular, how can one keep Christian faith in his or her career? How can one remain “salt and light” of such a society? Being a Christian is no longer popular in Uganda and an alarming number of young Christians are walking away from their faith by the time they finish their university years. Mere academic knowledge should not be the sole aim of education, but rather the Christian character in one's life during education and, later on, in his or her career.     

ACT UP 25: HIV/AIDS,Archival Queers,and Mnemonic World Making

Audre Lorde's speech, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, “sheds light on the margins of rhetoric in the sense of the public speech because she examines factors that may cause some people to remain silent while enabling others to speak and act. “Margins” refers both to the parameters employed for defining a practice and the relative place or value of varied activities exemplifying the practice. Lorde interweaves her commentary on the silence surrounding breast cancer with insights about silence drawn from her experiences as a member of several subordinated communities, especially as they relate to the misuse of power to silence those who are different. Her speech comments on silencing and power, sexism, verbal abuse, violence and sexualized aggression, shame, the taboo, and hostile social environments. Paradoxically, Lorde's speech is as much about the possibilities of rhetoric as its limits.     

The rhetoric of oratory and how to teach it

Campbell's reputation has suffered from modem conceptions that assume Aristotle's Rhetoric as the paradigm for rhetorical theory and from modern commitments to epistemic and dialogic rhetorics. A focus on the place of the passions and emotional appeal in Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (POR) brings his achievement more clearly into view. The “sentiments, passions, dispositions,” three key terms in Campbell's definition of the “grand art of communication,” are an index to his consideration of non‐rational response, a consideration informed by a discussion of “the passions” in the moral psychology of the period and that culminates in Book II of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. What emerges when POR is seen from this perspective has significance for our understanding of the relationship between reason and passion in persuasion and for our appreciation of POR, which is arguably the most coherent conception of rhetoric that we have.     

The Procedural Queer: Substantive Due Process,Lawrence v. Texas,and Queer Rhetorical Futures

This essay discusses Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's choice to foreground arguments from due process rather than equal protection in the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. Kennedy's choice can realize constitutional legal doctrine that is more consistent with radical queer politics than arguments from equal protection. Unlike some recent critiques of Kennedy's opinion, a queer rhetorical analysis of Lawrence reveals a futuristic, always-open-to-change vision in Kennedy's rhetorical framing of constitutional law that is significantly less damaging to possibilities for “queer world making” in the United States than other contemporary US judicial arguments of and about sexuality.     

Religion,Sexual Orientation,and School Policy: How the Christian Right Frames Its Arguments

The Christian Right opposes the inclusion of sexual orientation in school policies, charging that the schools are legitimating and promoting homosexuality. The arguments have moved past the trite, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” to claims of violations of parental rights and the First Amendment, often positioning Christians as the ones who are now being discriminated against. The purpose of this study is to examine if opponents frame their arguments using language that's agreeable to the larger and more liberal public to garner more broad based support; if so, what are some examples; and to see if opponents' arguments are aligned with a Christian Right worldview. The findings of this ethnographic case study focus on the Christian Right's perceived threat to its hegemony over American social life and highlight the debate over the purposes of schooling.     

Women's issues,women's place: Gender‐related problems in presidential campaigns

This essay is a feminist rhetorical analysis of recurring gender‐related problems in presidential campaigns, focusing particularly on the 1992 campaign. I examine 39 speeches from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions (1972–1992) for discussion of women's issues, women's roles, and men's roles, and conclude that the anti‐feminist “backlash”; of the 1980s has taken a serious toll on public attention to women's issues. When politicians spoke of women's concerns, they largely ignored actual issues, and instead focused their attention on women's roles in society. Men's roles were also a central focus, as each presidential candidate sought to convince the voting public to cast him as the Leading Man.     

Shaking Religious Education: A New Look At The Literature

This article offers an analysis of religious education practice through the literature that informs it. It engages Derrida's critique of the “metaphysics of presence” (1982a) to develop a theoretical framework for a new look at the ways in which different approaches to religious education represent religion and racial difference. The article specifically examines literature that has impacted mainstream Christian and “secular” religious education in South Australia from the 1970s until today. The article concludes by proposing a new approach to racial, cultural, and religious difference in religious education—one that begins to understand religious education's engagement with Others in terms of ethical questions, deliberation, and a radical openness to what is unforeseeable. It argues for the need for religious educators to begin to actively and deliberatively engage with “who” and “what” has traditionally been absent from multireligious approaches to religious education.     

Toward an Ethical Rhetoric of the Digital Scientific Image: Learning From the Era When Science Met Photoshop

Over the past two decades, scientific editors have attempted to correct “mistaken” assumptions about scientific images and to curb unethical image-manipulation practices. Reactions to the advent and abuse of image-adjustment software (such as Adobe Photoshop) reveal the complex relations among visual representations, scientific credibility, and epistemic rhetoric. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's model of argumentation provides a flexible system for understanding these relations and for teaching students to use scientific images ethically and effectively.     

Legitimizing the Wound: Mapping the Military's Diagnostic Discourse of Traumatic Brain Injury

Following reports spanning from the beginning of the OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) and OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) conflicts to the early 2010s, this rhetorical investigation analyzes the U.S. military's diagnostic practices used to identify mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in blast-affected troops. Considering the notion of “wound/injury” as a possible boundary object, this paper discusses how the conceptual framing of “invisible” injuries may produce interruptions of distrust that inhibit effective diagnosis.     

Spiritual Education in Islamic Tradition: Revisiting Ghazali’s “Deliverance”

Any religion has three aspects: moral–ritual orders, metaphysical–cosmological beliefs, and the feelings that are the foundations of “religious experience”; focusing on any of these particular aspects results in a different approach toward the concept of “religion” and “religious education.” This study will examine Ghazali’s version of Sufism as a significant way of spirituality in Islam. He thought that mystical vision was the sublime ideal of Islam and education. But he redefined the other two aspects in line with achieving religious experience. Thus, he achieved a special interpretation of spiritual education that could be called negative education.     

From Autonomy to Divinity: The Cultural Socialization of Moral Reasoning in an Evangelical Christian Community

This study examined moral reasoning in parent–child conversations within a U.S. evangelical Christian community. The goal was to identify social‐communicative processes that may promote the development of Divinity in children's moral reasoning. Sixteen parent–child dyads (6–9 years old) discussed hypothetical moral vignettes about failures to help peers in need. Analyses revealed that Divinity typically co‐occurred with Autonomy in these conversations and that such co‐occurrences typically happened through three distinct social‐communicative processes, labeled “align,” “scaffold,” and “counter.” Findings are used to explain the shifting priority of Autonomy and Divinity over the life course among members of evangelical Christian faiths that previous research has documented. More broadly, findings highlight socialization processes through which children can rationalize their developing moral outlooks in culturally distinct ways.