Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary

Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary
Author: Emily Murphy Cope
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2024-02-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100385446X

Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary addresses the question of how Christian undergraduates engage in academic writing and how best to teach them to participate in academic inquiry and prepare them for civic engagement. Exploring how the secular both constrains and supports undergraduates’ academic writing, the book pays special attention to how it shapes younger evangelicals’ social identities, perceptions of academic genres, and rhetorical practices. The author draws on qualitative interviews with evangelical undergraduates at a public university and qualitative document analysis of their writing for college, grounded in scholarship from social theory, writing studies, sociology of religion, rhetorical theory, and social psychology, to describe the multiple ways these evangelicals participate in the secular imaginary that is the public university through their academic writing. The conception of a “secular imaginary” provides an explanatory framework for examining the lived experiences and academic writing of religious students in American institutions of higher education. By examining the power of the secular imaginary on academic writers, this book offers rhetorical educators a more complex vocabulary that makes visible the complex social forces shaping our students’ experiences with writing. This book will be of interest not just to scholars and educators in the area of rhetoric, writing studies and communication but also those working on religious studies, Christian discourse and sociology of religion.

Interior States

Interior States
Author: Meghan O'Gieblyn
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0385543840

Winner of The Believer Book Award for Nonfiction "Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection." --Lorrie Moore A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere. What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country." She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still," and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture ("Hell"), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design ("Species of Origin"), the paradoxes of Christian Rock ("Sniffing Glue"), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages ("Midwest World"), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity ("Ghosts in the Cloud"). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.

Children as Rhetorical Advocates in Social Movements

Children as Rhetorical Advocates in Social Movements
Author: Luke Winslow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2024-03-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1003859216

This book examines “Rhetorical Children” as visible and vocal communicators, shaping public discourse on contentious social issues related to organized labor, civil rights, gun violence, and climate change. This book explores four key social movement case studies: the 1903 Mother Jones-led March of the Mill Children to reform child labor laws, the 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,-led Children’s Crusade to end segregation, the 2018 Parkland student-led March for Our Lives movement to end gun violence, and the ongoing struggle for climate change mitigation led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Through these case studies, the book outlines three rhetorical strategies, namely children’s ability to activate adults’ moral obligation; to invoke threats to natality and lost childhood; and to disrupt social order. It enables readers to better understand rhetorical children and the rhetorical tools required for social movements. Assessing the powerful role children play in shaping public discourse, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Communication Studies, Rhetoric, Public Address, Social Movements, and Cultural Studies.

Rhetoric and Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process

Rhetoric and Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process
Author: Mónica Reyes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2024-09-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1040193668

This book explores the U.S. asylum process and how those seeking shelter deal with the rhetorical pressures of compelling asylum narratives they need to write in order to stay. Centered around a study conducted at a shelter on the U.S. border, this book moves beyond this context to demonstrate how liminal sites provide opportunities for displaced communities to employ distinct shared rhetorical practices of daily life—like silence and routine—that both safeguard vulnerabilities and enact agency for individuals within precarious spaces. Placing people who seek asylum and those who work with them as rhetorical and socio-cultural experts on this issue, the study adds to the emerging importance of rhetoric within discussions of asylum and forced migration and demonstrates the significance of rhetorical ecology theory as part of a blended methodology in understanding people seeking asylum as a group in a perpetual and explicit state of ethos development. Highlighting the need for support which is sensitive to the narrative struggles people seeking asylum face, this book will have important findings for scholars and upper-level students of cultural rhetorics, feminist rhetoric, migration studies, political science, and intercultural communication.

Hiram Gray

Hiram Gray
Author: Jonathan Wood
Publisher:
Total Pages: 190
Release: 1915
Genre:
ISBN:

Secularism in Antebellum America

Secularism in Antebellum America
Author: John Lardas Modern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2011-11-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0226533255

Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

Heaven's Interpreters

Heaven's Interpreters
Author: Ashley Reed
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501751379

In Heaven's Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and debates, imagining new possibilities for women's individual agency and collective action. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

The God Beat

The God Beat
Author: Costica Bradatan
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506465781

In the wake of the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks we, as an increasingly secular nation, were reminded that religion is, for good and bad, still significant in the modern world. Alongside this new awareness, religion reporters adopted the tools of so-called New Journalists, reporters of the 1960s and '70s like Truman Capote and Joan Didion who inserted themselves into the stories they covered while borrowing the narrative tool kit of fiction to avail themselves of a deeper truth. At the turn of the millennium, this personal, subjective, voice-driven New Religion Journalism was employed by young writers, willing to scrutinize questions of faith and doubt while taking God-talk seriously. Articles emerged from such journalists as Kelly Baker, Ann Neumann, Patrick Blanchfield, Jeff Kripal, and Meghan O'Gieblyn, characterized by their brash, innovative, daring, and stylistically sophisticated writing and an unprecedented willingness to detail their own interaction with faith (or their lack thereof). The God Beat brings together some of the finest and most representative samples of this emerging genre. By curating and presenting them as part of a meaningful trend, this compellingly edited collection helps us understand how we talk about God in public spaces--and why it matters--in a whole new way.

If God Meant to Interfere

If God Meant to Interfere
Author: Christopher Douglas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501703528

The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.

Imagining Judeo-Christian America

Imagining Judeo-Christian America
Author: K. Healan Gaston
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2019-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 022666385X

“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.