With language we name and define all things, and by studying our use of language, rhetoricians can provide an account of these things and thus of our lived experience. The concept of the sacred, however, raises the prospect of the existence of phenomena that transcend the human and physical and cannot be expressed fully by language. The sacred thus reveals limitations of rhetoric.
Featuring essays by some of the foremost scholars of rhetoric working today, this wide-ranging collection of theoretical and methodological studies takes seriously the possibility of the sacred and the challenge it poses to rhetorical inquiry. The contributors engage with religious rhetorics—Jewish, Jesuit, Buddhist, pagan—as well as rationalist, scientific, and postmodern rhetorics, studying, for example, divination in the Platonic tradition, Thomas Hobbes’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of sacred texts, the uncanny algorithms of Big Data, and Hélène Cixous’s sacred passages and passwords. From these studies, new definitions of the sacred emerge—along with new rhetorical practices for engaging with the sacred.
This book provides insight into the relation of rhetoric and the sacred, showing the capacity of rhetoric to study the ineffable but also shedding light on the boundaries between them.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Michelle Ballif, Jean Bessette, Trey Conner, Richard Doyle, David Frank, Daniel M. Gross, Kevin Hamilton, Cynthia Haynes, Steven Mailloux, James R. Martel, Jodie Nicotra, Ned O’Gorman, and Brooke Rollins.
Michael Bernard-Donals is Chaim Perelman Professor of Rhetoric and Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Focusing mainly on the relation between rhetoric and ethics, he has authored or edited ten books in the field.
Kyle Jensen is Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Reimagining Process: Online Writing Archives and the Future of Writing Studies.
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Taking Rhetoric to Its Limits; or, How to Respond to a Sacred Call
Michael Bernard-Donals and Kyle Jensen
Part 1: Sacred Encounters
Sacred Passages, Rhetorical Passwords
Cynthia Haynes
Engaging a Rhetorical God: Developing the Capacities of Mercy and Justice
David Frank
Political Theologies of Sacred Rhetoric
Steven Mailloux
How to Undo Truths with Words: Reading Texts Both Sacred and Profane in Hobbes and Benjamin
James R. Martel
Chanting the Supreme Word of Information: “Sacred?! Redundant?!”
Richard Doyle and Trey Conner
Part 2: Sacred Practices
Hacking the Sacred (or Not): Rhetorical Attunements for Ecodelic Imbrication
Jodie Nicotra
Divining Rhetoric’s Future
Michelle Ballif
Where Is the Nuclear Sovereign?
Ned O’Gorman with Kevin Hamilton
From the Cathedral to the Casino: The Wager as a Response to the Sacred
Brooke Rollins
Rightness in Retrospect: Stonewall and the Sacred Call of Kairos
Jean Bessette
Historiography and the Limits of (Sacred) Rhetoric
Daniel M. Gross
List of Contributors
Index
Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction
