Responding to the Sacred: An Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric

Published by Penn State University Press 2021

Responding to the Sacred

An Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric

Edited by: Michael Bernard-Donals and Kyle Jensen

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271089737

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 to 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.

Author / Editor information

Bernard-Donals Michael :

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.

Reviews

“Responding to the Sacred provides a capacious and prismatic view of communicating that which is not fully communicable, and in doing so, it ventures to rhetoric’s very edges—and beyond.”
—Debra Hawhee, author of Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Taking Rhetoric to Its Limits; or, How to Respond to a Sacred Call Michael Bernard-Donals and Kyle Jensen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part 1. Sacred Encounters
1 Sacred Passages, Rhetorical Passwords Cynthia Haynes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2 Engaging a Rhetorical God Developing the Capacities of Mercy and Justice David Frank Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
3 Political Theologies of Sacred Rhetoric Steven Mailloux Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
4 How to Undo Truths with Words Reading Texts Both Sacred and Profane in Hobbes and Benjamin James R. Martel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
5 Chanting the Supreme Word of Information “Sacred?! Redundant?!” Richard Doyle and Trey Conner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	119
Part 2. Sacred Practices
6 Hacking the Sacred (or Not) Rhetorical Attunements for Ecodelic Imbrication Jodie Nicotra Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
7 Divining Rhetoric’s Future Michelle Ballif Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
8 Where Is the Nuclear Sovereign? Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
9 From the Cathedral to the Casino The Wager as a Response to the Sacred Brooke Rollins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
10 Rightness in Retrospect Stonewall and the Sacred Call of Kairos Jean Bessette Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	214
11 Historiography and the Limits of (Sacred) Rhetoric Daniel M. Gross Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	236
List of Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 286
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 8
- Images: 8
- Other: 8 illustrations
Keywords: Rhetoric; Religion; Sacred; Ritual

eBook

Published: June 2, 2021
ISBN: 9780271089737