Rhetoric, Religion, and Tragic Violence

Rhetorical artifacts, including religious speeches by Sojourner Truth, Joseph Biden, Harvey Milk, Tony Kushner, Pope Francis, Barak Obama, Julius Streicher, Josef Schuster, and Jefferson Sessions are analyzed, from rhetorical approaches, as responses to policies, laws and historic events with their basis in sacred and rancorous religion rhetoric.

Sacred words often provide succor, summoned to comfort individual victims and entire communities ravaged by acts of violence. History also demonstrates, however, that religious discourse, like rhetoric itself, functions as a pharmakonboth a remedy and a poison. Religious discourse evoked to incite or justify violence functions as a kind of rancor or intense partisan anger that distorts reality, exacerbates harm, and eschews the accountability of its perpetrators. Moreover, a third function of religious rhetoric synthesizes sacred succor and rancor to express the productive tension of righteous indignation employed by speakers to decry violence and demand social justice.

This compendium of both historic and contemporary speeches on the intersecting themes of religion, rhetoric, and violence endeavors to complicate the rhetoric/violence binary by interpolating religion (another foundational and cultural belief inextricably entangled with both rhetoric and violence) into the dialectic.

Autorentext

Christopher J. Oldenburg is Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and Chair of the Communication Arts Department at Illinois College. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Pope Francis: Critical Mercy and Conversion for the Twenty-First Century(Lexington Books, 2018) Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award 2019.

Adrienne E. Hacker Daniels is the A. Boyd Pixley Professor of Humanities and Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Illinois College. She is editor of the volume, Communication and the Global Landscape of Faith(2016). Her second edited volume, Casting the Art of Rhetoric with Theatre and Drama: Taking Center Stageis forthcoming 2024.

Inhalt

Foreword List of Rhetors Introduction Race, Gender, and Violence Part 1: Joseph Biden, "100th Anniversary of Tulsa Race Massacre", 2021 Part 2: Sojourner Truth, "Address at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio", 1851 LGBTQ and Violence Part 1: "Harvey Milk vs. John Briggs" Televised debate transcription, 1978 Part 2: Tony Kushner, "Matthew's Passion", 1998 Geopolitics, Violence, and Remembrance: "Interfaith Meeting with Pope Francis at September 11 Memorial and Museum", 2015 Education and Violence: Barack Obama and Interfaith Speakers, "Interfaith Prayer Vigil Address at Newtown High School," 2012 Religion and Violence Part 1: Julius Streicher, "The Night of Broken Glass", 1938 Part 2: Josef Schuster, "80th Anniversary of Reichspogromnacht", 2018 Borders/Immigration and Violence Part 1: Jefferson Sessions, "Zero Tolerance Policy Speech", June 2018 Part 2: Pope Francis, "Homily of His Holiness Pope Francis at Ciudad Juárez Fair Grounds" Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. February 17, 2016 Afterword Notes.