Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry

Description

This exceptional collection of writings offers for the first time a discussion among leading thinkers about the points at which rhetoric and religion illuminate and challenge each other. The contributors to the volume are eminent theorists and critics in rhetoric, theology, and religion, and they address a variety of problems and periods. Together these writings shed light on religion as a human quest and rhetoric as the origin and sustainer of that quest. They show that when pursued with intelligence and sensitivity, rhetorical approaches to religion are capable of revitalizing both language and experience. Rhetorical figures, for example, constitute forms of language that say what cannot be said in any other way, and that move individuals toward religious truths that cannot be known in any other way. When firmly placed within religious, social, and literary history, the convergence of rhetoric and religion brings into focus crucial issues in several fields—including philosophy, psychology, history, and art—and interprets relations among self, language, and world that are central to both past and present cultures. Contents Introduction Part I. Coming to Faith in Rhetoric I. The Word as History: Sacred and Profane 2. Kenneth Burke's Religious Rhetoric: "God-Terms" and the Ontological Proof Appendix 3. The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric 4. Invention, Emotion, and Conversion in Augustine's Confessions 5. Rhetorical Theology: Charity Seeking Charity 6. Rhetoric, Conscience, and the Claim of Religion Part II. Speaking of God 7. Erasmus: Rhetorical Theologian 8 Naming God 9. Prophetic Rhetoric and Mystical Rhetoric 10. Apophatic Analogy: On the Language of Mystical Unknowing and Being-Toward-Death, Part III. The Rhetoric of Excess, Difference, and the Sublime 11. Machiavellian Rhetoric in Paradise Lost 12. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Idolatry in the Writings of Emmanuel Levinas 13. Theological Reflections on the Hyperbolic Imagination Part IV. Rhetoric and Community 14. Koinonia and the Friendship Between Rhetoric and Religion 15. Picturing God: The Rhetoric of Religious Images and Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul 16. The Rhetoric of Philosemitism 17. Performing Faith: The Peaceable Rhetoric of God's Church Contributors Acknowledgment3s Index