Responding to the Sacred : : An Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric / / ed. by Kyle Jensen, Michael Bernard-Donals.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
• MitwirkendeR: Ballif, Michelle,; Bernard-Donals, Michael,; Bessette, Jean,; Conner, Trey,; Doyle, Richard,; Frank, David,; Gross, Daniel M.,; Hamilton, Kevin,; Haynes, Cynthia,; Jensen, Kyle,; Mailloux, Steven,; Martel, James R.,; Nicotra, Jodie,; O’Gorman, Ned,; Rollins, Brooke,
• HerausgeberIn: Bernard-Donals, Michael,; Jensen, Kyle,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (286 p.) :; 8 illustrations

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1. Sacred Encounters -- 1 Sacred Passages, Rhetorical Passwords -- 2 Engaging a Rhetorical God -- 3 Political Theologies of Sacred Rhetoric -- 4 How to Undo Truths with Words -- 5 Chanting the Supreme Word of Information -- Part 2. Sacred Practices -- 6 Hacking the Sacred (or Not) -- 7 Divining Rhetoric’s Future -- 8 Where Is the Nuclear Sovereign? -- 9 From the Cathedral to the Casino -- 10 Rightness in Retrospect -- 11 Historiography and the Limits of (Sacred) Rhetoric -- List of Contributors -- Index