Full Description
Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse seeks to address the current gap in American public discourse between secular liberals and religiously committed citizens by focusing on the academic and public writing of millennial evangelical Christian students. Analysis of such writing reveals that the evangelical Christian faith of contemporary college students—and the rhetorical practice motivated by it—is marked by an openness to social context and pluralism that offers possibilities for civil discourse. Based on case studies of evangelical Christian student writers, contextualized within nationally-representative trends as reported by the National Study of Youth and Religion, and grounded in scholarship from rhetorical theory, composition studies, folklore studies, and sociology of religion, this book offers rhetorical educators a new terministic screen that reveals the complex processes at work within our students' vernacular constructions of religious faith.
Contents
1. From Problem to Possibility: Evangelical Christian Students, Composition Studies, and Civil Discourse 2. Vernacular Religious Creativity: Lived Religion and Evangelical Christianity 3. Creating Deliberative Conversation: Toward Inventional Creativity 4. Effective Witness, Faithful Witness: Austin, Casuistic Stretching, and the Desire for Legitimacy 5. The Problem and Possibility of Ethos: Articulating Faith in Kimberly's Schooled Writing 6. Changing the Way We Speak: Eloise, Inclusion, and Constitutive Rhetoric 7. Coming to Terms: Toward a Pedagogy of Values Articulation Appendix A: Methodology Appendix B: The National Study of Youth and Religion as Context
