Full Description
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 pharmakon—both 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.
Contents
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.
