This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The current definition of post-truth creates an adversarial relationship with rhetorical theory, relying on a positivist stance toward epistemology. Additionally, the most public-facing scholarship concerning post-truth tends to view knowledge in rather concrete ways, failing to account for the nuance of differing types of knowledge and rhetorical situations. As a result, most of the pragmatic approaches to dealing with disingenuous post-truth rhetorical tactics are predicated on positivism (e.g., fact-checking) and post-truth gets either downplayed or only treated theoretically in rhetorical scholarship. This article redefines post-truth in a manner more amendable to rhetorical theory and presents a heuristic predicated on stasis theory as a method for evaluating the epistemic certainty of rhetorical claims. The heuristic is then used to analyze an exchange from an episode of the podcast Armchair Expert to demonstrate how rhetorical discourse can become unproductive and adversarial when interlocutors claim an inappropriate amount of epistemic certainty, in particular by treating value-based claims as facts. Discussions of the post-truth dilemma need to extend beyond the confines of the current definition to include all discursive practices that ascribe the wrong amount of epistemic certainty to particular claims, not just practices that challenge established knowledge and facts.

How do we move forward when the legality of teaching and learning about social justice research is called into question by the state? This article demonstrates the efficacy of collaboration as a form of institutional critique that made it possible to provide a comprehensive graduate education following the emergence of anti-DEI legislation in Florida. To teach and learn in a tumultuous legal landscape without sacrificing rigor, eliding DEI-oriented scholarship, or violating state law, we piloted a collaborative disciplinary meta-analysis project that enabled students to study social justice research along with the field’s other major research topics. This portable approach allowed us to meet the professional and ethical imperative to engage research that has been targeted by state officials but remains foundational for disciplinary expertise. It also demonstrates the futility of removing politically unfavorable scholarship from curricula. After sharing an overview of the results of our meta-analysis project, with a special focus on our field’s take on social justice and collaboration, we reflect on the rhetorical strategies those of us working in highly politicized educational climates have deployed to manage increased oversight from zealous state legislatures challenging the legitimacy of disciplinary expertise.

From fundamentalist views that wish to ban the books for their use of magic, to perspectives that the books are a modern-day expression of good Christianity, controversy around the rhetorical implications of faith in Harry Potter has become critical to the culture of the book. With its focus on these questions of religious rhetoric in Rowling’s texts, this article centers specifically on the theological thread that runs through C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Harry Potter series. Lewis’s deeply embedded use of the trilemma “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” — the question that haunts Narnia as Edmund plays the Judas to Aslan’s existence and resurrection — also winds its way through the unfolding plot of the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s narrative, however, takes its own rhetorical path. Defying and confusing traditionally stark boundaries between good and evil, mortal and immortal, Harry Potter is not the tidy story of clear ideological divisions. Rather, Rowling’s use of Lewis’s trilemma serves to complicate and illustrate the dialectic of faith and doubt, as well as the moral complexities of “good” and “evil,” in order to address an audience not necessarily Christian, but decidedly human.