Kairos as God's Time in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Last Sunday Sermon

Richard Benjamin Crosby Schlumberger (Ireland)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to advance the discussion of kairos by developing it as a theory of divine timing. While some critics have noted kairos' potential for understanding “God's time,” we lack a grounding of this interpretation in the close analysis of religious texts. This paper does so and asserts that kairos can be understood not only as a hermeneutic for considering temporal constraints, but also as a theory for the production of revelatory discourse and its political implications. Ultimately, the article tries to enrich our comprehension of kairos (a figure we thought we had understood) by examining an unknown text from Martin Luther King Jr. (an orator we thought we had read) as a foray into an area of our discipline that we have neglected to develop: the rhetoric of revelation.

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
2009-07-01
DOI
10.1080/02773940902991411
Open Access
Closed
Topics

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (6)

  1. Rhetoric & Public Affairs
  2. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  3. Computers and Composition
  4. Philosophy & Rhetoric
  5. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Show all 6 →
  1. Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Cites in this index (5)

  1. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Rhetoric Review
  3. Written Communication
  4. College English
  5. Rhetoric Review
Also cites 13 works outside this index ↓
  1. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology
  2. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism
  3. Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies
  4. 10.1080/10417949109372839
  5. 10.1080/08934218809367458
  6. 10.1080/00335638609383783
    Quarterly Journal of Speech  
  7. 10.1353/rap.2004.0026
  8. 10.1086/447812
  9. 10.1353/rap.2004.0028
  10. 10.2307/284129
  11. Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis
  12. 10.1080/00335639209383999
  13. 10.1111/j.1467-9795.2006.00258.x
CrossRef global citation count: 8 View in citation network →