On November 2, 2016, Theresa Jarnagin Enos unexpectedly passed away at her home in Tucson, Arizona, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of work in writing, teaching, scholarly editing, (wo)mentori...

I am one of those kooks who believe that when I kneel down by my bedside at night to pray, my ill-formed, spontaneous, and largely unuttered thoughts somehow project out into the universe and into ...

In God's Politics evangelical minister Jim Wallis uses what I call “prophetic alchemy,” a strategy meant to reconcile and combine two opposing viewpoints—particularly liberal secularists and conservative Christians—into one progressive agenda for social change. Prophetic alchemy is magical thinking through argument, and as rhetorical strategy it participates in Kenneth Burke's alchemic tropes, particularly transcendence and division. In this article I review prophetic rhetoric as a genre, situate Wallis's rhetorical efforts in the timeline of the Protestant dialectic between progressive and conservative ideologies, and then analyze God's Politics as it participates in prophecy by attempting to reconcile opposing audiences through the symbolic power of prophetic alchemy.

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public deliberation effective and how we can teach students to deliberate.

In 1834 the Richmond Whig declared with alarm that “the Republic has degenerated into a Democracy” (Sean Wilentz. The Rise of American Democracy. New York: Norton, 2005. 425). What they meant was t...

Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies by Elizabeth McHenry. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xiv + 423 pp. Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing by J. Blake Scott Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. xii + 281 pp. Authority and Reform: Religious and Educational Discourses in Nineteenth‐Century New England Literature by Mark G. Vasquez. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. xxii + 393 pp.