This study shows how the rhetorical form of the jeremiad emerges in academic writing produced by one evangelical Christian student. Recognizing the jeremiad in student writing can help compositionists and literature instructors better understand the rhetorical choices of such students and help them leverage the jeremiad’s resources for rhetorical ends.

Composition studies has accepted a reductive view of dogma as an acritical commitment to received knowledge that precludes inquiry. As a result, composition gives short shrift to the role that basic beliefs play in any act of inquiry. But certain forms of humble dogma can and do serve as essential starting places for asking questions—even for skepticism and doubt. The writings of St. Augustine and Lesslie Newbigin exemplify such approaches to dogma and offer rhetorical educators a new terministic screen through which to value the role that beliefs play in inquiry.

This essay considers how a male evangelical Christian in a first-year writing (FYW) course at a state university negotiates his identity in his academic writing for a non-Christian audience. It focuses on how “Austin” casuistically stretches a biblical text to accommodate his audience’s pluralistic perspective. Austin’s writing thus provides a discursive window into how writing academically for an FYW course might nudge students from dualism toward pluralism. It thus prompts compositionists not only to interrogate how writing academically may implicate students’ most deeply held beliefs, but also to make such identity consequences explicit to students.

In recent years, scholars in rhetoric and composition studies have given increased attention to the various ways that rhetoric and religion intersect. To explore this relationship further, this article employs Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad and the methods of pentadic analysis proposed by Floyd Anderson and Lawrence Prelli in order to analyze two texts, Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourseand Obama's “Pentecost 2006 Keynote Address.” In our analysis, we aim to reveal the motives locked within Crowley's and Obama's texts to demonstrate how their attempts to open the universe of discourse—that is, to provide ways of bridging the divide between political liberals and religious conservatives—shut down the possibility for dialogue. We then offer counterstatements—what Anderson and Prelli refer to as “expressions of alternative orientations toward social reality” (90)—that may serve to open the universe of discourse.