The author proposes three ways that engagement with religious rhetorics in undergraduate writing courses might enable teachers of rhetoric to cultivate writers’ civic capacities. To give readers a sense of what courses on religious rhetorics that aim to improve writers’ civic capacities look like in practice, DePalma discusses three undergraduate writing courses recently taught in different kinds of institutional settings and the kinds of learning that occurred as a result of students’ engagement with religious rhetorics in those courses.

This qualitative study examines how writers perceive the mobilization and adaptation of their print-based writing knowledge and multiple literacies when remediating written essays into digital stories. It also outlines a pedagogical tool that can help writers reflect on what they might transfer as they compose across media.

This archival study examines the rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy of Austin Phelps, an accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. In disclosing Phelps's contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy at the first graduate seminary in the United States, this article highlights the ways that Phelps's melding of American transcendentalist thought and Christian orthodoxy enabled him to adapt nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy in important ways. By demonstrating the extent to which Phelps's discussions of practical rhetorical wisdom and experiential preaching complicate documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the nineteenth century, this research aims to bring out a layer of the curriculum that other histories of writing instruction during the nineteenth century have not thoroughly investigated.

In this essay, I offer William James’s notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think about the relationship between academic discourse and religious discourse. And the second adjustment relates to the stances we adopt when responding to religious students’ texts. Along with outlining these adjustments, I illustrate the ways James’s framework productively informed my response to a faith-based narrative that an evangelical student wrote in one of my first-year writing courses.

This paper highlights the largely unacknowledged theoretical and pedagogical contributions of Austin Phelps, the accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and teacher of rhetoric, in two ways: First, it demonstrates that Phelps's methods of instruction depart from the documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the mid-nineteenth century in that he endeavors to teach the sermon as a form of civic engagement. Second, it shows how Phelps's discussions of the unconscious in the process of composing and his insights into the role of emotion in the writing process anticipate aspects of the process movement in Composition Studies.

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.