Spiritual Modalities

Spiritual Modalities shows what rhetoric has to offer the conversations about prayerits emphasis on situatedness, with its insistence (and Burke's insistence especially) on seeing language as inseparable from bodies, attitudes, values, contexts, and culture. William FitzGerald captures that additive quality and stands to lure scholars from other fields into rhetoric. Debra Hawhee,Pennsylvania State University This is a profoundly useful book. Spiritual Modalities not only explores in depth the rhetorical power of prayer; it also provides abundant critical and theoretical resources for the further study of this ancient yet still contemporary speech-act genre. Creatively employing Kenneth Burkes dramatism as an interpretive lens, this systematic, postsecular analysis skillfully reveals prayer as a cognitive scene of address, a material act of invocation, and a social attitude of reverence. Spiritual Modalities is a significant contribution to the ongoing religious turn in rhetorical studies and the human sciences more generally. Steven Mailloux,Presidents Professor of Rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University William FitzGeralds Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance is a clarion call: a call for scholars of communication to re-engage research on prayer. In an age made more anxious by its own technologies, Spiritual Modalities asks why humans across cultures and times have enacted this enigmatic but fundamentally human behavior. What motivates us to address the sacred, and what do we expect from it? Relentlessly intellectual, Spiritual Modalities is one of the most important, sustained, and theoretically sophisticated engagements of religious rhetoric since Kenneth Burkes Rhetoric of Religion. Robert Glenn Howard,author of Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet

William FitzGerald is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Prayer: The Rediscovered Country 1 Prayer and Its Situations: Meditation on Kairos and Krisis 2 Hear Us, O Lord: Audience and Address in Communicating with the Divine 3 Invocations of Spirit: Prayer as Speech Act 4 The Dance of Attitude: Prayer as the Performance of Reverence 5 Performing the Memorare: Prayer as a Rhetorical Art of Memory 6 Bodies and Spirits in Virtual Motion: Prayer and Delivery in Cyberspace Conclusion: Does Rhetoric Have a Prayer? Notes Works Cited Index