With language we name and define all things, and by studying our
use of language, rhetoricians can provide an account of these
things and thus of our lived experience. The concept of the sacred,
however, raises the prospect of the existence of phenomena that
transcend the human and physical and cannot be expressed fully by
language. The sacred thus reveals limitations of rhetoric.
Featuring essays by some of the foremost scholars of rhetoric
working today, this wide-ranging collection of theoretical and
methodological studies takes seriously the possibility of the
sacred and the challenge it poses to rhetorical inquiry. The
contributors engage with religious rhetorics-Jewish, Jesuit,
Buddhist, pagan-as well as rationalist, scientific, and postmodern
rhetorics, studying, for example, divination in the Platonic
tradition, Thomas Hobbes's and Walter Benjamin's accounts of sacred
texts, the uncanny algorithms of Big Data, and Helene Cixous's
sacred passages and passwords. From these studies, new definitions
of the sacred emerge-along with new rhetorical practices for
engaging with the sacred. This book provides insight into the
relation of rhetoric and the sacred, showing the capacity of
rhetoric to study the ineffable but also shedding light on the
boundaries between them. In addition to the editors, the
contributors to this volume include Michelle Ballif, Jean Bessette,
Trey Conner, Richard Doyle, David Frank, Daniel M. Gross, Kevin
Hamilton, Cynthia Haynes, Steven Mailloux, James R. Martel, Jodie
Nicotra, Ned O'Gorman, and Brooke Rollins.
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