Speakers themselves within a speech sometimes suggest standards by which a rhetorical critic might at least partially evaluate that speech. In his speech, “Who is Tampering with the Soul of America?”, Jenkin Lloyd Jones suggests a cluster of images, a set of related rhetorical roles, that a critic usefully can employ to analyze the workings of this speech. Through direct statement and indirectly through word choice, Jones assumes the rhetorical roles of a “calamity howler” and an evangelist in the genre of a secular jeremiad. First the tradition of the American Puritan jeremiad and the characteristics of the contemporary secular jeremiad are traced. Then Jones's speech is analyzed as a “paradigm case” to further illuminate the nature of the contemporary secular jeremiad. Significant dimensions examined are: (1) internal and external evidence of Jones's self‐chosen role of Jeremiah, evangelist, and calamity howler; (2) invocation of the Puritan heritage and the American Dream; (3) value appeals and condemn...

The Media Gospel

The jeremiad and Jenkin Lloyd Jones

The number of religious congregations with Web sites nearly tripled from 1998–2006, and each year another 10,000 congregations launch a Web site (Chaves & Anderson, 2008). Couple this with the fact that 79% of attendees are now in a congregation with a Web site. Scholars of media and religion know very little, however, about the content of these Web sites or what they tell us about the culture of different religious groups. The aim of this article, therefore, is to examine how congregations are constructing Web sites to advertise their identity, organize their followers to get involved in civic and political issues, and provide an interactive space for online participation in actual ministries. Extensive qualitative data were gathered from 600 individual congregation Web sites from nine denominations in 53 different cities across the United States. The results of the descriptive analysis of these data suggest that there is a strong correlation between the “off-line” characteristics of a particular congreg...

background

The Divine Online: Civic Organizing, Identity Building, and Internet Fluency Among Different Religious Groups

The report of the Unesco International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (MacBride Commission) is described as ambiguous but useful. It acknowledges the emergence of “information societies” ‐ nations like the United States where a majority of the workforce is employed in information‐related activities rather than agriculture or industry ‐ but does not link information economies to Western dominance of international communication. The rapid development of second‐generation television systems in the United States, which combine satellite and cable distribution, affords new opportunities for a balanced exchange of TV programming. But as long as a few Western countries dominate in the production of new knowledge, a “free and balanced flow” of communications among the nations of the world as called for by the MacBride Commission is considered unlikely. Current efforts to improve third world communications structures ‐ notably the new International Program for the Development of Commun...

The Media Gospel

Citations

The jeremiad and Jenkin Lloyd Jones

The Divine Online: Civic Organizing, Identity Building, and Internet Fluency Among Different Religious Groups

The MacBride commission report reconsidered

Falwell and fantasy: the rhetoric of a religious and political movement

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