Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives

Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives. Edited by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmstead. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. v + 425 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

"Perhaps not since the Rennaissance... have students of rhetoric and religion had so much to say to one another." This is an accurate introductory sentence to an ambitious collection of essays on rhetorical themes in religious discourse, edited by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmstead. Done as a follow-up to an earlier collection edited by Jost and Michael Hyde, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in our Time (Yale University Press, 1997), this volume stands on its own as a timely picture of where we are in the post-War rapprochement between rhetorical and religious studies. Anyone wanting a sense of either the broad methodological coherence of this rapprochement or its sometimes bewildering thematic complexity will find resource here. It will prove as helpful an introductory text for upper level academic work as it will an engaging resource to dip in and out of for interested scholars or engaged preachers.

Seven of the seventeen essays are reprints, including one from Walter Ong's The Presence of the Word (1967), a 1979 essay by Paul Ricoeur on "limit-expressions" in polyphonic biblical rhetoric, and essays from David Tracy, Margorie O'Rourke Boyle, Manfred Hoffmann, and Victoria Kahn. Set alongside the new essays, these pieces reveal new depths.

The title, Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, identifies the coherence around which the chapters are gathered. First, by locating rhetoric within the storehouse of means by which good reasons coalesce with affective appeal, rather than in a specific normative method, the editors welcome a variety of approaches without allowing anything and everything to count. Moreover, by underlining that religion at least includes contingent forms of exploration into ideas as well as discourse meant to interpret the implications of that exploration, the editors show how the study of religion is invariably a rhetorical study. The book avoids essays applying specific methods to texts, such as Aristotelian, Burkean, Marxist, Feminist, or Evangelical interpretations of religious or secular rhetoric. As valuable as such projects are, these essays remain in that generative zone of methodological and thematic openness framed by rhetoric as discovery and religion as a rhetorical striving. The rhetoric they enlist has no "subject matter," as such, but winds through action where symbols are recruited to persuade.

The first and fourth sections emphasize the work of topics in religious discourse. The middle two roughly take up the work of tropes. The first includes an essay by Wayne Booth on Kenneth Burke, Debora Shuger on emotion in Renaissance sacred rhetorics, Olmstead on Augustine, O'Rourke Boyle on what makes for "rhetorical theology," and Jost on rhetoric and conscience. The middle sections include essays considering the hermeneutic significance, force, and limits of God-language. Hoffmann's interpretation of Erasmus is particularly engaging, as is the Ricoeur essay. So too is the essay by Tracy on the prophetic and the mystical impulse and Thomas Carlson's analogical correlation of Heideggerian finitude and Dionysian desire (though Levinas might have served better than Heidegger). Kahn explores the Machiavellian impulse in Dante, Susan Shapiro considers Levinas, and Stephen Webb makes an enticing apologia for hyperbole. In the final section, Kathy Eden looks at friendship, Stephen Happel at artistic images, and Mark Krupnick at the rhetorical roots of American philosemitism. The book concludes with an insightful essay by James Fodor and Stanley Hauerwas recruiting performance theory to describe rhetorical invention in faithful living.

I miss greater contribution from scholars in communication studies. I also miss deconstructive approaches. And I look forward to seeing Islam and other religions appear in work to come. But there is enormous value in the essays here. "The gift of godly speech," as Fodor and Hauerwas put it, "is bequeathed freely and gratuitously, to be sure, but this does not preclude effort and regular practice and constant rehearsal on the part of the recipients of that gift" (p. 395). This volume is good practice, indeed.

WES AVRAM

Yale University Divinity School

New Haven, Connecticut

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved