This exceptional collection of writings offers for the first time a discussion among leading thinkers about the points at which rhetoric and religion illuminate and challenge each other. The contributors to the volume are eminent theorists and critics in rhetoric, theology, and religion, and they address a variety of problems and periods.

Together these writings shed light on religion as a human quest and rhetoric as the origin and sustainer of that quest. They show that when pursued with intelligence and sensitivity, rhetorical approaches to religion are capable of revitalizing both language and experience. Rhetorical figures, for example, constitute forms of language that say what cannot be said in any other way, and that move individuals toward religious truths that cannot be known in any other way. When firmly placed within religious, social, and literary history, the convergence of rhetoric and religion brings into focus crucial issues in several fields-including philosophy, psychology, history, and art-and interprets relations among self, language, and world that are central to both past and present cultures.

About the Author
Walter Jost is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia. Wendy Olmsted is associate professor, Humanities Division, Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World and the College, University of Chicago. Jost coedited, and both he and Olmsted contributed to, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, published by Yale University Press.



Book Information
ISBN 9780300080575
Author Walter Jost
Format Paperback
Page Count 432
Imprint Yale University Press
Publisher Yale University Press
Weight(grams) 630g