Review Essay: “Intelligence Illuminated by Love”: Faith, Learning, and the Stakes of Doing Rhetorical Scholarship

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Notes

1. Martin J. Medhurst, “Introduction,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 446.

2. Martin J. Medhurst, 447.

3. Stanley Fish, “All in the Game: One University, Under God?” The Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no. 18 (January 7, 2005) C1.

4. Readers also may recall the special issue of the Journal of Communication and Religion (March 2004) entitled “Religion and Scholarship: A Pluralistic Conversation.” The volume featured pieces by Professor Medhurst, Em Griffin, and Julia Wood, among other communication scholars.

5. Stanley Fish, C1.

6. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5.

7. Quoted in Marsden, 433.

8. See especially Romans 14:1–15:3.

9. George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–4.

10. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 219.

11. Stephen L. Carter, God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 187.

12. Quoted in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Erdmans Publishing Co., 1994), 26.

13. See especially Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 190.

14. The body practices to which Griffith alludes have received recent provocative treatments in very different scholarly contexts. See, for example, Kristen Pool's Racial Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Kazim Sheikh, “Medical Issues and Ramadan,” Journal of American Medical Association 295, no. 5 (February 1, 2006): 498. I am indebted to Kirt Wilson for pointing out these studies and the longer conversation in which they participate.

15. Also see McCarraher.

16. The term “thinking activists” is Chappell's, who offers that these

• intellectuals, including nonformally educated ones like Fannie Lou Hamer, … are keys to retrospective understanding. They talk more on the record, they tend to preserve their own observations, and they have an occupational interest in being more precise and thorough than their fellows about whatever afflicts them. (191)

17. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 3.

18. I borrow this phrase with grateful acknowledgement to the Reverend Mark R. Orten, Director of Religious Life and Chaplain of Denison University. It is taken from his “Welcome Remarks” for the Denison University Convocation in Celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 25, 2004). Readers seeking a “potent” example are encouraged to consult A Season of Discernment: The Final Report of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church (Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.: 2006).

19. James F. Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 208. I have no knowledge whatever of Professor Darsey's faith convictions. I think his desire to grapple with that which falls outside the bounds of strict empiricism is admirable, and his work on the prophetic tradition magisterial. The accolades heaped upon the book might suggest that a good many of his colleagues feel as I do.

20. Quoted in McCarraher, 190.