Spiritual Modalities

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Prayer: The Rediscovered Country

1 Prayer and Its Situations: Meditation on Kairos and Krisis

2 “Hear Us, O Lord”: Audience and Address in Communicating with the Divine

3 Invocations of Spirit: Prayer as Speech Act

4 The Dance of Attitude: Prayer as the Performance of Reverence

5 Performing the Memorare: Prayer as a Rhetorical Art of Memory

6 Bodies and Spirits in Virtual Motion: Prayer and Delivery in Cyberspace

Conclusion: Does Rhetoric Have a Prayer?

Notes

Works Cited

Index

“William FitzGerald’s Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance is a clarion call: a call for scholars of communication to re-engage research on prayer.  In an age made more anxious by its own technologies, Spiritual Modalities asks why humans across cultures and times have enacted this enigmatic but fundamentally human behavior.  What motivates us to address the sacred, and what do we expect from it? Relentlessly intellectual, Spiritual Modalities is one of the most important, sustained, and theoretically sophisticated engagements of religious rhetoric since Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Religion.”

—Robert Glenn Howard, author of Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet