So says William FitzGerald:
In his book, FitzGerald draws upon contributions to rhetorical theory from Kenneth Burke along with a broad range of classical and contemporary perspectives on audience, address, speech acts, and modes of performance across all religious traditions and historical eras.
He says prayer is a phenomenon of both cognitive and social memory. It is cognitive because prayer is learned through performance, including memorization, and it is social because it is handed down through textual and oral transmission as a shared resource of a spiritual community.
via Rutgers-Camden Professor Uncovers the Rhetorical Power of Prayer.
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Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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