Religious Dialectics of Pain and Imagination

By Bradford T. Stull

Subjects: Comparative Religion
Series: SUNY series in Rhetoric and Theology
Paperback : 9780791420829, 196 pages, September 1994
Hardcover : 9780791420812, 196 pages, October 1994

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

1. The Way to Proceed

Rhetoric
Postmodern versus Liberationists
Pain
Imagination
The Religious
Burke, Merton, Freire, Romero

2. Burke's Beloved Cynosure and Sinecure

The Ambiguity of History
The Plurality of Language
Imagination
Pain
The Religious

3. 'Poetic Rhetoric and Baffling Illogic': Merton's The Geography of Lograire

The Plurality of Language
The Ambiguity of History
Pain
Imagination

4. Zoon Phonanta: Freire's New Human

Pain
Imagination
Language and History

5. Romero's Pastoral Letters: 'Goodtidings to Those Who Suffer'

Pain
Imagination
Language, History, Liberation

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Description

This book explores the possibility of a "liberatory postmodern rhetoric" or, alternatively, a "postmodern liberation rhetoric. " The author turns to one of the most ancient disciplines, rhetoric, in order to address a most contemporary concern: how can humans imagine new and better worlds when surrounded by unspeakable pain?

After a foray into key terms—rhetoric, postmodern, liberation, pain, imagination, religion—the author places into conversation the theory and practice of four contemporary rhetoricians, two postmoderns, Kenneth Burke and Thomas Merton, and two liberationists, Paulo Freire of Brazil and Oscar Romero of El Salvador.

Bradford T. Stull is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University-East.

Reviews

"There are many things I like about this book. First, and above all, it is concerned with how to be a responsible human being in the contemporary world, and the author's voice is appropriate to that concern: honest, intelligent, compassionate. Second, the book, ambitiously, aims to bring into dialogue two of the most powerful groups of theory on the scene at present. This is to tackle two major questions of pressing concern to many: on the one hand, can or does postructuralist theory have an ethic; on the other, how limiting is the particularity on which liberationist theories are based. Third, I like the author's choice of rhetoric and dialectic as a way to stage this confrontation and to address the ethical questions that concern him. " — Lynn Poland, Davidson College