Rhetoric and Religious Experience

This is a book about religious rhetoric, its cultural foundations, and its role in articulating sociocultural change and facilitating psychosocial adaptation to the demands of a new environment. It draws its inspiration from the work of F.G. Bailey, Kenneth Burke, and James Fernandez, and focuses on the ethnography of religious discourse as it relates to Chinese immigrant churches. Contents: Introduction: The Force of Words; The Arena of Religious Discourse; Orators and Audiences; The Public Discourse; Two Sermons; A Model of Chinese Christian Rhetoric and Its Origins; The Chinese Christian World View; Church Unity and Social Conflict; Personal Disorder and the Quest for Identity; Leadership and Religious Authority; and Identification and Transformation.