Rutgers-Camden professor examines rhetoric of prayer
Text messaging and social networking have transformed the way people communicate, but have those modern practices also changed the way people pray?
William T. FitzGerald, an assistant professor of English at Rutgers–Camden, has comprehensively researched the rhetoric of prayer, its history, and its place in modern society for his book, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer, Rhetoric, and Performance.
Prayer is a spiritual tradition common among all faiths that has been passed down for many years, but like many other methods of communication, prayer is finding its place in the 21st century.
“I would say that as new communication practices arise and prayer adapts to them, it becomes easier to see how prayer migrates across various modalities in the way that it is imagined, learned, and performed,” FitzGerald says.
The Rutgers–Camden scholar makes a case that prayer is kind of a virtual communication.
“Sending an e-mail or maintaining a Facebook page has a lot more in common with prayer than you might think,” FitzGerald says. “It’s very similar because human beings have to make meaningful connections with each other.”
FitzGerald specializes in rhetorical studies with particular interests in stylistics, speech acts, and the rhetoric of religion. He says prayer is not just talking to yourself, addressing a divine being, or a way to connect to other human beings.
“It’s all of those things at once,” he says. “It has multiple audiences, even when intended for one addressee. Prayer is always speaking at multiple levels and across different modes.”
FitzGerald says in writing his manuscript, he wanted to capture the different kinds of prayer without focusing on any one of them.
“It’s not exclusively focused on oral contexts, although that’s a primary focus,” FitzGerald says. “It tries to explain how prayer migrates across different modes of discourse or modes of performance like text, the body, and cyberspace.”
One example FitzGerald uses to explain the evolution of prayer is how people had come to move away from memorization, a practice to which people are returning. He spoke about prayer and memory at a recent Rhetoric Society of America conference in Minneapolis.
FitzGerald says prayer is very much rooted in memory because it’s a received tradition that one passes on. Over the course of the last several years, memory and delivery have been making a comeback.
“The arts of memory and the means of delivery have experienced renewed interest in a digital age,” FitzGerald says. “Prayer was always an art especially concerned with both memory and delivery, so that as these two areas of traditional rhetoric get interesting again, so too does prayer.”
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.
FitzGerald, who is still seeking a publisher for his book, says there is also a resurgence of interest in prayer in a number of different critical fields like psychology, communications studies, sociology, and history.
FitzGerald teaches Discourse and Genre, Modern Rhetorical Theory, and 21st Century Literacies at Rutgers–Camden, in addition to courses on the history of rhetoric, figurative language, and media studies. He received his undergraduate degree from Haverford College and his master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Maryland.
Media Contact: Ed Moorhouse
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E-mail: ejmoor@camden.rutgers.edu