A close look at the rhetoric of Operation Rescue. >

Religious Rhetoric: Dividing a Nation or Building Community examines religious rhetoric and its creation of both division and unity from a variety of perspectives and issues. Religion, in a variety of forms, is central to our understanding of who we are and how we respond to the world around us. Even those who claim not to have a religious faith have religion in the sense that they have a particular worldview through which they understand and react to the world around them. By examining religious rhetoric in a variety of contexts, this book uncovers the cultural impact of this rhetoric on our political, community, and personal systems of understanding.

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This collection offers fresh and challenging essays by scholars in law, English and comparative literature, social and political thought, and communication studies. It explores unique angles of vision that allow us to read legal opinions as well as criminal cases, abortion clinic violence, trial testimony (victim impact statements), legal authority, and legal fictions of personal and national identity (passports). The literature it analyzes ranges from Shakespeare's Richard II and The Merchant of Venice to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Providing a breadth of material, this collection breaks through disciplinary boundaries as new voices challenge old paradigms, pushing marginalized questions into the center of the literature and law enterprise.