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to Edward Farley, "has a hermeneutic character: to grasp reality in its complexity involves interpretive activities." The reason is that "[a]nything that is actual has different dimensions that call for different kinds of interpretive responses" (Farley 1988: 12). A goal of socio-rhetorical criticism is to invite correctives of the Enlightenment tradition into basic procedures and goals of the Enlightenment tradition. This means that socio-rhetorical interpretation invites disciplined interaction of "various types of knowledge and modes of thinking" to explore "experiential, pluralistic, hermeneutic, critical, rational, political, and aesthetic dimensions" of texts (cf. Farley 1988: 60). The presupposition is that texts are "historically engendered deposits of wisdom," and that important "knowledge occurs in conjunction with the reinterpretation" of them (Farley 1988: 10). Adapting further words of Farley, the conviction underlying a socio-rhetorical approach is that interpretation of texts "has to do with capacities of responding to and interpreting the complexities, the various dimensions, of reality," and this calls for "broader, more flexible paradigms of interpretation" (Farley 1988: 60-61). It is essential that multiple modes be dynamically and critically juxtaposed with one another in the approach, since "[c]oncrete reality occurs in a large system of ever-changing relations and events" (Farley 1988: 6). Underlying this approach is a special interest in "religion" as a phenomenon of great importance within both the past and the present experience of humans. I share the presupposition of Farley that religion is not a region or entity but an aspect of human, historical, and personal processes, events, and relations. The grasp of this aspect calls for a complex and flexible posture of interpretation which includes, among other things, philosophical scrutiny of the strangeness of the human being and its experience of the world, as well as a probing of the complex strata of human language (Farley 1988: 61). Texts, then, that are perceived especially to be "religious" texts call for a wide-ranging, complex, and flexible approach to interpretation. If socio-rhetorical interpretation is hermeneutical in character, what does it mean for the hermeneutic of the approach to be rhetorical? Steven Mailloux has championed a concept of "rhetorical hermeneutics" that is highly instructive in this regard. In his words, "[r]hetorical hermeneutics is the theoretical practice that results from the intersection between rhetorical pragmatism and the study of cultural rhetoric" (Mailloux 1991: 233). Socio-rhetorical interpretation, as an approach that uses rhetorical strategies of analysis, that operates out of the insights of pragmatism into the function of language and the making of texts (Langsdorf 1995), and that approaches religious discourse as cultural rhetoric, is naturally grounded in rhetorical hermeneutics. A rhetorical hermeneutics views shared interpretative strategies not as the creative origin of texts but rather |