Abstract
The Call for Proposals for this Special Issue on Writing and Ritual, Faith Communities, and Religious Practices noted how Scribner and Cole (1981) studied the important and wide-ranging role of the Qur’anic literacy of the Vai of West Africa. Literacy, to the authors, is “not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying that knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use” (p. 236). This emphasis on contexts of use and on how practice is socially organized continues in today’s studies of literacy, especially in religious contexts.
Also in the 1980s, Written Communication was established in response to a need for studies of writing outside academia (Witte & Daly, 1984, p. 3), and has since addressed writing in disciplinary, workplace, and community contexts, as well as academic and educational ones. In keeping with the journal’s emphasis on broad social, material and cultural contexts, the articles in this Special Issue—exploring writing in relation to ritual, faith communities, and religious practices—examine what writing is, how it gets done, what work it does in the world, and how it provides meaning for communities.
We were very pleased with the breadth and quality of submissions we received. We accepted seven pieces to include in the Special Issues, four published in April’s issue and three featured here. The connections and themes across the seven articles suggest important areas for writing researchers to continue to investigate. We identified two strands running through the articles: (a) the overlap of religious texts and practices with other aspects of life and (b) the communal role of writing in religious contexts. The authors have taken care to detail the specific contexts they are studying and have chosen methods—from ethnography to fine-grained rhetorical analysis—that do justice to the complexity of the data and research sites.
Overlap of Religious Writing With Other Areas of Life
Many of the Special Issue pieces speak to how religious literacies and practices inform and overlap with other important aspects of life, rather than being isolated from them.
First, in April’s issue, Mary Juzwik and Corie Mackenzie’s study shows the overlap of religious faith and the arena of public education. They used portraiture methodology to study a cosmopolitan-minded writing unit in a public high school English class, listening for stories that emerged out of data such as classroom field notes and interviews with a student and a teacher who both identify as evangelical Christians. Through their portraits of these two participants, the authors generated insights helpful for writing scholars and teachers, including the range of within-religious-category variation, the pervasiveness of religious faith in schools, and ultimately the need to, as they say, take teachers’ and students’ religious roots seriously when theorizing about how religion may interact with cosmopolitan writing pedagogy.
Robert LeBlanc (July) also focuses on the overlap of religion and education, but in the context of a Catholic school. LeBlanc describes what rituals, such as reciting the liturgy during school Mass, mean and do for eighth graders in a Catholic school. He finds that authorities such as teachers and priests help to define what it means to be a good Catholic student. Drawing from interview and observational data, he also analyzes students’ participation in rituals, including their bodily movements, showing how students subvert those rituals or leverage their ritual performances as a resource. LeBlanc’s study helps support that this nexus of practice, text, and ritual operates across religious traditions, and its social meaning is linked to specific places and times in each religious context.
Meaghan O’Keefe’s (April) article focuses on Catholic voting guides, but its implications extend beyond religious contexts to any contexts where power, literacy, and authority intertwine. Using entextualization approaches and micro-rhetorical analysis, O’Keefe examines the use of citation in Catholic voting guides before and after sexual abuse scandals. She finds that the Catholic bishops who authored the voting guides advanced particular religious aims through typographical, grammatical, and rhetorical strategies. These moves included highlighting Latin texts to minimize the authors’ own presence, or temporal shifts to show deference to the Vatican. Despite these religiously specific strategies, O’Keefe’s study suggests how citation can serve as a means for those with unstable authority to indirectly reaffirm their authority.
Gholnecsar Muhuammad (July) studied the use of writing for the formation of not only religious identity, but also community, personal, and gender identity, for a group of Black Muslim teenage girls participating in a writing collaborative based on Islamic principles. Drawing on the girls’ poetic broadsides, interviews, and field notes of writing sessions, she noted that the girls wrote primarily about topics such as war, violence, abuse and mistreatment of women. In this study, writing reflected both the participants’ religious identity and our current times, with implications for treating social justice issues in writing pedagogy.
Communal Nature of Writing in Religious Contexts
Another theme running through the articles is how the writing central to religious practices plays a communal role: It connects people within a religious tradition and also beyond it. Writing is at the heart of communal activities and rituals and holds special meaning for the individuals and groups participating.
For instance, Karin Tusting (July) studied Catholic textbooks used in a children’s First Communion course along with children’s and catechists’ literacy practices that surrounded those texts to give them communal meaning. According to her findings, texts and writing in this setting served to recontextualize global Catholic discourses at an individual level, constructing children’s identity as members of a faith community. Writing in these classes was not about teaching knowledge or constructing allegiance; instead, Catholic children used writing to textually represent their identities as individuals and Catholics, to verbalize emotions, to understand their agency, and to relate with their community.
Shifting focus to ritual in Lukumi, an African Diasporic spiritual tradition, Tiffany Pogue’s study (April) shows how literacy operates in a community where the primary mode of communication is oral. Through qualitative methods such as interviews, focus groups, and participant observation in communal Lukumi ceremonies, Pogue finds that, though ceremony participants may have initially underestimated the role of writing in this spiritual tradition, recording and decoding different forms of information are essential. In this community, Pogue identifies literacy in color, rhythm, liturgical structure, syllabus text, and material culture.
Chaim Noy (April) identifies the sociality of writing in Jewish heritage museums. Using ethnographic methods, Noy analyzed museum visitor books and visitors’ interactions with the books. This approach enabled him to comment on, as he says, the materialities of writing and not just the materialities of the written. He finds that museums rhetorically structure museum displays and the act of writing in visitor books as a participatory ritual. Visitors’ writing is often a joint production that becomes a contribution to the museum’s record and historical narrative. His study has implications for research on material aspects of writing, as well as collective rituals, in cultural institutions.
Questions of writing, religion and faith will undoubtedly continue to be of interest to writing researchers. We hope the articles here will contribute to this ongoing enterprise.