Professor Robert Stephen Reid is Emeritus Director of the Master of Communication degree program in Organizational Communication and Leadership at the University of Dubuque. He served as the convener of the Rhetoric Working Group for the Academy of Homiletics from 2000-2016. His scholarly project includes work in ancient rhetorical theory including the NT, homiletics, and contemporary religious communication theory.
This booklet was created as a senior seminar assignment I wrote for Communication Department majo... more This booklet was created as a senior seminar assignment I wrote for Communication Department majors at the University of Dubuque while I served as the Dept. Head. The booklet's focus on thinking about a career as a "calling" makes no assumption that students view calling from a religious perspective. Rather, if clarifies two options to think about it from a secular point of view and two options from a religious perspective.
The Journal of Organizational Communication and Leadership, 2014
The contemporary challenge for Christian congregations is not just to identify ways to implement ... more The contemporary challenge for Christian congregations is not just to identify ways to implement change, but to create congregations that are continuously adaptive. The question: Can we help congregations develop new mental models where strategies of mission which were once core capabilities do not end up becoming core rigidities, making a congregation increasingly irrelevant to an ever-changing, globally aware, digitally connected, and ethnically diverse culture? This essay draws on Lawler and Worley's Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness (Jossey-Bass, 2006), adapting its conception of change principles that keep an organization continuously effective and applying them to congregation missional practice as principles that can be adopted to remain effective in achieving missional purposes.
In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) philosopher Charles Taylor makes a case, contrary to those w... more In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) philosopher Charles Taylor makes a case, contrary to those who bemoan the malaises of modernity (e.g., the culture of late-modernity), that the secular era is not without an ethic. For all their willingness to be seduced in the name of living authentically, expressive individualists can still be challenged to live into the inherent aspirations of this cultural consciousness. He pursues this case further in his monumental A Secular Age (2007). This essay poses the question whether Taylor’s ethical defense which assumes we are all secular Christians has relevance in the face of our postmodern homiletics developed to oppose secular expressive individualism. Sociological descriptions of continuing American disestablishments of religion are traced culturally and homiletically as continuing a trajectory of individualism in order to ask whether we should abandon shaping sermon appeals to [p]reach to late-modern secularists who are often disoriented by the ongoing process of disestablishment in America. [Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Charles Taylor, An Ethic of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).]
American preaching as taught in Christian seminaries and other institutions of ministerial traini... more American preaching as taught in Christian seminaries and other institutions of ministerial training can generally be arrayed by the kind of cultural faith consciousness that a given sermon calls forth from listeners. The explicit or implicit persuasive appeals preachers employ are typically embedded in the structure of a sermon’s organizing strategy. They are designed to appeal to the type of faith consciousness that reflects the dominant cultural/faith consciousness of a congregation. Following Reid (2006), this essay clarifies how a preacher’s cultural/faith consciousness is voiced as “silent speech” (Ricoeur 1985), reliant on the preacher’s habitus of faith consciousness (Bourdieu 1977) that reflect a worldview of the pre-modern, of modernity, of late-modernity, or of postmodernity. The manner in which development each of these cultural/faith consciousnesses is correlated to the continuing disestablishment of religion in America is examined.
Those who preach are typically well taught to be aware of the theology they bring to the pulpit a... more Those who preach are typically well taught to be aware of the theology they bring to the pulpit and even consider the way in which theological commitments need to be coherent. In addition, students of preaching may be introduced to selected kinds of philosophies that shape cultural consciousnesses in preaching (e.
In proposing to read Plato through Dionysius and Dionysian theory, I am keenly aware that Dionys... more In proposing to read Plato through Dionysius and Dionysian theory, I am keenly aware that Dionysius' critique is already a meta-language interposing itself between actual Attic compositional practice and later theoretical reflection, but my primary concern is to understand how Dionysius would have read the text and only secondarily whether his reading actually describes Attic compositional practice. What becomes evident with even a casual perusal of Dionysius' critical essays is the way in which his system of prose economy expands our contemporary understanding of arrangement and argument strategy in ancient discourse. Therefore, the results of this inquiry probably have more to contribute to our knowledge about the nature of prose economy as an aspect of literate composition, to our knowledge of potential incipient forms of what eventually became controversiae, and to our knowledge of literate aspects of what, elsewhere, I have termed the finished narrative technique in antiquity (1994), than any final adjudication of the Socratic question. But in good Platonic fashion, inquiry into the latter provides a means of purchase with regard to the former
This booklet was created as a senior seminar assignment I wrote for Communication Department majo... more This booklet was created as a senior seminar assignment I wrote for Communication Department majors at the University of Dubuque while I served as the Dept. Head. The booklet's focus on thinking about a career as a "calling" makes no assumption that students view calling from a religious perspective. Rather, if clarifies two options to think about it from a secular point of view and two options from a religious perspective.
The Journal of Organizational Communication and Leadership, 2014
The contemporary challenge for Christian congregations is not just to identify ways to implement ... more The contemporary challenge for Christian congregations is not just to identify ways to implement change, but to create congregations that are continuously adaptive. The question: Can we help congregations develop new mental models where strategies of mission which were once core capabilities do not end up becoming core rigidities, making a congregation increasingly irrelevant to an ever-changing, globally aware, digitally connected, and ethnically diverse culture? This essay draws on Lawler and Worley's Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness (Jossey-Bass, 2006), adapting its conception of change principles that keep an organization continuously effective and applying them to congregation missional practice as principles that can be adopted to remain effective in achieving missional purposes.
In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) philosopher Charles Taylor makes a case, contrary to those w... more In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) philosopher Charles Taylor makes a case, contrary to those who bemoan the malaises of modernity (e.g., the culture of late-modernity), that the secular era is not without an ethic. For all their willingness to be seduced in the name of living authentically, expressive individualists can still be challenged to live into the inherent aspirations of this cultural consciousness. He pursues this case further in his monumental A Secular Age (2007). This essay poses the question whether Taylor’s ethical defense which assumes we are all secular Christians has relevance in the face of our postmodern homiletics developed to oppose secular expressive individualism. Sociological descriptions of continuing American disestablishments of religion are traced culturally and homiletically as continuing a trajectory of individualism in order to ask whether we should abandon shaping sermon appeals to [p]reach to late-modern secularists who are often disoriented by the ongoing process of disestablishment in America. [Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Charles Taylor, An Ethic of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).]
American preaching as taught in Christian seminaries and other institutions of ministerial traini... more American preaching as taught in Christian seminaries and other institutions of ministerial training can generally be arrayed by the kind of cultural faith consciousness that a given sermon calls forth from listeners. The explicit or implicit persuasive appeals preachers employ are typically embedded in the structure of a sermon’s organizing strategy. They are designed to appeal to the type of faith consciousness that reflects the dominant cultural/faith consciousness of a congregation. Following Reid (2006), this essay clarifies how a preacher’s cultural/faith consciousness is voiced as “silent speech” (Ricoeur 1985), reliant on the preacher’s habitus of faith consciousness (Bourdieu 1977) that reflect a worldview of the pre-modern, of modernity, of late-modernity, or of postmodernity. The manner in which development each of these cultural/faith consciousnesses is correlated to the continuing disestablishment of religion in America is examined.
Those who preach are typically well taught to be aware of the theology they bring to the pulpit a... more Those who preach are typically well taught to be aware of the theology they bring to the pulpit and even consider the way in which theological commitments need to be coherent. In addition, students of preaching may be introduced to selected kinds of philosophies that shape cultural consciousnesses in preaching (e.
In proposing to read Plato through Dionysius and Dionysian theory, I am keenly aware that Dionys... more In proposing to read Plato through Dionysius and Dionysian theory, I am keenly aware that Dionysius' critique is already a meta-language interposing itself between actual Attic compositional practice and later theoretical reflection, but my primary concern is to understand how Dionysius would have read the text and only secondarily whether his reading actually describes Attic compositional practice. What becomes evident with even a casual perusal of Dionysius' critical essays is the way in which his system of prose economy expands our contemporary understanding of arrangement and argument strategy in ancient discourse. Therefore, the results of this inquiry probably have more to contribute to our knowledge about the nature of prose economy as an aspect of literate composition, to our knowledge of potential incipient forms of what eventually became controversiae, and to our knowledge of literate aspects of what, elsewhere, I have termed the finished narrative technique in antiquity (1994), than any final adjudication of the Socratic question. But in good Platonic fashion, inquiry into the latter provides a means of purchase with regard to the former
Development of the stage theory articulated in this book to become a theory of cultural conscious... more Development of the stage theory articulated in this book to become a theory of cultural consciousnesses can be found in subsequent essays for the Academy of Homiletics posted above.
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Papers by Robert S Reid
[Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Charles Taylor, An Ethic of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).]
[Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Charles Taylor, An Ethic of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).]