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Craig E. Mattson

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The University and Community Engagement: Recent Approaches

If we’re going to do this,” DeAmon Harges told me, “we’re going to have to become friends.” The condition set me back on my heels. Of course, I wasn’t opposed to getting to know this Indianapolis-based nonprofit leader, rapidly becoming a national figure in community development conversations. But though I was far from reluctant to…
Craig E. Mattson
July 11, 2024
Review Essays

The University and Community Engagement: Recent Approaches

If we’re going to do this,” DeAmon Harges told me, “we’re going to have to become friends.” The condition set me back on my heels. Of course, I wasn’t opposed to getting to know this Indianapolis-based nonprofit leader, rapidly becoming a national figure in community development conversations. But though I was far from reluctant to…
Craig E. Mattson
June 10, 2024
ArticleReview Essays

Winsome Conviction

Let’s start with the proposition that conversation about civility among evan-gelical Christians today has too much of the book of Proverbs and not enough of the book of Job. In contrast with the complex emotional world of Job (more on that later), the proverbists have a settled, centered comfortability with the world—so long as one…
Craig E. Mattson
July 15, 2022
Article

Stop Talking that Way! An Affective Approach to Uncanny Speech in the Christian College Classroom

Bethany Keeley-Jonker and Craig Mattson notice that some of their best speech students practice a delivery so controlled it feels uncanny. This essay traces such “zombie speech” not to students’ worldview assumptions but to affective norms in conventional speech pedagogy. The essay appropriates Christian theology to reorient the practice of speech in keeping with a…
Bethany Keeley-Jonker and Craig E. Mattson
January 15, 2016
Reviews

Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human

What are rhetoricians good for? That query plays on George Scialabba’s 2009 book title about the utility of public intellectuals. Directed toward rhetoricians in particular, the question also helps interpret Michael J. Hyde’s recent book, Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human. Christian scholars will quickly appreciate Hyde’s attention to the relationship between rhetoric and…
Craig E. Mattson
January 15, 2011
Review Essays

Keeping Company With Wayne Booth

Wayne Booth was a critic, theorist, and funny-wonderful dreamer. One night during World War II, while serving in Europe as what he called a “clerk-rifleman,” he had a dream that raised him far above the conflict with the Nazis. His autobiography relates it this way: The night heavens are alight, with three huge overlapping circles,…
Craig E. Mattson
January 15, 2009
Reviews

After Rorty: The Possibilities for Ethics and Religious Belief

More than once, Rorty observed that he was distrusted on both the right and the left. Conservatives thought him too relativistic, he sighed, and progressives thought him too complacent. When accompanied by his famous shrug, not only did this self-portrayal invite sympathy for his being so beleaguered, but also suggest quietly the striking possibility that…
Craig E. Mattson
April 15, 2008