Laurie A. Britt-Smith’s research while affiliated with University of Detroit Mercy and other places

Writing Beyond the University: Preparing Lifelong Learners for Lifewide Writing extends the burgeoning scholarly conversation regarding the role of writing in lifelong and lifewide learning. The collection introduces higher education faculty, staff, and administrators to research on how all members of a campus community can prepare learners to be effective writers beyond the university, in personal, professional, and civic contexts. The collection also discusses how to teach writing and teach with writing across the academic disciplines and in a variety of co-curricular spaces, such as student life, student employment, and career services, and in internship, co-ops, and work-integrated learning opportunities.

This presentation introduces the basic theoretical underpinnings of my in-progress dissertation, American Prophet: Christian Literacy Practices and the Rhetoric of Social Justice, as well as demonstrates the practical application of my research by focusing on one of my exemplar speakers, rock icon and activist, Bono. Using a model of the prophetic orator developed by theologian Walter Brueggemann, I analyze the rhetorical features of his speech and writing that promote vision and prompt action. Additionally, applying socio-cultural linguistic theory, which considers all aspects of communication to be forms of literacy, I examine the development of his rhetorical strategies, investigating how the acquisition of culturally specific literacies grants or denies his speech acts the cultural power to cross multiple social boundaries of community. Tying together conversations in literature, theology, cultural studies, and rhetoric/composition, the overall goal is to demonstrate how Christian teaching and social literacy practices intersect and energize rhetorics of social justice. American public discourse (rhetoric), with its root in the highly sermonic style of the Puritan colonists, has always been partially based on a vision promising a continually improving society. As literary scholar Sacvan Bercovitch discusses in The American Jeremiad, although drawn from European sermonic rhetoric, the vision for the new world has always been more corrective rather than destructive in nature. Whereas the European version of the jeremiad generally was intended to invoke social change as a secular virtue, the New England version melded spiritual and secular virtues together. This particularly American jeremiad, or political sermon, served as a basis for much of the national rhetoric that would follow and is still echoed in movements for social justice and its attendant political reform. Although American social identity is always in the process of reform, and any moment of reform can be studied for the intersection of religious and political rhetoric, this presentation is part of a larger project that examines how the jeremiad and rhetoric on