Borrowed Authority

Abstract

Rhetorical use of citation is a means of indirectly reaffirming authority while avoiding the appearance of argument. It is therefore an especially useful strategy for people and institutions with compromised public images. This article compares the American Catholic bishops’ written citational patterns in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ presidential year voting guides issued before and after the clerical sexual abuse scandals. To investigate these changing citational strategies, work on entextualization by linguistic anthropologists is integrated with micro-rhetorical methods to provide a socially situated, fine-grained English language analysis of citation within a religious discourse community. Findings suggest that the bishops’ new citational patterns work to obliquely erase the authorial presence of the American bishops, to show deference to the Vatican, and to avoid challenges from lay Catholics. Religious aims are advanced through typographical and grammatical strategies that are specific to written discourse.

Keywords

entextualization mediational routines Vatican micro-rhetoric oblique argumentation

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Arendt

(1970). On violence. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Bakhtin

M. M.

(1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays ( Holquist

, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barber

(1999). Quotation in the constitution of Yorùbá oral texts. Research in African Literatures, 30, 17-41.

Bauman

(2004). A world of others’ words: Cross-cultural perspectives on intertextuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Bauman

Briggs

C. L.

(1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 59-88.

Beck

Giddens

Lash

(1994). Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Bielo

J. S.

(2009). Words upon the word: An ethnography of evangelical group Bible study. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Briggs

C. L.

(1996). The politics of discursive authority in research on the “invention of tradition.” Cultural Anthropology, 11, 435-469.

Brown

C. G.

(2004). The word in the world: Evangelical writing, publishing, and reading in America, 1789-1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

10.

Cap

(2013). Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing (Vol. 232). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

11.

Catholic Answers. (2004). Voter’s guide for serious Catholics. Retrieved from http://www.catholic.com/sites/default/files/voters_guide_for_serious_catholics.pdf

12.

Catholic Church. (1994). Catechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

13.

Congregation for Catholic Education, Catholic Church. (2008). Final seminary visitation report. Retrieved from http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/vocations/priesthood/priestly-formation/upload/Final-Seminary-Visitation-Report.pdf

14.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Catholic Church. (1986). Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the pastoral care of homosexual persons. Washington, DC: Office of Pub. Services, United States Catholic Conference.

15.

Connors

R. J.

(1999). The rhetoric of citation systems—part II: Competing epistemic values in citation. Rhetoric Review, 17, 219-245.

16.

Coriden

J. A.

(2004). An introduction to canon law. New York, NY: Paulist Press.

17.

Cronin

Shaw

(2002). Identity-creators and image-makers: Using citation analysis and thick description to put authors in their place. Scientometrics, 54(1), 31-49.

18.

Curran

C. E.

(2008). Catholic moral theology in the United States: A history. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

19.

Curran

C. E.

Griffin

(2001). The Catholic Church, morality, and politics. New York, NY: Paulist Press.

20.

Derrida

(1977). Signature event context. Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 1, 172-197.

21.

Foucault

(1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison ( Sheridan

, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.

22.

Garber

(1999). “ ” (quotation marks). Critical Inquiry, 25, 653-679.

23.

Giddens

(1994). Living in a post-traditional society. In Beck

Giddens

Lash

(Eds.), Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order (pp. 56-109). Cambridge, UK: Polity.

24.

Giddens

(2002). Runaway world: How globalisation is reshaping our lives. London, UK: Profile Books.

25.

Goodman

Jane E.

Tomlinson

Richland

J. B.

(2014). “Citational Practices: Knowledge, Personhood, and Subjectivity.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 449-463.

26.

Halevi

Moed

H. F.

(2013). The thematic and conceptual flow of disciplinary research: A citation context analysis of the journal of informetrics, 2007. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(9), 1903-1913.

27.

Hopper

(2007). Linguistics and micro-rhetoric. Journal of English Linguistics, 35, 236-252.

28.

Hopper

(2008). Emergent serialization in English: Pragmatics and typology. In Good

(Ed.), Linguistic universals and language change (pp. 253-284). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

29.

Hyland

(2004). Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

30.

Jamieson

K. M.

(1973). Generic constraints and the rhetorical situation. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 6, 162-170.

31.

Jamieson

K. M.

(1975). Antecedent genre as rhetorical constraint. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61, 406-415.

32.

Johnstone

(2008). Discourse analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

33.

Juzwik

M. M.

(2014). American evangelical biblicism as literate practice: A critical review. Reading Research Quarterly, 49, 335-349.

34.

Kaveny

M. C.

(2008, October 27). Intrinsic evil and political responsibility. America. Retrieved from http://americamagazine.org/issue/673/article/intrinsic-evil-and-political-responsibility

35.

Keane

(2006). Christian moderns: Freedom and fetish in the mission encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.

36.

Kralis

(2004, October 28). Does the bishops’ voter guide confuse priorities of magisterial teaching? Renew America. Retrieved from http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kralis/041028

37.

Kuipers

(2013). Evidence and authority in ethnographic and linguistic perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 399-413.

38.

Lacey

M. J.

Oakley

(2011). The crisis of authority in Catholic modernity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

39.

Langer

(2002, June 12). U.S. disapproval clouds bishops’ meeting. ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90386

40.

Lefort

(1986). The political forms of modern society: Bureaucracy, democracy, totalitarianism ( Thompson

J. B.

, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity.

41.

Lefort

(2006). The permanence of the theologico-political? ( Macey

, Trans.). In De Vries

Sullivan

(Eds.), Political theologies: Public religions in a post-secular world (pp. 148-187). New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

42.

Malley

(2004). How the Bible works: An anthropological study of evangelical Biblicism. Palo Alto, CA: Alta Mira .

43.

Madsen

(2009). The archipelago of faith: Religious individualism and faith community in America today. American Journal of Sociology, 114(5), 1263-1301.

44.

Mylott

K. D.

(2005, January 3). Bishops and campaign 2004. National Catholic Register. Retrieved from http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/2412

45.

Noll

M. A.

(2001). American evangelical Christianity: An introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

46.

Obey

(2004, August 16). My conscience, my vote. America. Retrieved from http://americamagazine.org/issue/493/article/my-conscience-my-vote

47.

Oddo

(2013). Discourse-based methods across texts and semiotic modes: Three tools for micro-rhetorical analysis. Written Communication, 30, 236-275.

48.

O’Keefe

(2013). Sainthood as rebuke: The U.S. conference on Catholic Bishops’ strategic canonization of Dorothy Day. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 3, 1-16.

49.

Olson

D. R.

Oatley

(2014). The quotation theory of writing. Written Communication, 31(1), 4-26.

50.

Paul VI. Vatican II. (1966). Dogmatic constitution on divine revelation: Dei Verbum. Boston: Pauline Books & Media.

51.

Pew Research Center, Religion & Public Life Project. (2012, August 12). Catholics share bishops’ concerns about religious liberty. Retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/2012/08/01/2012-catholic-voters-religious-liberty-issue/

52.

Priests for Life. (n.d.). Priests for Life Library of Documents and Articles. Retrieved July 28, 2014 from http://www.priestsforlife.org/library/index.aspx?cat=14

53.

Quirk

Greenbaum

Leech

Svartik

(1991). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London, UK: Longman.

54.

Reese

T. J.

(1989). Archbishop: Inside the power structure of the American Catholic Church. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

55.

Reese

T. J.

(1992). A flock of shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward.

56.

Said

E. W.

Wood

(1997). Beginnings: Intention and method. London, UK: Granta.

57.

Schryer

C. F.

Bell

Mian

Spafford

M. M.

Lingard

(2011). Professional citation practices in child maltreatment forensic letters. Written Communication, 28(2), 147-171.

58.

Smidt

Green

J. C.

Kellstedt

Guth

(2007). What does the Lord require? Evangelicals and the 2004 presidential vote. In Rozell

M. J.

Whitney

(Eds.), Religion and the Bush presidency (pp. 31-47). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

59.

Swales

J. M.

(2014). Variation in citational practice in a corpus of student biology papers from parenthetical plonking to intertextual storytelling. Written Communication, 31(1), 118-141.

60.

Uelmen

A. J.

(2008). “It’s hard work”: Reflections on conscience and citizenship in the Catholic tradition. Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, 47, 317-342.

61.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (1976). Political responsibility: Reflections on an election year. Washington, DC: Author.

62.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (1979). Political responsibility: Choices for the 1980s. Washington, DC: Author.

63.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (1983). Political responsibility: Choices for the 1980s. Washington, DC: Author.

64.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (1987). Political responsibility: Choices for the future. Washington, DC: Author.

65.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (1991). Political responsibility: Revitalizing American democracy. Washington, DC: Author.

66.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (1995). Political responsibility: Proclaiming the Gospel of life. Washington, DC: Author.

67.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (1999). Called to faithful citizenship: Civic responsibility for a new millennium. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference.

68.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (2003). Faithful citizenship: A Catholic call to political responsibility. Washington, DC: Author.

69.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (2007). Forming consciences for faithful citizenship. Washington, DC: Author.

70.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (2008). Style guide. Washington, DC: Author.

71.

Urban

(1996). Entextualization, replication, and power. In Silverstein

Urban

(Eds.), Natural histories of discourse (pp. 21-44). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

72.

Yurchak

(2006). Everything was forever, until it was no more: The last Soviet generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.