My reasons for refusing to teach public speaking online include the following: First, the way I currently teach public speaking seems to work very well. Actually, from my understanding of the history of rhetoric it has worked well for thousands of years. The second reason concerns my vocational calling. My perception of effective teaching involves being with students in real physical space. In other words, I am called to the classroom, not the computer screen. My third reason – not unrelated to the first two – concerns the notion of embodiment. I am persuaded that embodied teaching, especially with a subject that centers on the use of the body and voice, is superior to disembodied teaching. My reason for not wanting to teach public speaking online would be identical to why I do not think sculpting or tennis should be taught online.

Understanding Jacques Ellul, Jeffrey P. Greeman, Read Mercer Schuchardt and Noah J. Toly (2012) Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 174 pp., ISBN: 978-1610974318, p/bk, $21.00 Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind, John Foley Miles (2012) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 312 pp., ISBN:-13: 978-0252078699, p/bk, $27.00 On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, Oren Meyers, Motti Neiger and Eyal Zandberg (eds) (2011) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-0230275683, h/bk, $95.00

This article applies Daniel Boorstin’s notion of the pseudo-event to the ascendency of President Donald Trump. Boorstin defines the pseudo-event as an event staged to call attention to itself, a phenomenon made possible by the graphic revolution. As early as 1961, Boorstin recognized this phenomenon in the areas of travel, news and politics. Concerning the latter, the hero, a person once recognized for his achievements, has been replaced by the celebrity, a person known for his well-knownness. While Davy Crockett was a precursor of the American celebrity politician, P. T. Barnum and Edward Bernays were practitioners of the pseudo-event par excellence. Donald Trump, however, exemplifies the human pseudo-event in a most tragic way because his persona is emblematic of what some observers now perceive as the fly-in-the-ointment of American liberal democracy – the unrestrained autonomous self, something to which our original political commitments ensure us can be liberated from nature, time and place. In our quest to realize ‘liberty’ for ourselves, older and more localized ethical restraints had to be cast aside. Ironically, the crisis of liberalism resides in its great success.

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American evangelicalism finds its roots in the Great Awakening of the 18th century, a movement that has proven to be both multifaceted and populist. The early half of the 20th century saw evangelicalism marginalized from cultural powerbrokers, only to resurface again in the later 20th century as a political force. Nevertheless, evangelicals today as a whole still mirror the same entrepreneurial, individualistic, and pragmatic values that have been part and parcel of American enterprise, a bustle now gone hyperconsumer. Not all evangelicals are oblivious to the reshaping of Old World Protestant sensibilities by mass culture forces. Confessionalists, as named in this article, are fully aware of how media forms can shape cultural institutions like the Church. Neil Postman’s ideas have been useful to evangelicals who understand that the Christian faith, like the Jewish faith, is logocentric. Although Postman’s Enlightenment values sometimes clash with the values of those who lay claim to the Protestant Reformation, both have much in common.