This essay on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt challenges her argument from two opposing sides. First, it critiques all jeremiads. It asks how a person uttering prophetic indictments, whether in the form of a classical jeremiad or the more moderate form that Kaveny argues for, can possibly know of what she speaks, given the otherness of God. Second, it calls for more jeremiads. It asks whether a person, whether religious or not, might indeed know enough to offer withering jeremiads, in (...) those cases where she sees the target of her jeremiad making flagrantly incompatible commitments. (shrink)

In Prophecy without Contempt, Cathleen Kaveny argues that prevailing scholarly approaches to religious and public discourse misunderstand the actual complexity of moral rhetoric in America. She endeavors to provide a better account through study of the role the Puritan jeremiad has played. Kaveny then offers a normative case for deliberative public moral discourse and the limited exercise of prophetic denunciation. I argue that Kaveny's distinction between deliberation and prophetic denunciation is overdrawn. They are ideal types that elide other rhetorical forms. (...) Moreover, both deliberative discourse and prophetic denunciation assume a social contract or shared tradition. Healthy moral discourse requires revolutionary rhetoric to interrogate and break traditions that are themselves morally compromised. (shrink)