Notes on Prayerful Rhetoric with Divinities

This article explores some rhetorical paths of thinking about prayer in relation to traditional humanism and its alternatives. It seeks to develop a Heideggerian rhetorical hermeneutics in relation to a nonpersonal, extrahuman model of communication between the human and the divine. Eventually, the article pivots away from God as the addressee of prayerful rhetoric and focuses instead on angels as the name for the finite, contingent conditions in which the rhetoric of prayer takes place.