Robert Stephen Reid

Professor Reid, the author of multiple books on contemporary preaching & public speaking, is Chair of the Rhetoric Working Group of the North American Academy of Homiletics and serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Communication and Religion. He is Communication Department Head and Director of the Master of Arts degree program in Organizational Communication and Leadership at the University of Dubuque. He co-authored the basic rhetoric of preaching textbook, Connecting with the Congregation (Abingdon 1999), with Prof. Lucy Lind Hogan. Two recent books, The Four Voices of Preaching (Brazos 2006) and Slow of Speech and Unclean Lips (Cascade 2010) explore the manner in which identity in religious speech is communicated. He has proposed theory of Christian discourse in "A Rhetoric of Contemporary Christian Discourse" (JCR 31 [2008]: 109-142) and applied this theory in critique of "Solzhenitsyn's Christian Civilization Rhetoric: The Other 'Prophetic' Speech 30 Years Later," And the Word Became Flesh (Pickwick 2009). He is also co-author, with Jennifer Supple and Anne Marie Gruber, of Connecting with Your Audience: Making Public Speaking Matter (Kendall Hunt 2010), a public speaking textbook with a fresh proposal for engaging values in dispute speech in civic discourse.