SACRED SPEECH: A Practical Guide for Keeping Spirit in Your Speech

As a mainline Protestant minister and preacher, Schaper is sensitive to the demands of public speech in a diverse culture and to the need for private speech that can appropriately counsel or confront. She is especially good at understanding speech in the old-fashioned sense of it as rhetoric, with power to move, persuade or console. Many of her observations and chapter topics, devoted to these functions of speech, make good sense. Indeed, much praise is due to a book that helpfully distinguishes between whining ("a spoken form of despair") and lamenting (which seeks resolution); takes on the more absurd excesses of political correctness; and includes a chapter on the value of silence and when to say nothing. But the book is uneven and some parts are murky. Schaper's prose has a tendency to pile up metaphors ("Sacred speech knows we live in a vertical, not a horizontal, world") instead of clarifying what is meant. A neologism that looks like a typo in a chapter title ("glocal") isn't explained until the end of the chapter. The titular promise to be "a practical guide" overstates the case; the book is descriptive and reflective and filled with illustrative anecdotes, but those characteristics don't add up to a how-to guide on speaking with greater sensitivity, which is an ambitious proposition. While the concept is intriguing, this book about sacred speech too often lapses into unclear speech itself. (Apr.)