Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: Witnessing, speaking or writing about ones beliefs and faith, is standard for many religions.In the case of the Jehovah's Witnesses, it is central to their practice.In this paper, close text analysis is conducted of letters to the editor in one of the movements publications, Awake!While this may be seen as atypical witnessing activity, it sheds light on the function of letters to the editor generally and also on the specific narrative requirements that members adhere to.In systematic and identifiable ways, writers of letters witness to their membership as well as actively performing it.The letters can also be seen as a recruitment tool as well as pedagogic in the sense of displaying to the wider discourse community what is required as a member.1T he particular letters here come from a Jehovah's Witnesses' publication, Awake! which is produced fortnightly.The five issues from which these letters (45 in all) were taken, were collected in a departmental foyer at Glasgow University between September 1998 and June 1999.It is by no means a complete set from this period.While the corpus is not large, it is sufficient for the text analysis undertaken here.The letters are valuable data because of the ubiquity of letters to the editor in general.Consideration of these letters may shed some light on letters to more 'mainstream' publications, something which (to my knowledge) has not been extensively researched (cf.
Author: Annabelle Mooney
Institution: Cardiff University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4386766046