In any event, Miller is an experienced detective in spotting what he refers to as liberal Protestant commonplaces in King's last speech.
Because the rhetorical term "commonplaces" is not a household word, I would like to mention here that President Ronald Reagan worked out his own way of using commonplaces in his speeches. He compiled his commonplaces on note cards. He would go through his notes cards to find certain commonplaces that he wanted to use in his speeches. Reagan's collection of commonplaces has been published in book form as THE NOTES: RONALD REAGAN'S PRIVATE COLLECTION OF STORIES AND WISDOM, edited by Douglas Brinkley (HarperCollins, 2011).
Wolfgang Mieder has compiled a massive collection of King's commonplaces, which Mieder refers to as proverbs: "MAKING A WAY OUT OF NO WAY': MARTIN LUTHER KING'S SERMONIC PROVERBIAL RHETORIC (Peter Lang, 2010).
As Miller details, King uses a lot of liberal Protestant commonplaces in his last speech. Once you have examined Mieder's book, it seems unremarkable that King uses commonplaces in his last speech, because he was in the habit of using commonplaces in his speeches.
King delivered his final speech in Mason Temple in Memphis. Miller does a fine job of explaining the historical heritage of this black Pentecostal church. From the way Miller describes the church interior, the church interior had a remarkable architectural design. I wish that some photographs of the church and especially of the interior had been included in Miller's book. But I got the picture -- the church interior was remarkable well designed for the kind of powerful and deeply personal speech that King delivered there that evening.
From Miller's fine description of the church's interior, I would surmise that the speaker-audience interaction that evening was powerful. But I wish that Miller had at least mentioned William M. A. Grimaldi's excellent essay "The Auditors' Role in Aristotelian Rhetoric" in the book ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATION: HISTORICAL APPROACHES, edited by Richard Leo Enos (Sage Publications, 1990, pages 65-81).
But now we come to the most interesting part of Miller's overall argument. Miller argues that King breaks new ground in his final speech. Miller says, "Stoutly resisting Christian supersessionism and the anti-Semitism that it often spawns, King clearly attests that Judaism serves as the wellspring of Christianity" (page 163).
Got that -- no Christian supersessionism?
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