Carl Kell

The bookshelves of southern history, particularly southern religious history, are stacked and overflowing with scholarship spanning the spectrum of regional church life. In the past quarter century, the rise of fundamentalism, leading to the take back or take over, depending on the perspectives of writers and readers alike, of the Southern Baptist Convention rests on the top shelf of southern church history.

In a frame set by the sparkling, dynamic, and charismatic pastors of mega southern Baptist Churches, a rhetorical campaign war was waged and done so successfully, spanning twenty-five years and counting. As a southern rhetorical historian, Kell has addressed and analyzed the rhetorical perspectives of the Southern Baptist Convention in all of its change and continuity.

Carl Kell received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and has taught at Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia. He has been a professor of Communication at Western Kentucky University since 1972. Kell is the author of In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention, which was the Religious Communication Association's 2000 Book of the Year, and Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War (University of Tennessee Press, 2006). The third book in the series, Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Southern Baptist Life, is forthcoming.