Introduces the concept of community and the role of ritual language, interaction, and language in creating and maintaining religious communities, in terms of passing on rituals and practices using sacred, liturgical language.

Draws the book to its conclusion, considering the main themes in light of the history of research into language and religion, and offering suggestions for several main streams of research going forward.

Describes inter-religious dialogue, focusing on the issue of speaking across religious traditions as a kind of translation and looking specifically at how institutional religious documents deal with the issue of other religious traditions and what this shows about the nature of religious belief.

Focus on multimodality looks beyond spoken and written language to how people communicate about their religious experiences using other resources, like gesture, showing how insights can be gleaned about how people think and talk about their experiences by specifically looking at how they gesture.

Examines interaction, focused on highlighting the tools of conversation analysis, a long-standing staple in discourse analysis, to understand how religious doctrine is worked out in interaction.

Discusses education, looking specifically at how religious language interacts with educational settings where a teacher’s religious identity is a key part of their motivation for their work: Christians teaching English as a second or additional language in contexts where teachers are explicitly motivated by their religious beliefs.

Looks at media, and the ways that technology in the recent past has changed how people talk about religious belief in and practice, and the consequences of those changes on how people think, believe, and act.

Discusses ritual, using the concept of pragamemes to discuss idiomatic eulogies in Taiwanese funerals. The analysis looks specifically at how religious beliefs influence the construction of Buddhist and Christian phrases, with important difference in the conceptual metaphors the idioms employ.

Shows how narrative approaches and storytelling within communities can be an important way of tracing how community and individual identity are tied to interaction around sacred texts and rituals, even in informal settings.

Describes the key issue of translation in religious discourse, including not only the translation of religious texts, but other important documents for the development of doctrine, touching on issues of grammar, lexis, and socio-historical context.

Introduces the key concept of sacred texts and their role in religious belief and practice, focusing specifically on how the reading of sacred texts can create a spatial and temporal experience of the divine for readers.

Discusses ecology and the role of natural environments in religious discourse, looking specifically at how religious institutions talked about the environment and conceive of it in relation to religious doctrine and belief and practice.

Discusses Identity, focusing specifically on issues around individual and social identity in the presentation of self, and how religious believers use language to present themselves as members of communities and hold specific beliefs, often implicitly, with particular language.

Introduces rhetoric, discussing how the long history of the study of rhetoric from Plato to the present day has developed tools that can be used to understand contemporary readings and uses of sacred texts, specifically as a part of political speech.