Thesis Proposal

                In Patrick Clark’s article American Justice and Divine Mercy he effectively accomplishes his goal to persuade his readers, predominantly Catholics like himself, that there should be some moral hesitation to celebrating at Osama bin Laden’s death.  Some of the major tactics that Clark uses are rhetorical questions, parrelellism, and repititon, and appeals to athority.

                This essay is full of rhetorical questions. One of Clark’s main purposes is to get his audience to deeply think about this issue, so the questions are extreamly effective. These questions also serve to highlight disparities between what the readers believe about Christ and his death, vs. what they believe about Osama bin Laden and his death. Clark uses it as an appeal to logos, revealing the logical fallacies in his reader’s own thinking, and also as ethos, defining the morality that he believes his audience should be living by.

                There is a lot of grammatical parallelism as well. This is effective because it highlights the comparisons that Clark is making. It is an appeal to logos, again serving to highlight the fallacies in his readers thinking, and to Pathos, because it makes us feel guilty and uncomfortable that we are feeling and thinking this way.

                The repetition in the essay highlights the important points and ideas; several words are repeated in almost every paragraph: mercy, justice, jubilation, solidarity, Divine Mercy Sunday. This is also an appeal to Pathos, because these are all words with a strong emotion attached to them, and sometimes different emotions in religious vs. political contexts and repeating them in both contexts brings all those emotions into the mix.

                There is also overstatement (in comparing bin Laden’s wounds to Christ’s- that’s a little extreme), strong appeals to authority, allusion to bible and saintly sources, and very religious diction.