Response on Astell

After the class discussion on Mary Astell, it made me wonder about rhetoricians in today’s society. She advocated that to be a good rhetorician, a person had to be unbiased, had to reduce their passions about a topic, had to make concise arguments, and had to be a good Christian. What I am supposing in her sense that “good” meant morally good. For in today’s society, I am not sure viewers of pop culture hold people up to those standards. An example of this is political speeches. Many times politicians are obscure and diverge from the particular question that was asked of them, but members of society see this as part of the norm. And, if they sound “pretty” while answering the questions, they are seen as eloquent and good speakers.

Another thing I thought was interesting was how she believed that to be a good rhetorician someone had to be Christian. While I am a Christian, I believe her viewpoint was biased on the grounds that there are many people who are successful at speaking but aren’t of the Christian faith. Granted she lived during the 15^th-16^th centuries, but in today’s world we see that there were non-Christian leaders who moved groups and nations towards betterment by their rhetoric abilities. Personally, I prefer the ancients’ look that to be a good rhetorician (in the moral sense) is to be a good person since it is more inclusive.