Analyzing an Advertisement for a Book of the Christian Faith

Analyzing an Advertisement for a Book of the Christian Faith

In our society today large numbers of people practice some sort of religion. Realizing how many people inhabit the world today it's not hard to believe that there are literally thousands of religions out there. Making a choice as to what religion you fit into can be a daunting task. Even if you already practice a set religion sometimes its hard to know if you are putting your faith in the right hands so to speak. People get into a religion and they think that their beliefs are right and everyone else's are wrong or twisted. Also people want the religion they are practicing to be the preferred religion of the country or of the world. So from the beginning of history people have been trying to convert one another to their personal religion, whether it be to make their religion stronger, for monetary purposes, or just because they believe that people of other religions or no religion need to be saved from eternal damnation. In the past this recruiting had been done through word of mouth, but now that we have computers and high-speed printing presses this recruiting has sometimes taken the form of ads on web pages or in popular magazines.

This Paper will describe and analyze an ad for a book of the Christian faith that was found in a September 1999 Time Magazine. This ad will be analyzed through Rhetorical Analysis. I will be using a model to accomplish this; designated PACES: Purpose, Audience, Context, Ethics, and Stance.

This ad is focused around a picture of a city block. In the center of the page there is a building that is taller than all the rest. It is square in shape and has a tower sitting on top of it. The tower starts out almost the same diameter as the buil...

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...that the author feels that judgment day is coming and this is clearly a religious point of view. I also think the author feels that he or she is doing a service to the public by offering this book.

In conclusion, the author of this ad is trying to get people to convert to Christianity specifically people who are Jewish and have doubts about if Judaism is right for them. This type of ad would be difficult if not impossible for a person with no religious background to write so the author must be religious. The author did do a fairly good job of presenting a situation, which could be scary to a specific group of people. This situation would be quite scary to people who were Jewish who questioned there faith not in religion itself but in the specific parts of their religion such as who there Messiah is. These people will probably send in the coupon to get the free book.