Awards

• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019

Overview

This book is a study of religious practices of listening in the Boston area. Through ethnographic study of a variety of religious communities, with an extensive focus on Quaker listening, it argues that religious practice shapes our habits of listening by creating a plurality of regimes of listening across Boston’s landscape. These practices, moreover, cultivate specific dispositions, as well as distinct patterns of religious and democratic virtues. Through these dispositions and virtues, religious listening facilitates a diverse range of forms of democratic engagement, and varied contributions to the pursuit of social justice. William Young provides an innovative interpretation of these religious practices. It argues that insofar as religious listening helps practitioners to extend and amplify their listening, and makes them more responsive to their communities, it creates a social mode of embodied receptivity and agency. Through both their listening and their actions, these groups express their conceptions of divinity, embodying divine attributes and activity within the sociopolitical realm—serving as God’s ears within the world. It is by interpreting their practices as creating modes of social discipline, reception, and agency that the book explicates the full significance of religious listening, in its adaptations and extensions of our aural capacities, and their implications for sociopolitical life.

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9781498576086

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Reviews

Many theologians talk about talking; in this highly original and important study, Willie Young listens to listening. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic data and with a deftness of theological and philosophical touch, he explores how people in faith communities learn to listen, how their listening can make a difference to civic life as they listen to their neighbours-and what it means to listen with God's ears in a contemporary city. His work produces exciting new resonances-not only in philosophical, political and theological accounts of listening, but also in wider discussions of how faith is embodied within the democratic body politic. -- Rachel Muers, University of Leeds

Many theologians talk about talking; in this highly original and important study, Willie Young listens to listening. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic data and with a deftness of theological and philosophical touch, he explores how people in faith communities learn to listen, how their listening can make a difference to civic life as they listen to their neighbours-and what it means to listen with God's ears in a contemporary city. His work produces exciting new resonances-not only in philosophical, political and theological accounts of listening, but also in wider discussions of how faith is embodied within the democratic body politic. -- Rachel Muers, University of Leeds Young persuasively and successfully interweaves wisdom from American Transcendentalism, Christian ethics, and Jewish philosophy in ways that will surprise most readers. More importantly, Young demonstrates how music forms citizens to attune themselves toward both the neighbor and the stranger. This book is necessary reading for any scholar interested in civic engagement, radical democracy, and religious ethics. -- Jacob L. Goodson, Southwestern College

Author Information

William W. Young III is professor of religion and philosophy at Endicott College.

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