Listening, Religion, and Democracy in Contemporary Boston

Gods Ears

By (author) William W. Young

Publication date:

01 November 2018

Length of book:

190 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498576086

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.

Part I: Regimes of Religious Listening

Introduction

Chapter 1: Heavenly Sounds in the Earthly City: Music and Religious Regimes of Listening

Chapter 2: Listening in the Spirit: Practices of Communal Formation

Part II: Religious Listening and the Pursuit of Democracy

Chapter 3: The Paradoxes of Religious and Democratic Virtue

Chapter 4: Hearing the Cry: Listening and Civic Engagement

Chapter 5: Defiant Obedience: Rethinking the Acoustics of Boston’s Religious Life

Chapter 6: Religion, Listening, and the Acoustics of Democracy

This ethnographic study of several Christian and Jewish congregations in contemporary Boston is informed by an extensive interdisciplinary consideration of religious and political theory, philosophy, and ethnomusicology. Young (Endicott College) offers a central thesis arguing that religious institutions foster distinctive habits of listening, where believers serve as “God’s ears” and individually and collectively adopt a divinely inspired response to the world. Religion instills virtues (hospitality, patience, humility, steadfastness) that resonate with democratic virtues to motivate the faithful to build community, engage neighbors, and promote social justice. Young anatomizes the dimensions and typologies of religious listening, religious and democratic virtues, the organizational structure of congregations and the relationship to democratic action, the varieties of musical listening, the forms of religious listening in prayer and liturgy, and the dialectic of obedient versus autonomous listening. The example of a small group of Quakers who gather weekly for silent prayer and a peace witness at the gates of a suburban defense contractor provides a powerful account of the “obedience to the truth”—an improvisational listening that moves these Friends to religiously inspired, democratic action. Young has created an indispensable guide for the study of religious listening and democracy.

Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.