The Art Of Listening In The Early Church

How did people think about listening in the ancient world, and what evidence do we have of it in practice? The Christian faith came to the illiterate majority in the early Church through their ears. This proved problematic: the senses and the body had long been held in suspicion as all too temporal, mutable and distracting. Carol Harrison argues that despite profound ambivalence on these matters, in practice, the senses, and in particular the sense of hearing, were ultimately regarded as necessary - indeed salvific -constraints for fallen human beings. By examining early catechesis, preaching and prayer, she demonstrates that what illiterate early Christians heard both formed their minds and souls and, above all, enabled them to become 'literate' listeners; able not only to grasp the rule of faith but also tacitly to follow the infinite variations on it which were played out in early Christian teaching, exegesis and worship. It becomes clear that listening to the faith was less a matter of rationally appropriating facts and more an art which needed to be constantly practiced: for what was heard could not be definitively fixed and pinned down, but was ultimately the Word of the unknowable, transcendent God. This word demanded of early Christian listeners a response - to attend to its echoes, recollect and represent it, stretch out towards it source, and in the process, be transformed by it.

The sense of hearing was particularly important in the ancient world when the majority of people were illiterate. Rhetoric has been given attention in this context, but listening has been virtually ignored. This book deals with the practical and theological issues which listening to an incorporeal, unknowable God raised for early Christians.

The Gospel of John presents its readers, listeners, and interpreters with a serious problem: how can we reconcile the Gospel’s exalted spirituality and deep knowledge of Judaism with its portrayal of the Jews as the children of the devil (John 8:44) who persecuted Christ and his followers? One widespread solution to this problem is the so-called “expulsion hypothesis.” According to this view, the Fourth Gospel was addressed to a Jewish group of believers in Christ that had been expelled from the synagogue due to their faith. The anti-Jewish elements express their natural resentment of how they had been treated; the Jewish elements of the Gospel, on the other hand, reflect the Jewishness of this group and also soften the force of the Gospel’s anti-Jewish comments. In Cast out of the Covenant, this book, Adele Reinhartz presents a detailed critique of the expulsion hypothesis on literary and historical grounds. She argues that, far from softening the Gospel’s anti-Jewishness, the Gospel’s Jewish elements in fact contribute to it. Focusing on the Gospel’s persuasive language and intentions, Reinhartz shows that the Gospel’s anti-Jewishness is evident not only in the Gospel’s hostile comments about the Jews but also in its appropriation of Torah, Temple, and Covenant that were so central to first-century Jewish identity. Through its skillful use of rhetoric, the Gospel attempts to convince its audience that God’s favor had turned away from the Jews to the Gentiles; that there is a deep rift between the synagogue and those who confess Christ as Messiah; and that, in the Gospel’s view, this rift was initiated in Jesus’ own lifetime. The Fourth Gospel, Reinhartz argues, appropriates Jewishness at the same time as it repudiates Jews. In doing so, it also promotes a “parting of the ways” between those who believe that Jesus is the messiah, the Son of God, and those who do not, that is, the Jews. This rhetorical program, she suggests, may have been used to promote outreach or even an organized mission to the Gentiles, following in the footsteps of Paul and his mid-first-century contemporaries.

An investigation on ancient sources (patristic and liturgical) on the Cross and the Eucharist that sheds light on contemporary discussions.

"The Art of Preaching: A Theological and Practical Primer explores the theological understanding of the homily, lessons from classical and contemporary rhetoric, the relevance of preaching for the life of the Church, highlighting recent teachings of the Magisterium, and it presents the incarnation as the foundation for preaching, understood as an essential aspect of the priestly life and mission. This primer offers a simple and effective method for the preparation and delivery of homilies. The book also provides a selection of homilies from the great preachers of the Church, organized chronologically, with brief introductions and commentaries that highlight what those homilies teach us for preaching today"--

Emotions in Byzantium came to life through hymnody, which invited the faithful to step into a liturgical world of compunction.

Ecologies of Resonance in Christian Musicking Rexplores a diverse range of Christian musical activity through the conceptual lens of resonance, a concept rooted in the physical, vibrational, and sonic realm that carries with it an expansive ability to simultaneously describe personal, social, and spiritual realities. In this book, Mark Porter proposes that attention to patterns of back-and-forth interaction that exist in and alongside sonic activity can help to understand the dynamics of religious musicking in new ways and, at the same time, can provide a means for bringing diverse traditions into conversation. The book focuses on different questions arising out of human experience in the moment of worship. What happens if we take the entry point of a human being experiencing certain patterns of (more than) sonic interaction with the world around them as a focus for exploration? What different ecologies of interaction can be encountered? What kinds of patterns can be traced through different Christian worshiping environments? And how do these operate across multiple dimensions of experience? Chapters covering ascetic sounding, noisy congregations, and Internet live-streaming, among others, serve to highlight the diverse ecologies of resonance that surround Christian musicking, suggesting the potential to develop new perspectives on devotional musical activity that focus not primarily on compositions or theological ideals but on changing patterns of interaction across multiple dimensions between individuals, spaces, communities, and God.