Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

FAIN: FT-60476-13

Isaac Amitai Weiner
Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA 30303-3011)

This book project offers a new model for analyzing the politics of religious pluralism in the United States by attending to disputes about public religious sound. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, I examine a series of historical case studies in which neighbors complained about religious sounds spilling over into public spaces. I use these noise disputes to consider how Americans have heard and responded to the sounds of religious difference and how sound has figured into broader contests over religion's place in American spatial and social order. Complaining about religion as noise has offered a valuable strategy for silencing religious dissent and for circumscribing religion's boundaries more generally. At the same time, religious individuals and groups have rarely kept quiet. They have insisted instead on their right to practice religion out loud, implicitly advancing alternative understandings of religion and its place in the modern world.

Associated Products

Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (Book)
Title: Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism
Author: Isaac Weiner
Abstract: Throughout U.S. history, complaints about religion as noise have proven useful both for restraining religious dissent and for circumscribing religion’s boundaries more generally. At the same time, religious individuals and groups rarely have kept quiet. They have insisted on their right to practice religion out loud, implicitly advancing alternative understandings of religion and its place in the modern world. In Religion Out Loud, Isaac Weiner takes such sonic disputes seriously. Weaving the story of religious “noise” through multiple historical eras and diverse religious communities, he convincingly demonstrates that religious pluralism has never been solely a matter of competing values, truth claims, or moral doctrines, but of different styles of public practice, of fundamentally different ways of using body and space—and that these differences ultimately have expressed very different conceptions of religion itself. Weiner’s innovative work encourages scholars to pay much greater attention to the publicly contested sensory cultures of American religious life.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=10821#.UmVtPBbZW-8
Publisher: NYU Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780814708200
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (Book)
Title: Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism
Author: Isaac Weiner
Abstract: Throughout U.S. history, complaints about religion as noise have proven useful both for restraining religious dissent and for circumscribing religion’s boundaries more generally. At the same time, religious individuals and groups rarely have kept quiet. They have insisted on their right to practice religion out loud, implicitly advancing alternative understandings of religion and its place in the modern world. In Religion Out Loud, Isaac Weiner takes such sonic disputes seriously. Weaving the story of religious “noise” through multiple historical eras and diverse religious communities, he convincingly demonstrates that religious pluralism has never been solely a matter of competing values, truth claims, or moral doctrines, but of different styles of public practice, of fundamentally different ways of using body and space—and that these differences ultimately have expressed very different conceptions of religion itself. Weiner’s innovative work encourages scholars to pay much greater attention to the publicly contested sensory cultures of American religious life.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=10821#.UmVtPBbZW-8
Publisher: NYU Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780814708200
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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