In this Book
- Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: NYU Press
summary
For six months in 2004, controversy raged in Hamtramck, Michigan, as residents debated a proposed amendment that would exempt the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, from the city’s anti-noise ordinance. The call to prayer functioned as a flashpoint in disputes about the integration of Muslims into this historically Polish-Catholic community. No one openly contested Muslims’ right to worship in their mosques, but many neighbors framed their resistance around what they regarded as the inappropriate public pronouncement of Islamic presence, an announcement that audibly intruded upon their public space.
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.
In the North American Religions series
Isaac Weiner is Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xiv
- Introduction
- pp. 1-16
- Part I: The Sounds of Power
- Part II: The Sounds of Dissent
- 3. A New Regulatory Regime
- pp. 79-97
- Part III: The Sounds of Difference
- 6. Calling Muslims—and Christians—to Pray
- pp. 158-194
- Conclusion
- pp. 195-208
- About the Author
- pp. 251-266
Additional Information
ISBN
9780814708064
Related ISBN(s)
9780814708071
MARC Record
OCLC
860908714
Pages
288
Launched on MUSE
2013-10-21
Language
English
Open Access
No