The Listening Heart: Vocation And the Crisis of Modern Culture [Hardcover]

A. J. Conyers (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1890626686 | ISBN-13: 978-1890626686 | Publication Date: December 15, 2006

A culture built upon the ideology of individual choice will be culture of alienation, loneliness, and violence. In a provocative new book, A. J. Conyers shows that Western culture was once informed by a sense of vocation, that men understood life as a response to a call from outside and above themselves. Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, the sense of vocation began to fade, to be replaced by the modern celebration of the unfettered human will. In such a society, Conyers argues, where relations among men are based on force, true community is impossible. The idea of vocation is of central importance in the Judeo-Christian tradition, of course, but Conyers shows how it has shaped non-Western societies as well. In every tradition, he finds, the divine call to which men respond is usually both arduous and contrary to their own will. When men s responsibility to the One who calls them is replaced by the cult of choice for its own sake, the ties of family, church, clan the ties of affection that constitute real community are dissolved. Society is organized but not organic, obsessed with a radical equality that reduces men to interchangeability. In the culture of choice, there is only the individual and the omnipotent state. In a stunning insight, Conyers shows that the quintessential institution of modernity is slavery, for the slave is the ultimate autonomous individual. Stripped of every human tie, he belongs to no community but to a stranger. It is no accident, then, that the rise of modern slavery coincided with the Enlightenment itself. This wide-ranging study, refreshingly free of sentimentality, makes the barbarism and unparalleled violence of the twentieth century explicable. For a society that casts off the burden of vocation abandons that which makes it human.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Theologian Conyers' last book (he died in 2004) follows naturally from his acclaimed explanation of the redefinition of tolerance to facilitate the growth of the modern, centralized state, The Long Truce (2001). It looks back to the kind of community that existed before modernity, when it was understood that everyone had a place and a function in a community whose source of power and legitimacy is God. Because of this understanding, each member of a community awaited a call to service that was ultimately divine in providence and in any event did not proceed from selfish considerations. The eventuality was that each community member did work that was valued and that suited him or her, in particular. Of course, allegiance was to the community and to God, not, as under modernity, which prefers personal choice to calling as the prime motivator in a human life, willfully to the self and under compulsion to the state. Conyers sees in vocation a solution to personal alienation, social fragmentation, and even to overweening political power, and he points to early Christianity for models of vocation-driven community life. He argues the benefits of learning to listen to one another in the spirit of an older form of tolerance that included and attended to everyone who was serious about "the foundational questions of what it means to be human and to live in community." Ray Olson
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Review

In The Listening Heart, Conyers writes with power and conviction. Whether in agreement or disagreement, the reader will find much to mull over and to savor. --Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago

The Listening Heart is for all who want to build faithful communities of love and learning. --Timothy George, executive editor, Christianity Today

A. J. Conyers is a wonderful critic of the interplay between the classical Christian faith and the contemporary world. The Listening Heart is a stimulating, engaging book. --Bishop William H. Willimon, former Dean of the Chapel, Duke University --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 217 pages
• Publisher: Spence Publishing Company (December 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890626686
• ISBN-13: 978-1890626686
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,983,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Both Beautiful and Useful, March 13, 2007

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thehomefront (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Listening Heart: Vocation And the Crisis of Modern Culture (Hardcover)

The Listening Heart is a rarity: both beautiful and practical. It's a book that belongs in the hands of everyone, because everyone has a calling from God, but especially in the hands of thoughtful young people who wish (or should wish) to discern that calling.