Review: Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us, by Kim Haines-Eitzen

Sound shapes experience. Kim Haines-Eitzen builds her innovative study around this central principle. She challenges readers “to ask what it means to orient ourselves to a place through listening and to engage in a practice of deep listening” and “also to other voices, past and present, who have been shaped by acoustical landscapes” (111). In Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us, Haines-Eitzen weaves together early monastic stories with personal narrative and wider literature to illuminate the connections across time that point to the shared human experience of sound, its relationship to environment, and its effect on lived religious experience. The tone of the book is reflective, with the feel of a guided meditation through the soundscapes of several deserts and through ancient monastic sources. This unusual approach yields new ways to examine and interrogate ancient sources and new ways to apply...