Tag Archives: General religious studies

An Epistemology for Listening Across Religious, Cultural, and Political Divides

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Categories: Publications

This essay is my first systematic published articulation of my theory of Sacrificial Listening. Many thanks to Mike Berhow and Greg Peterson of South Dakota State University for giving me a chance to sketch out some of my ideas there during a rich conversation in 2016, and for subsequently welcoming this more developed essay into their volume on the importance of intellectual virtues in a polarized society:

“An Epistemology for Listening Across Religious, Cultural, and Political Divides.” In Engaging Populism: Democracy and the Intellectual Virtues, ed. Gregory R. Peterson, Michael C. Berhow, and George Tsakiridis, 185–214. [London]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

This essay stems from two decades of reflection on my scholarship and teaching in the field of Islamic studies. That thinking was first articulated somewhat autobiographically, with a focus on pedagogy, in a paper called “Sacrificial Listening: Christians, Muslims, and the Secular University.” It was fleshed out more systematically in a talk at the University of Oklahoma, “Sacrificial Listening: An Epistemology and Pedagogy for Intellectual Humility in the Humanities.” In this published chapter I attempt to sharpen its philosophical grounding, frame it in terms of intellectual virtues, and broaden its application to include the understanding of Others across political lines.

The published essay and the entire volume are available from Palgrave Macmillan at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05785-4. Here I am only able to post my Author’s Original preprint manuscript as a pdf file.

Sacrificial Listening: An Epistemology and Pedagogy for Intellectual Humility in the Humanities

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Categories: Presentations

This paper attempted to articulate in a more detailed and systematic way the notion of “sacrificial listening” that is the guiding principle of my research and teaching. Its main points were presented to a group of colleagues in philosophy, psychology, education, and other fields at the University of Oklahoma, as part of the Virtue Forum Luncheon series of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing. Many thanks to Institute director Nancy Snow for this great chance to get some interdisciplinary input on this long-term project, and to the audience for a very helpful discussion.

“Sacrificial Listening: An Epistemology and Pedagogy for Intellectual Humility in the Humanities.” Virtue Forum Luncheon series of the Self, Virtue and Public Life Project, Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing, University of Oklahoma, October 9, 2019.

Here is a pdf of the full paper. A more developed version has since been published as An Epistemology for Listening Across Religious, Cultural, and Political Divides.

Panel on difficult passages in the Bible and the Qur’an

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Categories: Presentations

On March 16, 2016, I got to engage in an hour-and-a-half public discussion with James Murphy, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Christian origins at South Dakota State University, on the topic of “Religious Texts & Social Contexts: Challenging Interpretations in a Changing World.” We discussed our different responses to hard passages in the Qur’an and the Bible. I was enriched by my engagement with James Murphy, and with Krystal Smith of the Veritas Forum, which organized the event. Video of our discussion was available at http://www.veritas.org/religious-texts-social-conflicts/, but even the archived version of that page no longer seems to function.

Sacrificial Listening: Christians, Muslims, and the Secular University

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Categories: Personal, Publications, Teaching

This auto-biographical essay recounts the development of several themes and directions in my work as a Christian scholar of Islam, including my pedagogy of sacrificial listening.

David R. Vishanoff. “Sacrificial Listening: Christians, Muslims, and the Secular University.” In Faithful Is Successful: Notes to the Driven Pilgrim, ed. Nathan Grills, David E. Lewis, and S. Joshua Swamidass, 213-243. Denver: Outskirts Press, 2014. (ISBN 978-1478730354)

A scanned copy is posted here as a pdf file, by permission of the editors, for personal non-commercial use only.

A Pedagogy of Sacrificial Listening

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Categories: Teaching

Scholarship and teaching are both forms of human relationship. My purpose for both is to enable the development of further relationships characterized by integrity and by an ongoing process of coming to understand. Both must therefore be governed by the same principles.

The study of religions consists in listening to unfamiliar voices with sacrificial attention, constructing conceptual models that allow one to relate what one has heard to familiar categories, and then subjecting those models and categories to deconstruction through self-criticism and further acts of listening.

Teaching religions consists primarily of modeling and fostering the process of coming to understand unfamiliar primary texts and living voices through the practice of sacrificial listening.

Students should leave a course not with ‘talking knowledge’ – the ability to talk about religion – but with ‘listening knowledge’: a basic mental map, and the moral commitment and analytical ability to use and redraw that map as they strive to understand new religious voices and develop new relationships beyond the classroom.

Since teaching not only enables the development of new relationships, but is itself one form of human relationship, sacrificial listening must be a hallmark of student-teacher interaction in and outside the classroom. Students’ contributions must be given the same quality of attention as the voices being studied, so that they too may spark revisions in my ways of thinking and teaching.

The development of this pedagogy is explained in my essay “Sacrificial Listening: Christians, Muslims, and the Secular University.”