Book Review

Canada and the United States

Leigh Eric Schmidt begins and concludes this book with references to contemporary American culture. He introduces his subject by pointing to the work of Joe Nickell, a magician he describes as keeping alive "the Enlightenment dream of exposing the illusions, impostures, and credulities of religion" (p. 1). In the epilogue, Schmidt argues that the desire for "holy listening," the spiritual longing for both sounds and silence that bespeak a depth of religious meaning in the universe, has not by any means subsided by the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the five chapters between, Schmidt elaborates an appealingly complex cultural and historical conversation about what can or cannot be heard, should or should not be heard. It is grounded in the American Enlightenment but makes multiple connections forward and backward in time and ranges back and forth across the Atlantic as well. The larger, framing plot for this stimulating study is the ongoing, ever intertwining story line of demystification, disenchantment, and re-enchantment, dual and dueling convictions about divine absence and presence in the world. In Schmidt's interpretation, the ear, not the eye, becomes the instrument of both efforts.

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