“hearing to speech"

Nelle Morton coined the feminist principle of “hearing to speech.” Morton’s new understanding of hearing and speaking came to her while she was with a group of women who gathered to tell their stories. As one woman shared her story – a story which at times reached points of excruciating pain – no one moved or interrupted, everyone seemed to be holding their breath. At the end, when the woman finally finished, she said, “You heard me. You heard me all the way – I have the strange feeling you heard me before I started. You heard me to my own story.”

Morton recognized that hearing to speech, hearing all the way, was a “complete reversal of the going logic” in which a person speaks so that more accurate hearing may take place. What Morton was instead witnessing was a depth hearing, a kind of hearing that engages the whole self to the point of holding ones breath in order to allow the coherence of the story to form and come together. This kind of hearing evokes “a new speech – a new creation” – it enables one to be heard to ones own story, which then creates the possibility for new imagining, an imagining that contributes to the mutual empowerment and transformation of both hearer and speaker.

Scholarship is very personal in nature. I think people write and study because they care deeply about a given issue or circumstance and hope to impact it and make a difference for the better. If scholars would be mindful of that and keep it in mind as we engage with each another’s work, we may be more successful at bringing out the academic best in one another. We should of course point out the blind spots and shortcomings of each other’s work, but we must do so out of a sense of mutuality, with encouragement and respect, knowing that when we hear each other to speech we not only participate in another’s empowerment and be-coming, but also help tap into the source the of new imagining that can “break through political and social structures and imagine a new system.”

-- "Hearing Each Other to Speech in the Academy" By Xochitl Alvizo

The "hearing to speech" metaphor was referenced in Sodomy Cases and a search also obtain this UUA discussion of abortion:

What I see as the real challenge of the abortion issue is how we choose to be present with women in procreative crisis—how we choose to honor their needs and concerns. It is what feminist scholar Nelle Morton calls, "hearing each other into speech." It is what Gethsemane refers to as "the call to watch."

The lead excerpt's author also is connected to something known as "pub church," which I see has its own Wikipedia page, so it clearly arrived as a concept. The first Christian churches were often meetings at homes, so why not have religious meetings at pubs or cafes or other public places?

Anyways, I checked out what turns out to be the fourth (there is a fifth now) version of the UUA pocket guide, a sort of "very short introduction" affair. It was sort of a rambling affair, but it gives you a decent taste of the basics of the religion and its history.