Description: Listening to God proceeds from the author's belief that a wide spectrum of people are attracted to religion, yet are wary of it. The book is designed to describe Howard Lesnick's own experience in coming to find in religious language and practice an expression of a belief for which, as Paul Tillich describes, "we have no name".

Understanding that many individuals are uncomfortable with their disconnection with religion, Lesnick presents a book that is grounded in a single religious perspective yet manifests genuine appreciation, not only of other faith traditions, but also for the substantial bases for deep skepticism about any religious beliefs or practices. In the book, Lesnick recounts the odyssey of his own engagement with religion, from a mild form of conventional adherence to Conservative Judaism as an adolescent, to a long period of alienation from all religion, to a gradual, growing, and changed reengagement with both Judaism and other religions.

The God of which Lesnick speaks is both the repository of truth about the moral life and the force that draws him to struggle to discern and follow it. Although he writes from a predominantly Jewish perspective, Lesnick addresses what it is to believe in God, regardless of religious perspective. The book articulates the ways in which the author found it illuminating to turn to religious language, religious metaphors and religious images, not as a source of metaphysical knowledge or belief but as an aid to understanding, an aid to discernment of moral truth and the way it can be an aid to those, like him, who are searching for that feeling that cannot be named.

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