Hearing Voices: Reading as Listening in Literature, Law, and Theology

Jack Sammons has always written from the center. Whether he is writing about teaching, or the legal profession, or law, or religion, or music, or baseball, or manners, everything he says comes from the same mysterious and powerful place: coherent, honest, generous, and sincere, not at all aggressive, but insistent upon the value and importance of the inquiry at hand. Jack writes as the whole person he is, with a constant and deep integrity. As we all know, an important part of what Jack has written about is the world of sound and music, to which he is richly alive.

I think especially of The Law's Melody, in which he builds a whole ontology, and ethics too, on a musical base. For him, the analogy between law and music leads to a vision of meaning emerging out of mystery, a process in which we can participate but which we cannot control, and thus one that constantly calls upon us to live out of the great theological virtues of hope and faith.