Includes bibliographical references.

"For the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophany of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous desert shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how the ambient sounds of wind, thunder, water, and animals shaped the emergence and development of early Christian monasticism, and then showing how their desert quests offer profound lessons for us about what it means to search for silence"--adapted from book jacket.