Dismissed as a passive behavior that comes naturally, listening is, in fact, a complex and learned activity that can be perfected. Like reading, writing, and speaking, listening as a practical activity is critical for success in college life and beyond. But while rhetoric as the art of speaking has been a basic course in higher education for millennia, rarely if ever has a course in the humanities focused on the art of listening. In this article, the author discusses how he structured his undergraduate course called "Issues in Rhetoric and Culture: The Art of Listening." The goal of this course is to build some practical skills in the art of listening within a humanities context, which might give these practical skills meaning beyond function (e.g., better grades, better job performance, better personal relationships). Believing that listening has been neglected as a rhetorical art, the author's goal is to offer some new cultural criticism by way of his focus on the art of listening. He intends to demonstrate that in late modernity the art of listening has moved out of the public sphere and out of the relationship to God into the domain of so-called soft social science, most importantly, psychoanalysis. (Contains 1 table.)