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Contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship itself. Author Monique M. Ingalls argues that participatory worship music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations, or "modes of congregating". Through exploration of five of these modes--concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations--Singing the Congregation reinvigorates the analytic categories of "congregation" and "congregational music." Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology and congregational studies, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice--in this case, the musically-structured participatory activity known as "worship." "Congregational music-making" is thereby recast as a practice capable of weaving together a religious community both inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a powerful way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that comprise this global religious community. The interactions among the congregations reveal widespread conflicts over religious authority, carrying far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias (and other oppositional religious communities), music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume as a whole, then, approaches Christian groups and their musics as diverse and powerful windows into the way in which music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) between places, now and historically. It also tries to take account of the religious self-understandings of these groups, presenting Christian musical practice and exchange as encompassing and negotiating deeply felt and deeply rooted moral and cultural values. Given that the centerpiece of the volume is Christian religious musical practice, the volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.

Chronicling the amazing rise of this genre from its gospel roots to today's diverse musical sound, this guide offers a complete capsule encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian artists as well as an introduction to the music form. 40 illustrations.

More than Precious Memories is the first book of its kind--a collection of essays offering scholarly analysis and interpretation of Southern Gospel Music. Believing Southern Gospel Music to be a significant cultural and religious phenomenon worthy of the best efforts of scholarship, Grayes and Fillingim have assembled a diverse group of scholars who apply a variety of methods and theories to the task of understanding Southern Gospel Music and its cultural context. These scholars and approaches include the following. - Scott Tucker, looks at the theme of "heaven" in six of the Gaither Homecoming songbooks - David Fillingim looks at how Southern Gospel Music answers the question of theodicy from the perspective of the rural white, working class - Robert M. McManus explores selected song lyrics to show how Southern - Gospel Music helps construct the identity of the community compared to Contemporary Christian Music - Darlene R. Graves identifies key sustaining personality strengths of women that tend to preserve consistency between their public performance and personal spiritual walk - Elizabeth F. Desnoyers Colas and Stephanie Howard (Asabi) explore Southern Gospel and Black Gospel music through the influence of Thomas A. Dorsey - Michael Graves examines how the culture of Southern Gospel Music deals with its inevitable prodigal sons - Raymond D.S. Anderson analyzes the Gaither Homecoming videos as examples of the postmodern turn in American popular Christian culture - John D. Keeler presents the first audience study of Southern Gospel Music employing a "Uses and Gratifications" research framework - Paul A. Creasman examines the ways Southern Gospel Musicas a culture memorializes its dead by use of the Internet - Naaman Wood reviews significant scholarly approaches to the study of popular music.

The second edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music provides an updated, state-of-the-art analysis of the most important themes and concepts in the field, combining research in religious studies, theology, critical musicology, cultural analysis, and sociology. It comprises 30 updated essays and six new chapters covering the following areas: · Popular Music, Religion, and Performance · Musicological Perspectives · Popular Music and Religious Syncretism · Atheism and Popular Music · Industrial Music and Noise · K-pop The Handbook continues to provide a guide to methodology, key genres and popular music subcultures, as well as an extensive updated bibliography. It remains the essential tool for anyone with an interest in popular culture generally and religion and popular music in particular.

Don Cusic presents gospel music as part of the history of contemporary Christianity. From the psalms of the early Puritans through the hymns of Isaac Watts and the social activism of the Wesleys, gospel music was established in eighteenth-century America. With the camp meetings songs of the Kentucky Revival and the spirituals and hymns that stemmed from the Civil War and beyond, gospel music grew through the nineteenth century and expanded through new technologies in the twentieth century.

Formed in 1972, Jesus People USA is an evangelical Christian community that fundamentally transformed the American Christian music industry and the practice of American evangelicalism, which continues to evolve under its influence. In this fascinating ethnographic study, Shawn David Young replays not only the growth and influence of the group over the past three decades but also the left-leaning politics it developed that continue to serve as a catalyst for change. Jesus People USA established a still-thriving Christian commune in downtown Chicago and a ground-breaking music festival that redefined the American Christian rock industry. Rather than join "establishment" evangelicalism and participate in what would become the megachurch movement, this community adopted a modified socialism and embraced forms of activism commonly associated with the New Left. Today the ideological tolerance of Jesus People USA aligns them closer to liberalism than to the religious right, and Young studies the embodiment of this liminality and its challenge to mainstream evangelical belief. He suggests the survival of this group is linked to a growing disenchantment with the separation of public and private, individual and community, and finds echoes of this postmodern faith deep within the evangelical subculture.

Rock music, once largely the domain of hedonism and debauchery of every kind, is now populated by a surprising case of upstanding and in many cases devout citizens who create all different kinds of music and oftentimes are animated by religious ideas that would have been completely alien to rock stars of yesteryear. The religious and religiously influenced are now commonplace in rock 'n' roll (Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Katy Perry, 21 Pilots). But is that good for either rock or the faith? In Rock Gets Religion producer and author Mark Joseph explores the tensions caused when religious youth are thrown into the world of rock 'n' roll. He weaves thoughtful commentary amidst the stories of devout and not-so-devout rockers--along with a warning about the inherent dangers of sanctifying rock. Four major trends caused this big-tent takeover: (1) Dozens of rookie artists are bypassing the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) scene altogether going directly to mainstream labels; (2) established CCM artists are switching to mainstream recording companies; (3) Those artists who experience religious conversions are staying in mainstream music instead of leaving for the church circuit; and (4) the American Idol phenomenon resulted in pop stars being picked by the American people instead of music industry gatekeepers who selected the stars of yesteryear. As a result, while CCM sales of Christian music as a genre may have been in a steady decline, the religious influence on rock has never been greater. Rock Gets Religion lays out the case for people of faith to continue to make their music in the middle of popular culture, and updates the scene with dozens of success (and not so successful) stories of Christians who have done just that. "Mark Joseph has been a key voice in the transformation of American popular music," says former Van Halen singer Gary Cherone. "In this book, his final in a three-part series, he shows us how the transformation happened and outlines a vision for the future of the unlikely alliance of rock music and serious faith."

In The Spirit of Praise, Monique Ingalls and Amos Yong bring together a multidisciplinary, scholarly exploration of music and worship in global pentecostal-charismatic Christianity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Spirit of Praise contends that gaining a full understanding of this influential religious movement requires close listening to its songs and careful attention to its patterns of worship. The essays in this volume place ethnomusicological, theological, historical, and sociological perspectives into dialogue. By engaging with these disciplines and exploring themes of interconnection, interface, and identity within musical and ritual practices, the essays illuminate larger social processes such as globalization, sacralization, and secularization, as well as the role of religion in social and cultural change. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Peter Althouse, Will Boone, Mark Evans, Ryan R. Gladwin, Birgitta J. Johnson, Jean Ngoya Kidula, Miranda Klaver, Andrew Mall, Kimberly Jenkins Marshall, Andrew M. McCoy, Martijn Oosterbaan, Dave Perkins, Wen Reagan, Tanya Riches, Michael Webb, and Michael Wilkinson.