Abstract
The Bible in Music: A Dictionary of Songs, Works, and More
by Siobhán Dowling Long and John F. A. Sawyer
Lanham: Rowman& Littlefield, 2015. 372 pp. $95.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8108-8451-9.
Until now, no reference work has yet appeared on the Bible and Western music. This volume fills that gap, providing a convenient guide to musical interpretations of the Bible. Alongside examples of classical music from the Middle Ages through modern times, the authors bring attention to the Bible’s impact on popular culture with numerous entries on hymns, spirituals, musicals, film music, and contemporary popular music. Each entry contains essential information about the original context of the work and, where relevant, its afterlife in literature, film, politics, and liturgy. It includes an index of biblical references and an index of biblical names, a bibliography, a glossary of technical terms and an index of artists, authors, and composers. It is designed to encourage choirs, musicians, musicologists, lecturers, teachers, and students of music and religious education to discover and perform some less well-known pieces, as well as helping them to listen to familiar music with a fresh awareness of what it is about.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities
edited by Suzel Ana Reilyand Jonathan M. Dueck
Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 744 pp. $150.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-19-985999-3.
This handbook investigates music’s role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religious experience and practices around the globe. It 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 examine Christianities and their music in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. Five themes are explored: 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 approaches Christian groups and their varieties of music 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. 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.
Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening
by Jeremy Begbie
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; reprint 2015 (pbk). 272 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-19-874503-7.
When the story of modernity is told from a theological perspective, music is routinely ignored—despite its pervasiveness in modern culture and the manifold ways it has been intertwined with modernity’s ambivalent relation to the Christian God. In conversation with musicologists and music theorists, this collection of essays shows that the practices of music and the discourses it has generated bear their own kind of witness to some of the pivotal theological currents and counter-currents shaping modernity. Music has been deeply affected by these currents and in some cases may have played a part in generating them. Begbie argues that music is capable of yielding highly effective ways of addressing and moving beyond some of the more intractabletheological problems and dilemmas which modernity has bequeathed to us. The volume includes studies of Calvin, Luther, and Bach, an exposition of the intriguing tussle between Rousseau and the composer Rameau, and an account of the heady exaltation of music in the early German Romantics. Particular attention is paid to the complex relations between music and language, and the ways in which theology, a discipline involving language at its heart, can come to terms with practices like music, practices which are coherent and meaningful but which in many respects do not operate in language-like ways.
Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word
by Maeve Louise Heaney; foreword by Jeremy Begbie
Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 360 pp. $42.00. ISBN 978-1-61097-450-9.
This volume insists that music be given a place in the ecology of theology, that music offers a form of approach to or comprehension of faith that is different than linguistic and conceptual understanding. Heaney does not set music against linguistic expressions of faith but proposes that there are aspects of the Logos, God revealed in the Word made flesh, that are better expressed through music, and that theology would do well to integrate this symbolic form of expression. Indeed, “there are things which God may only be saying through music”; thus, it is incumbent upon us to listen. Drawing primarily from Roman Catholic sources of wisdom, the book addresses music’s capacity to “say” or reveal something of the Word to us, and its role in and as theology.
Moses: The Man and the Myth in Music
by Helen Leneman
Bible in the Modern World. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2014. 320 pp. $80.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-9096-9744-7.
Moses has often been regarded more as a myth than a man. Later retellings of his story—particularly in operas and oratorios—demythologize him, while portraying him and characters surrounding him on a more human scale. Leneman discusses sixteen operas and oratorios from the eighteenth to the twentieth century—including works by Handel, Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Schoenberg, and more obscure composers. Through music, the listener can hear and also feel the suffering of the Israelites; the passion of Moses as leader, liberator, and even lover; the intensity of Miriam’s vision and commitment; and the whole range of emotion experienced by every character that inhabits this story. The music and librettos not only fill in the spaces between the lines, but go beyond the margins of the biblical text to conjure up a multi-dimensional world.
Singing the Church’s Song: Essays and Occasional Writings on Church Music
by Carl Schalk; foreword by Martin E. Marty
Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2015. 272 pp. $20.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1942304-06-7.
The essays in this collection by a noted Lutheran composer and scholar, gathered from presentations made over the years to various groups interested in the worship and music of the church, are grouped in five categories: the tradition of the church’s song; the Lutheran tradition of worship and church music; aspects of Lutheran hymnody; the composer of church music in the Lutheran tradition; and miscellaneous items (acoustics in worship, brief homilies, and devotional writings). At the heart of these writings is the simple proposition that church musicians need to be both theologically informed and musically skilled. Underlying themes include the central importance of the great tradition of the church’s worship and song and the central role of proclamation and teaching in worship, music, and congregational song.
Song That Blesses Earth: Hymn Texts, Carols, and Poems
by Thomas H. Troeger
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 120 pp. $21.95. ISBN 978-0-1934-0549-3.
This collection of poetry, written by one of the most celebrated hymn writers in the United States, includes hymn texts, carols, and poems for all occasions throughout the liturgical year. Troeger displays an artful gift of language through beautiful and expressive texts. The book is organized by theme and includes practical and useful indexes on meter, scriptural references, and liturgical usage, intending to enrich the work of preachers, liturgists, church musicians, and composers.
Liturgical-Missional: Perspectives on a Reformed Ecclesiology
edited by Neal D. Presa; foreword by Olav FykseTveit
Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016. 294 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-1-62564-702-3.
What is the nature and purpose of the church for a twenty-first-century world? What is the church’s calling in an age of globalization? Twenty-one pastors and theologians in the Reformed tradition offer insightful perspectives by bringing into conversation the treasures of liturgical and missional theology. They see the church’s essential character to be as worshipping-witnessing communities, gathered and sent by the triune God. Topics explored include the relationship between worship and mission, baptism and the Eucharist, the formative role of community, the catholicity and ecumenicity of the church, multiculturalism, and hymnody. Joseph D. Small, Darrell Guder, Martha Moore-Keish, John Burgess, and Mark Labberton are among the twenty-two contributors.
Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy
edited by Cláudio Carvalhaes
Postcolonialism and Religions. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015. 319 pp. $100.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-349-70362-3.
This book provides a reading of the liturgical field with postcolonial and decolonial lenses. Twenty-two contributors dissect how colonizers have exploited notions of worship and religious practices, and how those on the receiving end of these notions have responded to such forms of exploitation, in a variety of ways. The volume also engages interreligious perspectives. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars from different fields of knowledge and many places across the globe introduce and expand the dialogue between the field of liturgy and postcolonial thinking. Connecting main themes in both fields, this book shows what is at stake in this dialectical scholarship.
Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ
by J. Todd Billings
Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015. 224 pp. $18.99. ISBN 978-1-58743-358-0.
A Reformed theologian shares his journey, struggle, and reflections on providence, lament, and life in Christ in light of his diagnosis of incurable cancer. Theologically robust yet practical, the book engages the open questions, areas of mystery, and times of disorientation in the Christian life. Billings offers concrete examples through autobiography, cultural commentary, and stories from others, showing how our human stories of joy and grief can be incorporated into the larger biblical story of God’s saving work in Christ.
The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women
edited by Elizabeth A. Johnson
Maryknoll: Orbis, 2016. 344 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-1-62698-172-0.
The Gospel of John recounts the story of an encounter between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at the well. After their conversation, she goes out to tell her neighbors about the mysterious stranger, and many of them believed “on the strength of her witness.” These essays, drawn from around the world, reveal the many ways that women have reflected on and borne witness to the person, teaching, and praxis of Jesus Christ in light of their own varied contexts. These contexts include their struggles for life amidst wrenching poverty, racism, and violence; their experience of being female in male-dominated structures in the church and society; and their commitment to promote justice in view of the human dignity of women, all done in tandem with their faith relationship with the living God. Sandra Schneiders, Judith Plaskow, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Kwok Pui-lan, Teresa Okure, Dorothee Soelle, and Delores Williams are among the twenty-eight contributors.
Knowledge and Christian Belief
by Alvin Plantinga
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015. 144 pp. $16.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-7204-3.
In his widely praised Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Alvin Plantinga discussed in great depth the question of the rationality or sensibility of Christian belief. In this book he presents the same ideas in a briefer, more accessible fashion. Plantinga, a leading Christian philosopher, probes what exactly is meant by the claim that religious—and specifically Christian—belief is irrational. He argues that the criticisms by such well-known atheists as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are wrong. Finally, Plantinga addresses several potential “defeaters” to Christian belief—pluralism, science, evil, and suffering—and shows how they fail to defeat rational Christian belief.
Revelation: A Handbook on the Greek Text
by David L. Mathewson
Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016. 367 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-60258-676-5.
This handbook offers teachers and students a comprehensive guide to the grammar and vocabulary of Revelation. A perfect supplement to any commentary, this volume’s lexical, analytical, and syntactical analysis is a helpful tool for navigating Revelation. Mathewson provides more than just an analytic key; he leads students toward both a greater understanding of the Greek text and an appreciation for the textual, rhetorical, and interpretive intricacies not available in English translations.