front cover of A Change Is Gonna Come
A Change Is Gonna Come
Music, Race & the Soul of America
Craig Werner
University of Michigan Press, 2006
". . . extraordinarily far-reaching. . . . highly accessible."
Notes

"No one has written this way about music in a long, long time. Lucid, insightful, with real spiritual, political, intellectual, and emotional grasp of the whole picture. A book about why music matters, and how, and to whom."
—Dave Marsh, author of Louie, Louie and Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story

"This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context. No one can do this better than Craig Werner."
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

"[Werner has] mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotion, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories."
African American Review

A Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement, to the slick pop of Motown; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March; from Woodstock's "Summer of Love" to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write "What's Going On."

Originally published in 1998, A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike. This new edition, featuring four new and updated chapters, will reintroduce Werner's seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers.

Craig Werner is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and author of many books, including Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. His most recent book is Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul.
[more]

front cover of A City Called Heaven
A City Called Heaven
Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music
Robert Marovich
University of Illinois Press, 2015
In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation.

A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

[more]

front cover of Commentary on the Gospel of John, Books 1-10
Commentary on the Gospel of John, Books 1-10
Origen
Catholic University of America Press, 1989
No description available
[more]

front cover of Commentary on the Gospel of John
Commentary on the Gospel of John
Chapters 13-21
Thomas Aquinas
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
No description available
[more]

front cover of Commentary on the Gospel of John
Commentary on the Gospel of John
Chapters 1-5
Thomas Aquinas
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
No description available
[more]

front cover of Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 6-12
Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 6-12
Thomas Aquinas
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
No description available
[more]

front cover of Communication, Pedagogy, and the Gospel of Mark
Communication, Pedagogy, and the Gospel of Mark
Elizabeth E. Shively
SBL Press, 2016
Reflections on the relationship between research and teaching

Using Mark as a test case, scholars address questions like: How should my research and my approach to the text play out in the classroom? What differences should my academic context and my students' expectations make? How should new approaches and innovations inform interpretation and teaching? This resource enables biblical studies instructors to explore various interpretative approaches and to begin to engage pedagogical issues in our changing world.

Features:

  • Ideas that may be adapted for teaching any biblical text
  • Diverse perspectives from nine experts in their fields
  • Essays include tips, ideas, and lesson plans for the classroom
[more]

front cover of Conservation And The Gospel Of Efficiency
Conservation And The Gospel Of Efficiency
The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920
Samuel P. Hays
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
The relevance and importance of Samuel P. Hay's book, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, has only increased over time. Written almost half a century ago, it offers an invaluable history of the conservation movement's origins, and provides an excellent context for understanding contemporary enviromental problems and possible solutions. Against a background of rivers, forests, ranges, and public lands, this book defines two conflicting political processes: the demand for an integrated, controlled development guided by an elite group of scientists and technicians and the demand for a looser system allowing grassroots impulses to have a voice through elected government representatives.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency
The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920
Samuel P. Hays
Harvard University Press

Many assume that the conservation movement was a part of the population uprising against control by the business community—"the people" versus "the interests." Hays’s special perspective shows that it came about rather as an attempt by scientists and technicians to apply their skills to the development and use of natural resources. The resulting conflicts, far from being concerned with unequal distribution of wealth, were struggles for policy control among groups of resource users.

This book defines two conflicting political processes: the demand for an integrated, controlled development guided by an elite group of scientists and technicians and the demand for looser system allowing grassroots control through elected government representatives.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Early Christian Rhetoric
The Language of the Gospel
Amos N. Wilder
Harvard University Press, 1971

Amos Wilder’s study of early Christian rhetoric, first published in this country and in England in 1964, was hailed as the basic work on the literary art of the New Testament, important for its analysis of oral forms and for its insight into the novelty of New Testament speech.

The Tale Review commented, “Wilder brings to this study of New Testament language not only the ability of a recognized scholar in that field, but also a long-standing and well-informed interest in the broader literary picture. Working both these interests simultaneously, he argues that form and content in the language of the New Testament are integrally related… Here is nontechnical writing on the New Testament at its best, a book which should be of general interest to a large circle of readers, and it is a pleasure to note that for words the author’s hand is as keen as his eye.”

In his introduction to this reissue, Mr. Wilder explains more particularly the aim and method of the work, discusses the significance of his approach in current biblical interpretation, and considers some recent developments in the specifically “literary” and rhetorical aspects of New Testament study.

[more]

front cover of Embracing the Nonhuman in the Gospel of Mark
Embracing the Nonhuman in the Gospel of Mark
Dong Hyeon Jeong
SBL Press, 2023
In Embracing the Nonhuman in the Gospel of Mark, Dong Hyeon Jeong approaches the Gospel of Mark through the lens of nonhuman studies with an eye toward ecological consciousness. Drawing on the fields of nonhuman studies and postcolonial ecocriticism, Jeong disrupts nthropocentric readings of Mark by engaging animality, vegetality, and animacy theories in light of (colonized) ethnicity. His intersectional reading of Mark highlights the importance of engaging nonhuman biblical interpretation while being sensitive to the issue of racism arising from animalizing the other. By doing so, this book reimagines the Markan Jesus as the colonized messiah who embraces the nonhuman. Jeong encourages readers to consider the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the environment, while also addressing issues of power, oppression, and marginalization.
[more]

front cover of The Glory Road
The Glory Road
A Gospel Gypsy Life
Anita Faye Garner
University of Alabama Press, 2021

Stories and songs from a childhood spent in a vanished world of revivals and road shows

 Anita Faye Garner grew up in the South—just about every corner of it. She and her musical family lived in Texarkana, Bossier City, Hot Springs, Jackson, Vicksburg, Hattiesburg, Pascagoula, Bogalusa, Biloxi, Gulfport, New Orleans, and points between, picking up sticks every time her father, a Pentecostal preacher known as “Brother Ray,” took over a new congregation.

In between jump-starting churches, Brother Ray took his wife and kids out on the gospel revival circuit as the Jones Family Singers. Ray could sing and play, and “Sister Fern” (Mama) was a celebrated singer and songwriter, possessed of both talent and beauty. Rounding out the band were the young Garner (known as Nita Faye then) and her big brother Leslie Ray. At all-day singings and tent revivals across the South, the Joneses made a joyful noise for the faithful and loaded into the car for the next stage of their tour.

But growing up gospel wasn’t always joyous. The kids practically raised and fended for themselves, bonding over a shared dislike of their rootless life and strict religious upbringing. Sister Fern dreamed of crossing over from gospel to popular music and recording a hit record. An unlikely combination of preacher’s wife and glamorous performer, she had the talent and presence to make a splash, and her remarkable voice brought Saturday night rock and roll to Sunday morning music. Always singing, performing, and recording at the margins of commercial success, Sister Fern shared a backing band with Elvis Presley and wrote songs recorded by Johnny Cash and many other artists.

In her touching memoir The Glory Road, Anita Faye Garner re-creates her remarkable upbringing. The story begins with Ray’s attempts to settle down and the family’s inevitable return to the gospel circuit and concludes with Sister Fern’s brushes with stardom and the family’s journey west to California where they finally landed—with some unexpected detours along the way. The Glory Road carries readers back to the 1950s South and the intersections of faith and family at the very roots of American popular music.

For more information about the book and Anita Garner, visit
www.thegloryroad.com or www.anitagarner.com

[more]

front cover of Glory
Glory
The Gospel of Judas, A Novel
Giuseppe Berto
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Christ’s nemesis Judas Iscariot remains a shadowy figure in the four canonical gospels, which give contradictory reasons for why this rogue disciple betrays Christ. But how would Judas himself explain his motives? 
 
In Glory, Italian modernist Giuseppe Berto’s final novel, Judas finally tells his side of the story. From his perspective, Jesus is the betrayer, a would-be political activist and social reformer who fails to live up to his promises. And by fulfilling his predestined role in the drama of Christ’s death and resurrection, Judas himself is partly responsible for humanity’s salvation, enabling them to be redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice. As the novel probes into the psychological motivations behind his rejection of Jesus’ authority, Judas emerges as a compelling conflicted character, a man who seeks to have agency even when he knows his actions are being scripted by a higher power. Through Judas’s searing tortured monologues, this late masterpiece from one of Italy’s greatest writers investigates deep questions about the nature of faith, rebellion, fate, and free will. 

 

 
[more]

front cover of The Gospel of Germs
The Gospel of Germs
Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life
Nancy Tomes
Harvard University Press, 1998

AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.

Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race.

Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.

[more]

front cover of The Gospel of Happiness
The Gospel of Happiness
How Secular Psychology Points to the Wisdom of Christian Practice
Christopher Kaczor
St. Augustine's Press, 2019

Just as Aristotelian metaphysics provided a new basis for the natural theology of Aquinas’s time, so too, positive psychology provides a basis for a natural moral theology in our own time. this book marshals the empirically verifiable findings of positive psychology that show the wisdom of the Christian tradition. Christian warnings about the dangers of greed, coveting a neighbor’s goods (social comparison), and pride find an empirical verification. Likewise, positive psychology vindicates the wisdom of Christian teaching on the importance of forgiveness, of gratitude, of humility, and of serving one’s neighbor. moreover, positive psychology also can be a service to Christian believers by helping them in their struggles with willpower, by providing new motivations for prayer, and by helping them identify their signature strengths. Finally, this book argues, in a variety of ways, that it is folly to think that even the best of psychology can serve as a replacement for Christianity.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
The Gospel of John Marrant
Conjuring Christianity in the Black Atlantic
Alphonso F. Saville IV
Duke University Press, 2024
Reverend John Marrant (1755–91) was North America’s first Black ordained minister and one of America’s earliest Black authors and preachers. In The Gospel of John Marrant, Alphonso F. Saville IV examines how Protestantism and West African indigenous religious practices deeply informed his life and ministry. Saville follows Marrant from his time evangelizing the Cherokee in Georgia to meeting with Black Freemasons in Boston to engaging with diasporic communities along the eastern seaboard and in England. Using the Black folk magic tradition of conjure as a lens for understanding Marrant’s religious imagination, Saville outlines the importance of Africana religious and cultural themes, symbols, and cosmologies in the biblical interpretation and ritual culture in early Black North American Christian communities. Marrant’s life and work, Saville contends, reveal the diverse religious cultures that contributed to the formation of African American Christianity and its evolution into a prominent institution during the colonial and early history of the United States. In so doing, he demonstrates the need to recenter both religion and Africa in the study of African American cultural and intellectual history.
[more]

front cover of The Gospel of Progressivism
The Gospel of Progressivism
Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900-1930
R. Todd Laugen
University Press of Colorado, 2010
Chronicling the negotiations of Progressive groups and the obstacles that constrained them, The Gospel of Progressivism details the fight against corporate and political corruption in Colorado during the early twentieth century. While the various groups differed in their specific agendas, Protestant reformers, labor organizers, activist women, and mediation experts struggled to defend the public against special-interest groups and their stranglehold on Colorado politics.

Sharing enemies like the party boss and corporate lobbyist who undermined honest and responsive government, Progressive leaders were determined to root out selfish political action with public exposure. Labor unions defied bosses and rallied for government protection of workers. Women's clubs appealed to other women as mothers, calling for social welfare, economic justice, and government responsiveness. Protestant church congregations formed a core of support for moral reform. Labor relations experts struggled to prevent the outbreak of violence through mediation between corporate employers and organized labor. Persevering through World War I, Colorado reformers faced their greatest challenge in the 1920s, when leaders of the Ku Klux Klan drew upon the rhetoric of Protestant Progressives and manipulated reform tools to strengthen their own political machine. Once in power, Klan legislators turned on Progressive leaders in the state government.

A story of promising alliances never fully realized, zealous crusaders who resisted compromise, and reforms with unexpected consequences, The Gospel of Progressivism will appeal to those interested in Progressive Era reform, Colorado history, labor relations, and women's activism.

[more]

front cover of The Gospel of Sustainability
The Gospel of Sustainability
Media, Market and LOHAS
Monica M. Emerich
University of Illinois Press, 2014
From organic produce and clothing to socially conscious investing and eco-tourism, the lifestyles of health and sustainability, or LOHAS, movement encompasses diverse products and practices intended to contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle for people and the planet. In The Gospel of Sustainability, Monica M. Emerich explores the contemporary spiritual expression of this green cultural shift at the confluence of the media and the market.
 
This is the first book to qualitatively study the LOHAS marketplace and the development of a discourse of sustainability of the self and the social and natural worlds. Emerich draws on myriad sources related to the notions of mindful consumption found throughout the LOHAS marketplace, including not just products and services but marketing materials, events, lectures, regulatory policies, and conversations with leaders and consumers. These disparate texts, she argues, universally project a spiritual message about personal and planetary health that is in turn reforming capitalism by making consumers more conscious.
[more]

front cover of The Gospel of the Working Class
The Gospel of the Working Class
Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America
Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll
University of Illinois Press, 2011

In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War.

 
Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion.
 
This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.
[more]

front cover of Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music
Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music
A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of Its Precedents
Daniel Harrison
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The highly chromatic music of the late 1800s and early 1900s includes some of the best-known works by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Cesar Franck, and Hugo Wolf. Yet until now, the harmonic complexity of this repertory has resisted the analytic techniques available to music theorists and historians. In this book, Daniel Harrison builds on nineteenth-century music theory to provide an original and illuminating method for analyzing chromatic music.

One of Harrison's central innovations is his reconstruction of the notion of harmony. Harrison understands harmonic power to flow not from chords as such but from the constituents of chords, reckoned for the most part as scale degrees of a key. This insight proves especially useful in analyzing the unusual progressions and key relations that characterize chromatic music.

Complementing the theoretical ideas is a critical history of nineteenth-century German harmonic theory in which Harrison traces the development of Hugo Riemann's ideas on dualism and harmonic function and examines aspects of Riemannian theory in the work of later theorists. Combining theoretical innovations with a sound historical understanding of those innovations, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music will aid anyone studying this pivotal period of Western music history.
[more]

front cover of Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry
Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry
Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo
University of Illinois Press, 2021
From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music innovator

Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns and African American spirituals with popular music to create a potent gospel style. Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo examine his enormous influence on gospel music against the backdrop of Christian music history and Rodeheaver's impact as a cultural and business figure. Rodeheaver rose to fame as the trombone-playing song leader for evangelist Billy Sunday. As revivalism declined after World War I, Rodeheaver leveraged his place in America's newborn celebrity culture to start the first gospel record label and launch a nationwide radio program. His groundbreaking combination of hymnal publishing and recording technology helped define the early Christian music industry. In his later years, he influenced figures like Billy Graham and witnessed the music's split into southern gospel and black gospel.

Clear-eyed and revealing, Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry is an overdue consideration of a pioneering figure in American music.

[more]

front cover of Interpreting the Gospel of John in Antioch and Alexandria
Interpreting the Gospel of John in Antioch and Alexandria
Miriam DeCock
SBL Press, 2020

A nuanced study of early Christian exegesis

Miriam DeCock analyzes four important early Christian treatments of the Gospel of John, including commentaries by Origen and Cyril from the Alexandrian tradition and the homilies of John Chrysostom and the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia, which represent Antiochian traditions. DeCock maintains that the traditional distinction between nonliteral and literal interpretations in these two early Christian centers remains helpful despite recent challenges to the paradigm. She argues that a major and abiding distinction between the two schools lies in the manner in which Alexandrian and Antiochian authors apply the gospel text to their respective communities. DeCock demonstrates that the Antiochenes find primarily literal moral examples and doctrinal teachings in John's Gospel, whereas the Alexandrians find both these and nonliteral teachings concerning the immediate situation of the church and of its individual members.

Features

  • An examination of each author's interpretations of a selection of texts
  • Focused explorations of John 2; 4; and 9-11 in early Christian exegesis
  • A study of early literal non-literal interpretations of John's Gospel
[more]

front cover of Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love
Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love
Ronald Story
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Jonathan Edwards has long epitomized the Puritan preacher as fiery scold, fixated on the inner struggle of the soul and the eternal flames of hell. In this book, Ronald Story offers a fundamentally different view of Edwards, revealing a profoundly social minister who preached a gospel of charity and community bound by love.

The first chapters trace Edwards's life and impact, examine his reputation as an intellectual, Calvinist, and revivalist, and highlight the importance for him of the gentler, more compassionate concepts of light, harmony, beauty, and sweetness. Story then explains what Edwards means by the "Gospel of Love"—a Christian faith that is less individual than interpersonal, and whose central feature is the practice of charity to the poor and the quest for loving community in this world, the chief signs of true salvation. As Edwards preached in his sermon "Heaven Is a World of Love," the afterlife itself is social in nature because love is social.

Drawing on Edwards's own sermons and notebooks, Story reveals the minister's belief that divine love expressed in the human family should take us beyond tribalism, sectarianism, provincialism, and nationality. Edwards offers hope, in the manner of Walter Rauschenbusch, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King Jr., and other great "improvers," for the coming of a world without want and war. Gracefully and compellingly written, this book represents a new departure in Edwards studies, revising the long-standing yet misleading stereotype of a man whose lessons of charity, community, and love we need now more than ever.
[more]

front cover of Let Freedom Swing
Let Freedom Swing
Collected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Gospel
Howard Reich
Northwestern University Press, 2010
A swing note is, to the listener of the rhythm, an unexpected note, and it is the spark of life in jazz and its relatives. Whether playing the standards or the most experimental piece, it is how a musician handles these notes—fearlessly or safely—that determines the fate of the performance. Howard Reich’s critical writing is similarly unexpected and fearless, and Let Freedom Swing is a collection of the articles from the past three decades that best capture this spirit.

Each section of Let Freedom Swing composes a suite, focusing on either a person, place, or scene. Reich gives new life to the standards with his profiles and elegies for such giants as Gershwin, Ellington, and Sinatra. A profile of Louis Armstrong brings out the often angry side of Satchmo but also reveals a more remarkable musician and human being.

His open-mindedness makes Reich a particularly astute observer of the experimental and new, from Ornette Coleman to Chicago experimentalist Ken Vandermark. And his observations about street music open our ears to the songs of everyday life. Reich’s fearlessness is evident in his writing about daunting subjects, such as the New Orleans music scene after Katrina, the lost legacy of jazz in Panama, and the complicated legacy of "race music" in America.

Howard Reich combines a deep enthusiasm for music, a breadth of knowledge, and an ability to share his world with his readers, and Let Freedom Swing is essential reading for anyone interested in the continuing vitality of jazz, gospel, blues, and American music in general.
[more]

front cover of Painting the Gospel
Painting the Gospel
Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago
Kymberly Pinder
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, Pinder explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. She also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery.
 
Painting the Gospel includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.
 
[more]

front cover of Peace Be Still
Peace Be Still
How James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir Created a Gospel Classic
Robert M. Marovich
University of Illinois Press, 2021
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022

In September of 1963, Reverend Lawrence Roberts and the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, teamed with rising gospel star James Cleveland to record Peace Be Still. The LP and its haunting title track became a phenomenon. Robert M. Marovich draws on extensive oral interviews and archival research to chart the history of Peace Be Still and the people who created it. Emerging from an established gospel music milieu, Peace Be Still spent several years as the bestselling gospel album of all time. As such, it forged a template for live recordings of services that transformed the gospel music business and Black worship. Marovich also delves into the music's connection to fans and churchgoers, its enormous popularity then and now, and the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on the music's message and reception.

The first in-depth history of a foundational recording, Peace Be Still shines a spotlight on the people and times that created a gospel music touchstone.

[more]

front cover of Redescribing the Gospel of Mark
Redescribing the Gospel of Mark
Barry S. Crawford
SBL Press, 2017

A collaborative project with a variety of critical essays

This final volume of studies by members of the Society of Biblical Literature’s consultation, and later seminar, on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins focuses on Mark. As with previous volumes, the provocative proposals on Christian origins offered by Burton L. Mack are tested by applying Jonathan Z. Smith's distinctive social theorizing and comparative method. Essays examine Mark as an author’s writing in a book culture, a writing that responded to situations arising out of the first Roman-Judean war after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Contributors William E. Arnal, Barry S. Crawford, Burton L. Mack, Christopher R. Matthews, Merrill P. Miller, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Robyn Faith Walsh explore the southern Levant as a plausible provenance of the Gospel of Mark and provide a detailed analysis of the construction of Mark as a narrative composed without access to prior narrative sources about Jesus. A concluding retrospective follows the work of the seminar, its developing discourse and debates, and the continuing work of successor groups in the field.

Features

  • A thorough examination of the relation between structure and event in social and anthropological theory that provides conceptual tools for representing the project of the author of Mark
  • An exploration of the southern Levant as a plausible provenance of the Gospel, a permanent site of successive imperial regimes and culturally related peoples
  • A detailed analysis of the construction of Mark as a narrative composed without access to prior narrative sources about Jesus
[more]

front cover of Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark
Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark
Austin Busch
SBL Press, 2022

Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark traces the literary dynamics and explores the theological dimensions of the Gospel of Mark’s thematization of skepticism regarding resurrection. In every place where it seems to depict resurrection—Jesus's and others'—Mark evades the issue of whether resurrection actually occurs. Austin Busch argues that, despite Mark's abbreviated and ambiguous conclusion, this gospel does not downplay resurrection but rather foregrounds it, imagining Jesus’s death and restoration to life as a divine plot to overcome Satan through cunning deception. Risen Indeed? constitutes a careful literary reading of Mark's Gospel, as well as an assessment of Mark's impact on the traditions of Christian literature and theology that emerged in its wake.

[more]

front cover of Singing the Gospel
Singing the Gospel
Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation
Christopher Boyd Brown
Harvard University Press, 2005

Singing the Gospel offers a new appraisal of the Reformation and its popular appeal, based on the place of German hymns in the sixteenth-century press and in the lives of early Lutherans. The Bohemian mining town of Joachimsthal--where pastors, musicians, and laity forged an enduring and influential union of Lutheranism, music, and culture--is at the center of the story.

The Lutheran hymns, sung in the streets and homes as well as in the churches and schools of Joachimsthal, were central instruments of a Lutheran pedagogy that sought to convey the Gospel to lay men and women in a form that they could remember and apply for themselves. Townspeople and miners sang the hymns at home, as they taught their children, counseled one another, and consoled themselves when death came near.

Shaped and nourished by the theology of the hymns, the laity of Joachimsthal maintained this Lutheran piety in their homes for a generation after Evangelical pastors had been expelled, finally choosing emigration over submission to the Counter-Reformation. Singing the Gospel challenges the prevailing view that Lutheranism failed to transform the homes and hearts of sixteenth-century Germany.

[more]

front cover of The Sound of Light
The Sound of Light
A History of Gospel Music
Don Cusic
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
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.
[more]

front cover of Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry
Sandra Jean Graham
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they lay the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century. A companion website contains jubilee troupe personnel, recordings, and profiles of 85 jubilee groups. Please go to: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/graham/spirituals/
[more]

front cover of Then Sings My Soul
Then Sings My Soul
The Culture of Southern Gospel Music
Douglas Harrison
University of Illinois Press, 2012
In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. Harrison explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual--and potentially subversive--meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus.
 
Reassessing the contributions of such figures as Aldine Kieffer, James D. Vaughan, and Bill and Gloria Gaither, Then Sings My Soul traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century, one that emphasizes the music's interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of southern gospel's borders. His discussion includes the "gay-gospel paradox"--the experience of non-heterosexuals in gospel music--as a cipher for fundamentalism's conflict with the postmodern world.
[more]

front cover of Tractates on the Gospel of John 1–10
Tractates on the Gospel of John 1–10
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
No description available
[more]

front cover of Tractates on the Gospel of John 112–24; Tractates on the First Epistle of John
Tractates on the Gospel of John 112–24; Tractates on the First Epistle of John
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
In this volume, which concludes John W. Rettig's translation of St. Augustine's Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine applies his keen insight and powers of rhetoric to the sacred text, drawing the audience into an intimate contemplation of Jesus through the course of his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
[more]

front cover of Tractates on the Gospel of John 11–27
Tractates on the Gospel of John 11–27
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
No description available
[more]

front cover of Tractates on the Gospel of John 28–54
Tractates on the Gospel of John 28–54
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
No description available
[more]

front cover of Tractates on the Gospel of John 55–111
Tractates on the Gospel of John 55–111
Saint Augustine
Catholic University of America Press, 1988
No description available
[more]

front cover of When Sunday Comes
When Sunday Comes
Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras
Claudrena N. Harold
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers.

Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter