Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements explores the critical role that religion can play in formal and informal music education. As in broader educational studies, research in music education has tended to sidestep the religious dimensions of teaching and learning, often reflecting common assumptions of secularity in contemporary schooling in many parts of the world. This book considers the ways in which the forces of religion and belief construct and complicate the values and practices of music education-including teacher education, curriculum texts, and teaching repertoires. The contributors to this volume embrace a range of perspectives from a variety of disciplines, examining religious, agnostic, skeptical, and atheistic points of view. Music, Education, and Religion is a valuable resource for all music teachers and scholars in related fields, interrogating the sociocultural and epistemological underpinnings of music repertoires and global educational practices.

From the introductory: Spiritualism, and Its General Teachings. Man, a thinking, reasoning, and morally responsible being, is the crowning glory of God. He is furthermore a trinity in structure, made up of the soul, of a spiritual and of an earthly body. The soul, the conscious innermost of man, is a potentialized portion of the deific life, incarnated in the material body for a more potent individualization, and for necessary experiences in the realm of matter. Death, just as natural in a ripe old age as birth, is the severing of the co-partnership existing between the spiritual and the earthly body. Man is naturally a religious being, and the seals of his manhood are consciousness and intuition, reason and aspiration. And further, man desires to live again; desires to meet his friends in the higher life; desires to know and love them, and with them progress through eternity.