Musical experience intersects with religious experience, posing challenging questions about the ways in which Americans, historical communities and new immigrants, and racial and ethnic groups, construct their sense of self. This book studies the ways in which music shapes the distinctive presence of religion in the United States. The twenty contributors address the fullness of music's presence in American religion and religious history.

Since the appearance of The Bay Psalm Book in 1640, music has served as a defining factor for American religious experience and has been of fundamental importance in the development of American identity and psyche. The essays in this long-awaited volume explore the diverse ways in which music shapes the distinctive presence of religion in the United States and address the fullness of music's presence in American religious history.
Timely, challenging, and stimulating, this collection will appeal to students and scholars of American history, American studies, religious studies, theology, musicology, and ethnomusicology, as well as to practicing sacred musicians.

Hymns and hymnbooks as American historical and cultural icons. This work is a study of the importance of Protestant hymns in defining America and American religion. It explores the underappreciated influence of hymns in shaping many spheres of personal and corporate life as well as the value of hymns for studying religious life. Distinguishing features of this volume are studies of the most popular hymns ('Amazing Grace,' 'O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,' 'All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name'), with attention to the ability of such hymns to reveal, as they are altered and adapted, shifts in American popular religion. The book also focuses attention on the role hymns play in changing attitudes about race, class, gender, economic life, politics, and society.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided a number of new paradigms for reading the Bible that challenged the then prevailing literal or allegorical model of reading the Bible. This new biblical criticism, whose influence has fostered common ways of talking about readings of Scripture, demonstrated the ways that the biblical texts were pastiches of literary sources and forms, often edited by later hands to form the biblical book now in the canon. In the late twentieth century, the number of methods for reading the Bible proliferated and by the end of the century there were almost as many models for reading Scripture as there were readers of Scripture. These models arose mostly out of literary criticism of the Bible and thus there were a variety of deconstructionist readings that focused closely on the text, as well as rhetorical readings that focused on literary forms of particular units of Scripture. The greatest difference between biblical criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the criticism of the late twentieth century was the latter's increasing focus on politics and historicism. Thus, in the last decades of the twentieth century, feminist criticism, postcolonial criticism, and new historicism became models of reading Scripture. The editors have gathered essays by a number of internationally recognized scholars, ranging from evangelical biblical critics to postmodern biblical critics, who explore a variety of models for reading the Bible in the Third Millennium.