Agony and hilarity, said Norman MacLean, are both necessary for salvation. We Christians seem to know a lot about the agony part, but what about hilarity? Why do we have to remind ourselves so often that the Bible is full of funny and ridiculous stories and situations? Why do so few of the pictures we ve drawn of Jesus show him laughing? Because we ve forgotten the redemptive power of humor, that s why. In Jesus Laughed, Robert Darden senior editor of The Wittenburg Door, the world s oldest, largest, and pretty much only religious satire magazine draws on his years of experience deflating religious pomposity and making the faithful laugh to show why humor is so central to the faith, and how to make it a big part of your daily walk with God.

Click here to listen to Terri Gross's interview with Robert Darden on NPR's Fresh Air about the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. Darden runs the project at Baylor University where he is a journalism professor. The purpose of the project is to identify, acquire, preserve, record, and catalogue the most at-risk music from the black gospel music tradition, primarily between 1945 and 1970.

Robert Darden is Associate Professor of Journalism at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He served for 12 years as Gospel Music Editor for Billboard magazine, and since 1988 has been Senior Editor of The Wittenburg Door, the world s oldest, largest, and pretty much only religious satire magazine. He is the author of more than 25 books, including the definitive People Get Ready A New History of Black Gospel Music, which has been featured on National Public Radio, and Reluctant Prophets and Clueless Disciples, also published by Abingdon Press."

The first of two volumes chronicling the history and role of music in the African- American experience, Nothing But Love in God's Waters explores how songs and singers helped African-Americans challenge and overcome slavery, subjugation, and suppression. From the spirituals of southern fields and the ringing chords of black gospel, to the protest songs that changed the landscape of labor, and the cadences sung in the face of dogs and water cannons in Birmingham, sacred song has stood center-stage in the African-American drama. Hundreds of interviews, one-of-a-kind sources, and rare or lost recordings are used to examine this enormously persuasive facet of the Movement. Nothing But Love in God's Waters explains the historical significance of song and helps us understand how music enabled the Civil Rights Movement to challenge the most powerful nation on the planet.

People Get Ready!: A New History of Gospel Music is a passionate, celebratory, and carefully researched chronology of one of America's greatest treasures. From Africa through the spirituals, from minstrel music through jubilee, and from traditional to contemporary gospel, People Get Ready! shows the links between styles, social patterns, and artists. The emphasis is on the stories behind the songs and musicians. From the nameless slaves of Colonial America to Donnie McClurkin, Yolanda Adams, and Kirk Franklin, People Get Ready! provides, for the first time, an accessible overview of this musical genre. In addition to the more familiar stories of Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, the book offers intriguing new insights into the often forgotten era between the Civil War and the rise of jubilee-that most intriguing blend of minstrel music, barbershop harmonies, and the spiritual. Also chronicled are the connections between some of gospel's precursors (Blind Willie Johnson, Arizona Dranes, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and modern gospel stars, including Andrae Crouch and Clara Ward. People Get Ready! knits together a number of narratives, and combines history, musicology and spirituality into a coherent whole, stitched together by the stories of dozens of famous and forgotten musical geniuses. FROM THE INTRODUCTION "Among the richest of the lavish gifts Africa has given to the world is rhythm. The beat. The sound of wood on wood, hand on hand. That indefinable pulse that sets blood to racing and toes to tapping. It is rhythm that drives the great American musical exports, the spiritual (and, by extension, gospel), the blues, jazz and rock 'n' roll. But first you must have the spirituals-religion with rhythm. In this book, I will show the evolution of a musical style that only occasionally slows down its evolution long enough to be classified before it evolves yet again. In historical terms, spirituals emerged from African rhythm, work-songs, and field hollers in a remarkably short time-years, perhaps days-after the first African slaves landed on American shores. From the spirituals sprang not just their spiritual heir jubilee, but jazz and blues. And gospel music in its modern understanding morphed from the spirituals, the blues, jubilee and-of course-African rhythm. What today's gospel music is and what it is becoming is part of the continuing evolution of African American music. Religion with rhythm."

Volume 1 of Nothing but Love in God’s Water traced the music of protest spirituals from the Civil War to the American labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and on through the Montgomery bus boycott. This second volume continues the journey, chronicling the role this music played in energizing and sustaining those most heavily involved in the civil rights movement. Robert Darden, former gospel music editor for Billboard magazine and the founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University, brings this vivid, vital story to life. He explains why black sacred music helped foster community within the civil rights movement and attract new adherents; shows how Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders used music to underscore and support their message; and reveals how the songs themselves traveled and changed as the fight for freedom for African Americans continued. Darden makes an unassailable case for the importance of black sacred music not only to the civil rights era but also to present-day struggles in and beyond the United States. Taking us from the Deep South to Chicago and on to the nation’s capital, Darden’s grittily detailed, lively telling is peppered throughout with the words of those who were there, famous and forgotten alike: activists such as Rep. John Lewis, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and Willie Bolden, as well as musical virtuosos such as Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, and The Mighty Wonders. Expertly assembled from published and unpublished writing, oral histories, and rare recordings, this is the history of the soundtrack that fueled the long march toward freedom and equality for the black community in the United States and that continues to inspire and uplift people all over the world.