About the Book
The Spirit and the Song:Pneumatological Reflections on Popular Music explores pertinent pneumatological issues that arise in music. It offers three distinct contributions: first, it asks what, if anything, music tells listeners about God’s Spiritedness. Can the experience of music speak to human spiritedness, the world’s transcendentality, or a person’s own self-transcendence in ways nothing else does or can? Second, this book explores how the Spirit functions within, and even determines, culture through music. Because music is a profound human expression, it can find itself in a rich dialogue with the Spirit. Third and finally, this book explores the contested status of music in Christian spiritual traditions. It deals with music as inspired by the Spirit, music as participation in Spiritedness, and music as temptation of “the flesh.” As such, this book also engages music’s placement in Christian spiritual traditions. The contributors of this book ask how Christian convictions about and experiences of the Spirit might shape the way one thinks about music.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Music Makes the World New, by Chris E.W. Green
Part I: Music, Affect, and the Spirit
Chapter 1: Thus Sings the Lord: The Spirit, the Body, and the Mystical Nature of Singing, by Chris E.W. Green
Chapter 2: The Sacred Song: How Divine Creativity is Revealed in the Physics and Metaphysics of Music, by Edwin Rodríguez-Gungor
Chapter 3: We Feel Fire When It’s Hot: Affect and Manipulation in Music, by Steven Félix-Jäger
Chapter 4: “Everything Means Nothing to Me”: The Spirit of Wisdom within Qoheleth, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and the Elliott Smith Songbook, by Sophia A. Magallanes-Tsang
Part II: Music as Cultural Expression
Chapter 5: The Spirit-Haunted Lyrics of Jason Isbell, by Amber Benson
Chapter 6: The Spirit in Neoclassical, Wordless Music, by Marc Byrd and Aaron Gabriel Ross
Chapter 7: Spiritual Longing in the Music of Jimmy Hendrix, by Blaine Charette
Chapter 8: “The Answer, My Friend”: A Pneumatological Reading of “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan, by Jeff S. Lamp
Chapter 9: Rivers Underneath: The Quickening of the Spirit in Underground Music, by Jeremy Lee Hunt
Part III: Music in Christian Worship and Witness
Chapter 10: “There is a Cloud”: The Holy Spirit in Contemporary Worship Songs, by Shannan Baker
Chapter 11: When the Spirit Moves: Black Gospel Music as Embodied Witness, by Jennifer Thigpenn
Chapter 12: “Oh Happy Day”: The Migration and Reclamation of the Soul of Pentecostal Faith, by Kimberly Ervin Alexander
Chapter 13: Global Spirit and Globalizing spirits: Worship Song’s Role in Turkish Liturgical Identity, by Jeremy Perigo
Chapter 14: “We Were All Vibing the Same Way”: Luthercostality in South Brazil, by Marcell Silva Steuernagel
Conclusion: The Classic Fade Out, by Steven Félix-Jäger
About the Contributors
About the Author :
Chris E.W. Green is professor of public theology at Southeastern University and director for St Anthony Institute of Theology, Philosophy, and Liturgics.
Steven Félix-Jägeris associate professor of theology and worship, chair of the worship and media department, and director of academic research at Life Pacific University.
Review :
Chris E. W. Green and Steven Félix-Jäger have struck a chord with me in publishing this edited volume on The Spirit and The Song. I warmly welcome this Pentecostal, socio-cultural, affective, and musicological composition into its unique place as an invaluable resource for integrative spirituality through song. Their creative and courageous affirmation of the personification of song, music as cultural gift, and the worship of the church, will no doubt challenge our perceptions about the songs we sing and the performative spirituality contained therein. Generations will benefit greatly from the scope and depth of their fully-orbed understanding of the nature of songs and their avant-garde experimentation. Sincerely, Thank you!
Like many who grew up in a singing Pentecostal community, I hope my children will sing but in different or newer, spirited ways. The commonality will be the God who makes (and remakes) our world even as we participate; it will not be simple transposing of culture, methods, chords or lyrics. The theologising in The Spirit and the Song, edited by Chris E. W. Green and Steven Félix-Jäger, has a way of holding on to the Spirit of Jesus as its authors examine the space between spirit and body, mourning and joy, past and present, sacred and secular. These stellar contributors weave a story capable of explaining music’s sacramentality and importance to Pentecostals themselves, as well as its observers. In this creative and, even at times, provocative volume, a hopeful vision is presented: sound, both sacred and secular, woven creatively together with emotion, wisdom, poetry, literature, history, science, and light.
