Singing Yoruba Christianity

Singing Yoruba Christianity
Author: Vicki L. Brennan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-01-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253032083

Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified around a shared set of values. She follows parishioners as they attend choir rehearsals, use musical media—hymn books and cassette tapes—and perform the music and rituals that connect them through religious experience. Brennan asserts that church members believe that singing together makes them part of a larger imagined social collective, one that allows them to achieve health, joy, happiness, wealth, and success in an ethical way. Brennan discovers how this particular Yoruba church articulates and embodies the moral attitudes necessary to be a good Christian in Nigeria today.

Learning from London

Learning from London
Author: Jason A. Fout
Publisher:
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2019-11
Genre: Church growth
ISBN: 9780880284783

Winner of a Gold Medal - 2020 Illumination Book Awards Crucial reading for everyone committed to evangelism and church growth. -Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church As most mainline Christian denominations struggle with declining numbers, the Church of England in the Diocese of London is bucking the trend. In one of the most diverse, multi-faith, urban, and pluralistic cities in the world, London churches are growing and thriving against the odds, proclaiming the gospel afresh, and meeting the needs of their communities in creative, innovative, and life-changing ways. Based on more than six years of study, Jason A. Fout offers lessons from London, a road map to growth and revitalization for American churches-big and small, historic and newly started, evangelical and Anglo-Catholic. This remarkable guide offers practical tools as well as insight and inspiration for all who care about the future of the church.

Music in the History of the Western Church; With an Introduction on Religious Music Among Primitive and Ancient Peoples

Music in the History of the Western Church; With an Introduction on Religious Music Among Primitive and Ancient Peoples
Author: Edward Dickinson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-05-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9789357954198

Music in the History of the Western Church; With an Introduction on Religious Music Among Primitive and Ancient Peoples, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Surprised by Faith

Surprised by Faith
Author: Joy McBride
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1443808830

Surprised by Faith celebrates the 75th anniversary of C. S. Lewis “kicking and screaming” his way into Christianity—his 1931 conversion. Lewis described himself as, “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." But a convert, nonetheless, surprised by joy. This volume was inspired by Lewis’s autobiographical account of the life-events which led to his coming to faith—an event that had a profound effect on his work and his relationships. In Surprised by Faith, Lewis’s conversion is explored as both “a rational quest for truth and a romantic quest for meaning.” This collection of essays commemorates Lewis’s conversion, but also celebrates, examines and discusses what conversion means to us as scholars, academicians, and most importantly, as human beings. It’s a kind of conversation about conversion. The conversation’s participants are individuals from a variety of backgrounds who themselves have been converted in the classic Christian sense. Surprised by Faith hopefully will challenge the reader to think more deeply, biblically and theologically about the transformation that takes place in each life that embraces Christ and moves from unbelief to belief. The essays look at the influence of conversion on perspectives as they relate to various disciplines, such as anthropology, poetry, psychology, education, philosophy and culture.

Expressions of Indigenous and Local Knowledge in Africa and its Diaspora

Expressions of Indigenous and Local Knowledge in Africa and its Diaspora
Author: Akinloye Ojo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2016-06-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443896454

Expressions of Indigenous and Local Knowledge in Africa and its Diaspora provides critical discourses on Africa and the various configurations of its reflections in folklore, literature, music, languages, and philosophy. The collection, through its selected works, focuses on the African continent in terms of preserving the unique identity of African Indigenous and Local Knowledge. In reality, this preservation effort is confronted by a number of challenges within today’s increasingly globalized and westernized world. This book documents ongoing scholarly discussion on the paradoxical dynamics of preserving this identity and consequently enhancing the relevance of African Indigenous and Local Knowledge. This volume articulates the representation of knowledge and values lodged in the diverse knowledge systems in Africa and its diaspora, and which are constantly expressed in local and global spaces. It highlights the prejudicial assessment of African Indigenous knowledge systems that has ensured that Western epistemological systems are internationally recognized and supported while African epistemological systems are denigrated, discouraged or simply ignored, even on the African continent. Given that the term expressions entails making something known or manifest, this edited collection is assembled to make known some of the elements of indigenous and local knowledge, as well as the practices that these elements necessitate both historically and contemporarily in the African situation.

Liturgy and the Moral Self

Liturgy and the Moral Self
Author: E. Byron Anderson
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1998
Genre: Christian ethics
ISBN: 9780814661680

Liturgical theologian Don Saliers published an essay in 1979 challenging both the Church's and the theological academy's understanding of the relationship of liturgy and ethics. "Liturgy and the Moral Self" features Saliers' provocative essay, an introductory chapter, and sections on liturgical theology, the formation of character, and words and music--each with a single-page introduction to the chapters that follow.

Singing the Congregation

Singing the Congregation
Author: Monique M. Ingalls
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-09-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190499656

Contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship itself. Author Monique M. Ingalls argues that participatory worship music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations, or "modes of congregating". Through exploration of five of these modes--concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations--Singing the Congregation reinvigorates the analytic categories of "congregation" and "congregational music." Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology and congregational studies, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice--in this case, the musically-structured participatory activity known as "worship." "Congregational music-making" is thereby recast as a practice capable of weaving together a religious community both inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a powerful way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that comprise this global religious community. The interactions among the congregations reveal widespread conflicts over religious authority, carrying far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

Ori-Oke Spirituality and Social Change in Africa

Ori-Oke Spirituality and Social Change in Africa
Author: Nathanael Yaovi
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2018-09-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9956550280

The dynamic nature of Christianity has necessitated its movement from the cathedral to the mountain top. This has occasioned a proliferation of Prayer Mountains throughout Africa. In Yorubaland of southwestern Nigeria, Prayer Mountain is known as Ori-Oke. Like many communities in Africa, the Yoruba are confronted with fundamental challenges in life for which people do not rest until they find solutions. Within the praxis of Nigerian Christian lexicon Ori-Oke is synonymous with the enactment of a sacred space on a mountain top characterised by various prayer regimes, rituals, exorcism and religious practices, aimed at eliciting the help of the divine to alleviate the existential challenges of devotees. This book explores the resacralisation of space on the mountains, highlighting how humans and the divine interact in Yorubaland. It brings into conversation 35 empirically rich scholarly essays on the role of Ori-Oke to those seeking divine intervention in their lives. Today, Ori-Oke have become centres of pilgrimage as a result of the lived experiences of devotees, creating unique religious value quite distinct from the aesthetic value of these mountain tops. The spirituality of Ori-Oke is anchored on the absolute belief in God and the infusion of traditional African worldview sensibilities in religious rites and worship. Ori-Oke spirituality employs resources of Christian tradition, introduced by the formal agents of Christianity, synthesised with traditional culture, to develop a life based on the precepts of an African Christianity. The book is an intellectual discourse on Ori-Oke spirituality, reflecting its contemporary relevance in a context of religious innovation and competition.

The Spirituals and the Blues

The Spirituals and the Blues
Author: Cone, James H.
Publisher: Orbis Books
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2022-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608339432

"How two forms of song helped sustain slaves and their children in the midst of tribulation. With a new introduction by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes"--

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities
Author: Suzel Ana Reily
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 745
Release: 2016
Genre: Music
ISBN: 019985999X

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias (and other oppositional religious communities), music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume as a whole, then, approaches Christian groups and their musics as diverse and powerful windows into the way in which music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) between places, now and historically. It also tries to take account of the religious self-understandings of these groups, presenting Christian musical practice and exchange as encompassing and negotiating deeply felt and deeply rooted moral and cultural values. Given that the centerpiece of the volume is Christian religious musical practice, the volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.