"Exploring Christian Song is a Festschrift in honor of this organization. It brings together keynote addresses from the organization's first fifteen years of meetings. But the real value of this collection of essays lies in the fresh, alternative approaches employed by the ten authors. Volumes like Exploring Christian Song open up possibilities for musicologists and their professional societies to embrace a musical hermeneutic that goes beyond traditional theoretical analysis of Western sacred art music. Certainly the scholars involved in this publication have done as well as anyone to promote such a wholistic study of music in the Christian tradition and show its validity and value." -- Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association "Since ancient times, Christianity has embraced a paradoxical identity: eternal and temporal, celestial and terrestrial, universal and particular, global and local. This sampling spanning ages and continents represents song as sacrament, both a sign and means of Christian unity without uniformity. Ghanian song reflects glocalization (the opposite of globalization)--and so do Renaissance motet prints in the East-West crossroads of Venice, Enlightenment fascination with earthquakes exemplifying the terrible Sublime, and Zoltán Kodály's Genevan Psalm 50 (1948), contextualized within Hungarian folk music, Reformed psalmody, Jewish genocide, and Stalinist terror.

This collection admirably demonstrates the mission of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music as it celebrates fifteen years." --Stephen Schloesser, Loyola University Chicago "This engaging collection is testimony to the vitality and breadth of the emerging conversation between theology and music. Wise and insightful essays address music from various genres, historical eras and cultural settings. Taken together they illuminate the ways that musicians and communities have embodied their faith and devotion--in text and tone and rhythm; likewise, they point to the ways in which music has supported and enabled different dimensions of the life of the church." --Steven R. Guthrie, Belmont University "This wide-ranging anniversary collection of essays is a harvest home of the excellent scholarship that has animated the Society for Christian Music and Scholarship for the past fifteen years. It not only demonstrates the depth and richness of this vein of interdisciplinary thought, but it shows that the hermeneutic impulse is grounded in a spiritual instinct and a search for truth that acts as a refreshment of the Word. These texts once again bring us to contemplate divine action through music, the variety of revelation it brings, and its profound message of hope that is much needed by our culture today.

" --Robert Sholl, Royal Academy of Music.