Why do we disentangle music and religion? How are music and religion entangled in the worlds of practitioners and scholars? What can ethnomusicologists offer to all students of religion by attending to religion's audibility or inaudibility? In this book, author Jeffers Engelhardt engages generations-old interdisciplinary debates to highlight scholars' changing relationships with other-than-human beings in the religious worlds they study. In the history of ethnomusicology, there is a degree...

"These essays advance the understanding of Eastern Orthodox spiritual practices from a religious studies perspective."— Reading ReligionHow do people experience spirituality through what they see, hear, touch, and smell? In this book, Sonja Luehrmann and an international group of scholars assess how sensory experience shapes prayer and ritual practice among Eastern Orthodox Christians.Prayer, even when performed privately, is considered as a shared ...

Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In...

Resounding Transcendence is a pathbreaking set of ethnographic and historical essays by leading scholars exploring the ways sacred music effects cultural, political, and religious transitions in the contemporary world. With chapters covering Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist practices in East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Europe, the volume establishes the theoretical and methodological foundations for music scho...

Studying the role of music within religious congregations has become an increasingly complex exercise. The significant variations in musical style and content between different congregations require an interdisciplinary methodology that enables an accurate analysis, while also allowing for nuance in interpretation. This book is the first to help scholars think through the complexities of interdisciplinary research on congregational music-making by critically examining the theories and meth...