Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age

Anna E. Nekola is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University, teaching in the departments of Music and Communication, as well as the Queer Studies Program. Her work appears in Popular Music; The Journal of the Society for American Music; Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio-Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century (Ashgate 2011); Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience (Ashgate 2013); The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology; The New Grove Dictionary of American Music; and The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities. Tom Wagner is a teaching fellow at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh. His work appears in The Australian Journal of Communication; Journal of World Popular Music; Religions as Brands: New Persepctives on the Marketization of Religion and Spirituality(Ashgate 2014); and Religion in Times of Crisis (2014). He is also co-editor of Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience (Ashgate 2013) with Monique Ingalls and Carolyn Landau.

Introduction: Worship Music as Media Form and Mediated Practice: Theorizing the Intersections of Media, Music and Lived Religion

Part 1. Technology, Place and Practice

1. Music as a Mediated Object, Music as a Medium: Towards a Media Ecological View of Congregational Music

2. Music, Ritual and Media in Charismatic Religious Experience in Ghana

3. Panoptic or Pastoral Gaze? The Worship Leader in the New Media Environment

4. Who Gets to Sing in the Kingdom?

Part 2. Community Creation

5. ‘This is a Chance to Come Together’: Subcultural Resistance and Community at Cornerstone Festival

6. ‘Through Every Land, By Every Tongue’: Diasporic and National Consciousness Among a Transnational Community of Sacred Harp Singers

7. YouTube: The New Mediator of Christian Community

8. Belonging, Integration and Tradition: Mediating Romani Identity Through Pentecostal Praise & Worship Music

Part 3. Embodied Sonic Theologies

9. On the Inherent Contradiction in Worship Music

10. ‘Yet to Come’ or ‘Still to Be Done’?: Evangelical Worship and the Power of ‘Prophetic’ Songs

11. Happiness and Music: Salvific Practice in a Feelgood Age

12. The Dance + Pray Worship Experience in Finland: Negotiating the Transcendent and Transgressive in Search of Alternative Sensational Forms and Affective Space

Afterword: Of Animatrons and Eschatology: Congregational Music, Mediation and World-Making