Spirit Song

"Mary Summer Rain was the last student of the blind-from-birth Chippewa visionary, and spent many days in the remote cabin in the mountains with the woman who would become her beloved friend and teach her the many lessons of the spirit and of the Earth Mother." -- Back cover.

In Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries, Marc Gidal investigates how and why a multi-faith community in southern Brazil utilizes music to combine and segregate three Afro-Brazilian religions: Umbanda, Quimbanda, and Batuque. Combining ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary studies, Gidal advances a theory of musical boundary-work: the ways music reinforces, bridges, or blurs boundaries, whether for personal, social, spiritual, or political purposes. Gidal focuses on spirit-mediumship rituals and their musical accompaniment, exploring how the Afro-gaucho religious community employs music and rituals to variously promote innovation and egalitarianism in Umbanda and Quimbanda, while it reinforces musical preservation and hierarchies in Batuque. Religious and musical leaders carefully restrict the cosmologies, ceremonial sequences, and sung prayers of one religion from affecting the others so as to safeguard Batuque's African heritage. Members of disenfranchised populations view the religions as vehicles for empowerment, whether based on race-ethnicity, gender, or religious belief; and innovations in ritual music reflect this activism. These rituals come to life through illustrative video and audio examples on the book's companion website. The first book in English to focus on music in Afro-Brazilian religions, Spirit Song is a landmark study that will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars.

A runaway wife and a half-breed bounty hunter out to collect a $10,000 rewardfind romance in the Black Hills in this historical romance from the author of"Under a Prairie Moon, Chase the Wind" and "Angel and the Outlaw".

These arrestingly thoughtful translations and meditations on the Psalms encompass a wide range of emotional responses to God, providing a richly varied resource for Lent and Easter. ‘As John Calvin said, the Psalms are a “mirror of the soul”, and Megan Daffern helps us to look into this mirror in a way that transforms us and leads us into a deeper relationship with God.’ Tremper Longman III, Robert H. Grundy Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College, Virginia ‘A fresh and insightful guide for any Christian who seeks to engage with these practical and prayerful reflections on ancient psalmody.’ Susan Gillingham, Professor of the Hebrew Bible, University of Oxford ‘Written by someone who enthuses about Hebrew, but who knows how to write short sentences comprised of ordinary words, and who knows how to relate the Bible to everyday life.’ John Goldingay, Professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, California

This superb hymnal features more than six hundred hymns. It is designed for use by a variety of denominations and ecumenical settings.

Robert J. David's Spirit Fire and Lightning Songs makes a major contribution to the steadily growing body of research in the western United States that prioritizes indigenous voices, myth, and neuropsychological models to provide a fresh and innovative approach to decolonizing the past. As a Klamath Tribal member, David's scholarly and engaging writing style lends itself to the retelling of Klamath-Modoc myths and the interpretation of how these myths convincingly relate to rock art at 4-Mod-22, a complex Klamath Basin petroglyph site in Northern California near the former Tule Lake. David's work at 4-Mod-22 highlights three distinctive classes of rock art: iconic motifs, residual markings, and geometric figures. Information provided by a combination of Klamath-Modoc ethnography and myth suggests that these distinctive rock art categories denote two patterns of ritual use that include shamans' consultations with their spirit familiars, and shamanic power quests.

Gathers Negro spirituals, traditional gospel songs, European American hymns, and contemporary gospel songs.

Songs for the Spirits examines the Vietnamese practice of communing with spirits through music and performance. During rituals dedicated to a pantheon of indigenous spirits, musicians perform an elaborate sequence of songs--a "songscape"--for possessed mediums who carry out ritual actions, distribute blessed gifts to disciples, and dance to the music's infectious rhythms. Condemned by French authorities in the colonial period and prohibited by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1950s, mediumship practices have undergone a strong resurgence since the early 1990s, and they are now being drawn upon to promote national identity and cultural heritage through folklorized performances of rituals on the national and international stage. By tracing the historical trajectory of traditional music and religion since the early twentieth century, this groundbreaking study offers an intriguing account of the political transformation and modernization of cultural practices over a period of dramatic and often turbulent transition. An accompanying DVD contains numerous video and music extracts that illustrate the fascinating ways in which music evokes the embodied presence of spirits and their gender and ethnic identities.