Shout to the Lord

Shout to the Lord is a remarkable book, beautifully written and analytically careful. Music is the heart of evangelical experience, so the book helps to explain that religion. But the book does more. It explains the way music can become prayer, and why it moves us. -- TM Luhrmann,author of When God Talks Back
Songs and music are used in worship to help congregants reach an individual experience of God. But, as Ari Kelman shows, that individual experience only comes about because of the work of songwriters, marketers, and music producers who mediate individual religious experience. Shout to the Lordis a study of that work. Drawing on ethnography, interviews and participation in church services Kelman explores how worship music is produced, performed and experienced in U.S. evangelical churches. In doing so he masterfully draws out a series of fundamental tensions between entertainment and worship, technical skill and spirit, commerce and faith, and the danger troubling Christian musicians that they might & sing well but worship poorly. -- Brian Larkin,author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure & Urban Culture in Nigeria
This is a fascinating book. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and dozens of interviews with songwriters, worship leaders, and record producers, Kelman reveals the immense cultural work that goes into producing evangelical Christian worship music. He is a sensitive guide, treating his subjects sympathetically while remaining keenly attuned to the tensions that underlie their work. He is at his best in explaining how his subjects understand the essential role that music plays in worship even as they disavow its necessity. -- Isaac Weiner,author of Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism
In Shout to the Lord, Kelman meticulously elucidates for his academic readership the internal logics that undergird American evangelical cultural production. Because the study reflects the author’s generosity and responsibility toward his interlocutors, evangelical musical practitioners will find their histories and perspectives presented with patient nuance. This monograph on evangelical worship music, read in careful conjunction with the extant and burgeoning literature in Christian congregational music studies, promises to be an especially productive read for students and researchers of American religion, Christian liturgy, and popular music. -- Reading Religion
An insightful and well-researched examination of the creation of worship music in American evangelicalism and the worship music culture it has birthed. Kelman’s work is not just an analysis of religious and sociological scholarship—it is an experiment in understanding where he immersed himself into various corporate worship settings that span several years. * Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies *