Tim Dowley

Tim Dowley is a church historian who has written biographies of J.S. Bach and Robert Schumann. Christian Music is an historical survey of everything musical in Christian worship from David’s harp to 21st Century praise music. It covers contemporary Christian music on every continent, including Australian and the Pacific, and every style of music from choral to hymns to instrumental.

It was good to be reminded of the rise of Christian rock and the banning of early practitioners like Larry show more Norman, 1970s pioneer of “Jesus Music”, and to see its place in the development from Gospel to praise music.

The strength of this book is its breadth, and the clarity with which such a wide range of music is described. It is beautifully and generously illustrated adding a further dimension of understanding: depictions of early instruments with comments on their accuracy are a great aid to understanding a little more of the type of music of each period. A few screenshots show the development of musical notation and its impact on composition without drowning the reader in technical description, and sensitive portraits make the viewer ponder the sensibility of individual composers.

Seven specialist contributors take the reader to places where Dr Dowley was not so familiar: Dr Mark Evans is the guide for Australia and the Pacific, Lisbon-based Orthodox priest the Reverend Dr Ivan Moody explores Orthodox music.

Of course, breadth leads to mistakes of over-simplification. Gustav Mahler, for example, whose music has a complex and intentional Christian dimension, is dismissed in a sentence: “Gustav Mahler, a convert to Catholicism, confessed he could not compose a mass because he could not affirm the Credo.” (p.165). In contrast the sceptic Verdi and the Jewish Mendelssohn rightly receive one page and three pages respectively for their efforts in writing music around Christian themes (p.162, pp.159-161).

To produce a book like this, charmingly presented, wide-ranging and clearly written, of course involves many choices about inclusions. It is too easy to nit-pick on the basis of what has been left out. What has been left in covers a huge range of material placed in a narrative which reveals the dynamism, inventiveness and beauty of music inspired by Christian faith and used in Christian worship.

It will remain on my shelf as a reference and a companion to treasure. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1873337.html

It's an assembly of short and very short essays, aimed at evangelical Anglicans in the UK, originally published in 1977 and revised in 1990. The one thing I really did learn from it was the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, which I now realise was a hugely important step towards American independence in religious culture, leading to the political reality. But there was a lot that set my teeth on edge: the irritating point-scoring about which show more denominations performed well against Fascism, the total complacency about missionary activity. Apparently the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was founded in 1701 by "devout Anglican clergymen, shocked at the prevalence of Presbyterianism and vice in the American colonies." Well, as a lapsed Papist, I don't have a dog in that fight. An amusing misprint has the pre-Reformation Church troubled by "sexual immortality", that extra letter converting the description from cliché to erotic surrealism. The closing chapters touch rather superficially on the ordination of women. Homosexuality is not mentioned at all. show less

Quick survey of the history of Christianity with pretty pictures.

It does have a glance at Eastern Orthodoxy but basically follows the standard model of early Christians > medieval Catholicism > Reformation > European and American Protestantism > modern churches. Not much about negative influences of Christianity.

The Atlas of Christian History is only incidentally about theology. Rather, it is a story of power, influence and survival. It tells of how the tale of how the Christian religion(s) survived their challenges and spread around the globe, capturing the affections of billions of believers. We do not expect that the text to accompany an atlas should be detailed, but it still manages to provide a sound basis for interpreting the maps. Of course, history is more fun with maps - they can show where show more people life, and how apostles and missionaries over the ages needed to travel to spread the word.

One caution, we know that a picture is worth a thousand words - or rather can show thousands of details. In the modern era we can be confident that each detail is plotted exactly, but ancient and medieval records are far from complete. Even with the best research, the maps should be seen as providing an impression of what was happening rather than the precise detail show less