Far too often, life’s challenges and questions cause people to fight feelings of doubt and despair, as they search endlessly for hope. In Singing in the Dark, Ginny Owens introduces the reader to powerful ways of drawing closer to God and how the elements of music, prayer, and lament offer rich, vibrant, and joyful communion with Him, especially on the darkest days. Ginny has gained a unique life perspective, as she has lived without sight since age three. She brings rich, biblical teaching that will encourage readers and compel them to dig deep into the beautiful songs, prayers, and poetry of Scripture—the same words through which the people of the Bible flourished in impossible circumstances. Singing in the Dark includes reflection and journaling prompts at the end of each chapter.

Singing the Right Way enters the world of Orthodox Christianity in Estonia to explore musical style in worship, cultural identity, and social imagination. Through both ethnographic and historical chapters, author Jeffers Engelhardt reveals how Orthodox Estonians give voice to the religious absolute in secular society. Based on a decade of fieldwork, Singing the Right Way traces the sounds of Orthodoxy in Estonia through the Russian Empire, interwar national independence, the Soviet-era, and post-Soviet integration into the European Union. Approaching Orthodoxy through local understandings of correct practice and correct belief, Engelhardt shows how religious knowledge, national identity, and social transformation illuminate how to "sing the right way" and thereby realize the fullness of Estonians' Orthodox Christian faith in context of everyday, secular surroundings. Singing the Right Way is an innovative model of how the musical poetics of contemporary religious forms are rooted in both consistent sacred tradition and contingent secular experience. This landmark study is sure to be an essential text for scholars studying the ethnomusicology of religion.

“The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry.” - Marlon James, Elle From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah's Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers's magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted—and divided—family, set against the backdrop of postwar America. On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson’s epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and their better judgment—they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up, however, during the civil rights era, coming of age in the violent 1960s, and living out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, “whose voice could make heads of state repent,” follows a life in his parents’ beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and remain connected to them both. Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing is a story of self-invention, allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music, and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.

Elementary classroom teachers too often lack the confidence to present music to their students, because they themselves have little formal training in this area. SONGWORKS emphasizes singing as the means to teaching music in the elementary classroom. The authors assert that everyone sings (as a family on a car trip, singing as a child, singing the national anthem at a baseball game, singing Happy Birthday), therefore this is the most natural and effective basis for teaching music, and builds confidence among future teachers.

Have you ever wondered who hummed the first tune? Was it the flowers? The waves or the moon? Dove Award-winning recording artist Ellie Holcomb answers with a lovely lyrical tale, one that reveals that God our Maker sang the first song, and He created us all with a song to sing. Go to bhkids.com to find this book's Parent Connection, an easy tool to help moms and dads (or anyone else who loves kids) discuss the book's message with their child. We're all about connecting parents and kids to each other and to God's Word.

Singing for Our Lives is a celebration of the politics and music of street choirs and the social relationships that sustain them. It shows how making music can contribute to non-violent and just and social transitions.

Winner of the International Book Award from International Association for the Study of Popular Music (2003) The practice of singing and songwriting in France during the Great War provides an intriguing tool for the exploration of the French cultural politics of the epoch. Responding to the dearth of cultural studies of the First World War, Regina Sweeney's unique cross-disciplinary study illuminates many of the hitherto unexplored corners of an era that many historians consider to exhibit a break with recognizable trends. In early twentieth century Europe, singing was considered a part of education integral to the formation of good citizens. Singing was especially important to the French, for whom it was historically associated with authenticity of feeling and purity of character, and thereby with the very roots of French democracy; it was particularly associated with the image of France as a victorious nation. But as Sweeney shows, different performances of the same patriotic song could carry vastly different meanings. By focusing on singing, Sweeney is able to provide a more nuanced reading of French Great War cultures than ever before, and to show that cultures previously held to be exclusive — those of the home front and the Western front, for example — existed in dialectical tension and were themselves far from homogenous.

Performers of all ages and abilities will gain valuable insight into the mechanics, psychology and physiology of singing. The accompanying CD - in Jennifer's own voice - captures a conversation about her ideas and journey, as well as exercises that will help you discover and release your true and best instrument.

Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done—both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart. Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial. Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city's landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place. Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology—the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.

Traces the folk singer's career, influence, and political development through sheet music, quotations, reflections, and anecdotes, andincludes one CD-ROM with MP3s excerpts from over two hundred songs.