The stories in Bob Reed's delightful book are surefire spirit lifters that celebrate life and enrich the soul. Reed's seven tales not only come alive with hilarity and warmth, they show how God works through even the most bumbling and misdirected human efforts. Reed's humor is laced with insight, his descriptions with inspiration, and his characters with God's own love. In the lead story, "The Choir That Couldn't Sing," Reed's description of a hopelessly off-key church choir assembled from eccentrics and misfits will trigger gales of laughter. But tears are sure to flow when readers feel the impact of the choir's humble but grand, accomplishment. The book's other stories come equally alive with humor, insight, and inspiration that demonstrate how the least in the kingdom of heaven can touch the heart of God.

In these eighty-one years I have lived here on earth and the fi fty two years I have been blessed to preach the gospel from coast to coast preaching here and there, from east to west from north to south, traveling by auto and airplane and I ask myself after all these years how did I make it and every time it come back to me "By the Grace of God", I have never considered myself as one that is smart and the Lord have allowed me to write this my second book and get them published, produce two sermons on DVD and record a CD's with fourteen songs on it after passing out earlier that same day while preaching a sermon so I think this is a great accomplishment for a common everyday preacher from Selma AL. with a little education. God have been mighty good to me, my family and the people I have preached to over the years. All of my family of six is dead but my sister and myself and she is eighty years old herself and lives alone. It seem that the people of today don't know that God exist and controls everything and that we are on a death wish and a hell scrap, the Devil is on a least trying to take over the world and the church, all he have to do is get us to shut our mouths and it's a done deal. So brother preacher" it's time", time for us to wake up, time to get up, time to speak up, time to stand up and start talking and living for Jesus. This has been my calling and I hope it is yours whether you are in a preaching ministry or not, now is the time for all of God's people to tell the story of his suffering under Pilate and on the cross, his death, his resurrection, his ascension to the Father in Heaven, and his coming again for those who love him.

The Confident Choir is an exploration of conditions affecting the confidence levels in singers of all levels to create an accessible synthesis of the psychological models and offer practical confidence-building strategies for conductors, teachers, community musicians, and workshop leaders. Michael Bonshor combines his experience as a singing teacher and choral director with a series of in-depth interviews that give an intimate depiction of the challenges faced by the contemporary choral singer. These insights provide the basis for a range of suggested techniques to bolster confidence and reduce anxiety in the group-singing context. This book is primarily designed as a guide for leaders of amateur group singing activities and is relevant to choirs of all sizes and genres. The content will appeal to singers, teachers, and choir leaders; students and scholars in the fields of choral research, community music, music psychology, and adult education; and educators training the musical leaders of the future.

There has been a recent expansion of interest in cultural approaches to rural communities and to the economic and social situation of rurality more broadly. This interest has been particularly prominent in Australia in recent years, spurring the emergence of an interdisciplinary field called 'rural cultural studies'. This collection is framed by a large interdisciplinary research project that is part of that emergence, particularly focused on what the idea of 'cultural sustainability' might mean for understanding experiences of growth, decline, change and heritage in small Australian country towns. However, it extends beyond the initial parameters of that research, bringing together a range of senior and emerging Australian researchers who offer diverse approaches to rural culture. The essays collected here explore the diverse forms that rural cultural studies might take and how these intersect with other disciplinary approaches, offering a uniquely diverse but also careful account of life in country Australia. Yet, in its emphasis on the simultaneous specificity and cross-cultural recognisability of rural communities, this book also outlines a field of inquiry and a set of critical strategies that are more broadly applicable to thinking about the "rural" in the early twenty-first century. This book will be valuable reading for students and academics of Geography, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, introducing rural cultural studies as a new dynamic and integrative discipline.

A sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic recently made worldwide headlines in the Global Financial Crisis and for volcanic eruptions that caused unprecedented chaos to international air travel. Large contemporary audiences have formed very different images of Iceland through the vocal music and music videos of Björk and Sigur Rós. Just below the Arctic Circle, Icelandic men engage in more everyday vocal practices, where singing, literally for one's Self, is an everyday life skill set against a backdrop of unique natural, historical, economic and social phenomena. Their sagas of song and singing are the subject of this book. The original Icelandic Sagas - among the most important collections of medieval European literature - are valued for richly detailed portrayals of individual lives. This book's principle protagonists and collaborators share a heritage where Sagas remain central to national and local identity. While the oral traditions associated with them were largely overwhelmed by European romanticism just over a hundred years ago, ironically, this new vocal music became a key technology for national renewal. Written by an ’immigrant’ musician who lived in a remote Icelandic community for over twenty years, this volume focuses upon individual and collective stories about singing as personal and social work. Drawing upon everyday ethnographic and sociological studies of music, and emerging discourse about musical identity, the study uses anthropological, historical and musicological evidence in thinking about songs, singing and Self, and the genderedness of this particular singing practice.

The growing body of films in and around Africa, and the seemingly incongruent growth in African film scholarship, suggests the need for new perspectives, approaches and insights into film cultures in Africa. Although it is impossible to capture the entire diversity of existing African film cultures, this collection, which has resulted from African film conferences organized by the University of Westminster, United Kingdom, has recognized the significance and urgency of this task. The book offers a unique engagement with widened African film ‘cultures’ in the context of diverse peoples, histories, geographies, languages and changing film production cultures shaped by audiences and users at home and in the diaspora. The volume is a significant contribution to the processes of representing the self and other, as well as the emergence of alternative, non-official dialogues, circulation and consumption, including on social media. Students, researchers, film policy makers, film producers, distributors and anyone else with an interest in African screen media will find in the book useful and readable analyses of socio-political factors that affect and are shaped by African film.