Understanding the culture of living with hymnbooks offers new insight into the histories of poetry, literacy, and religious devotion. It stands barely three inches high, a small brick of a book. The pages are skewed a bit, and evidence of a small handprint remains on the worn, cheap leather covers that don’t quite close. The book bears the marks of considerable use. But why—and for whom—was it made? Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers.

Many new hymns as well as old favorites are included in this collection of 658 hymns. The hymns represent a variety of music styles that reflect the diversity of the Mennonite and Brethren denominations. An additional 202 worship resources offer responsive readings and prayers for many occasions. Round notes.

795 hymns without music.

This popular collection of 280 musical pieces from both the African American and Gospel traditions has been compiled under the supervision of the Office of Black Ministries of the Episcopal Church. It includes service music and several psalm settings in addition to the Negro spirituals, Gospel songs, and hymns.

In the time-honored tradition of church musicians who compose music for local use, Robert A. Hawthorne created these beautiful new settings of the psalms for his congregation in Oregon. They proved so singable, so sensitively rendered, and so liturgically appropriate that many who heard them felt this music should be more widely available. The Portland Psalter: Book One, brings the first part of Hawthorne's psalter to the larger church. It contains settings for all psalms appointed for the Sunday Eucharist according to the Book of Common Prayer lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary. Book Two contains the balance of psalm settings for the church year together with pastoral offices and ordination rites and the Easter Vigil.

A hymnal featuring the greatest hymns of church history and today.