Your Neighbor's Hymnal

Synopsis: Your Neighbor's Hymnal provides a winsome and thoughtful exploration of popular music, from rock to hip-hop to metal to soul, as a vital source contemporary culture continues to go to learn about faith, hope, and love. Where some Christians have kept their focus only on a hymnal found in their church or formed by the genre of Contemporary Christian Music, Keuss argues that your neighbor's hymnal is filled with great music that God is using and deserves a deeper listen. Offering forty songs spanning time and genres, each section includes a number of representative reflections on the history and artist that created the song, reflections on its lyrical content, and theological and biblical connections that will hopefully show some ways in which the song illustrates how your neighbor is hearing, seeking, and finding faith, hope, and love through popular music. This book can be approached in a number of ways. As an introduction to this stream of popular culture, the overviews and short introductions to each song provide a glossary useful in courses needing texts in theology and popular culture. For use with church groups, whether adult bible studies or youth groups, Your Neighbor's Hymnal provides points of reference for connecting key aspects of the Christian faith with illustrations readily available for discussion. For interested music listeners, the book will provide a means of giving voice to their own musings on faith. As with faith, good music is meant to be shared, and Your Neighbor's Hymnal offers a wonderful opportunity to do both. Endorsements: "How Keuss narrowed down his 'playlist' for this book is beyond me. There are a plethora of theological themes and 'religious' truths in popular music, and Keuss' selection is a wide and diverse sampling. It would be easy to dismiss popular music as vapid and superficial, driven and shaped by market forces that flatten the existential truths of the artists into commercial commodities, but Keuss enables us, like a fine teacher, to see the obvious, the beautiful, the transcendent, and the transformative in this powerful and omnipresent platform for giving voice to human desire. Those who have ears to hear already know this, those who do not could do no better than to surrender to Keuss' able guidance." -Eric G. Flett author of Persons, Powers, and Pluralities: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Culture "With the mind of a theologian, the heart of the pastor, and the soul of an artist, nobody reflects more intelligently and provocatively at the intersection of theology and pop culture then Jeff Keuss. Your Neighbor's Hymnal shows how this generation does its God-talk through music and lyrics and passionately calls us to listen to and participate in their conversation." -Dick Staub author of About You: Fully Human. Fully Alive. "Keuss works with popular music from the inside, like someone with the music flowing through his veins. This book is a fantastic example of how pop culture can serve as a deep source of theological reflection, which will enable readers to encounter God, through the music in 'Your Neighbour's Hymnal.'" -Michael W. DeLashmutt Co-Chair of the Network for Religion and Popular Culture Author Biography: Jeffrey F. Keuss is Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Theology at Seattle Pacific University. He is the author of Freedom of the Self: Kenosis, Cultural Identity, and Mission at the Crossroads (Pickwick, 2010), The Sacred and the Profane: Current Demands on Hermeneutics (2003), and A Poetics of Jesus (2002).