Battle Hymns

Providing literary analysis and historical background, Leland Ryken invites us to experience great hymns as powerful works of devotional poetrysavoring elements that we easily miss when singing them.

From its beginnings in the Bible, Christian hymnology has fulfilled three functions -- praise, recital and teaching of the Myth, and collective and personal adoration as well as the foundation and worship of the church. In Hymns and the Christian Myth, Lionel Adey demonstrates that over the centuries shifts emphasizing particular elements of the Christian faith accord with the interests and concerns of the times in which the hymns were composed.