Hymns are more than beautiful musical compositions; they provide us with a heightened language for praising and speaking to God, all while teaching us theology that reflects both the depth and complexity of Our Lord. Sacred hymns in our day have given way to “fifth-rate poetry set to fourth-rate music,” as C.S. Lewis once remarked. At times, the music used in worship can make us feel as though the culture is usurping the Church rather than being transfigured by it. There is a clear and present need to resurrect those distinctively different songs with a distinctively different vocabulary for people who want to live distinctive lives as followers of Christ. In these pages, Fr. George William Rutler introduces and reflects upon dozens of the greatest hymns written from the earliest years of the Church through the Twentieth Century. The text and composition of each hymn is included, as well as inspiring accounts of their authors and composers, fascinating stories and historical events connected with them, and notes on the significant contributions each one made to theology and music. Fr. Rutler has recovered here a rich musical legacy that will help us to give glory to our God who is Lord of all.

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.

Today's businessman stretches his lunch hour with a third martini or a fast game of handball. His nineteenth-century counterpart might well have stretched his to take in a religious revival. Across America, especially in 1857-58 and 1875-77, two men, Ira D. Sankey and Dwight L. Moody, were holding immensely popular meetings that would lay the foundation for the tradition of hymnody and revivalism that extends through Billy Sunday to Billy Graham. They added major new developments to an already existing revival tradition; mass meetings in large auditoriums, careful organization of local "Christian workers," and a completely interdenominational approach. But the most remarkable feature of the Moody/Sankey act was Sankey himself: he sang the gospel. He also had his own book of songs to sell. Sankey's Gospel Hymns was by far the most successful of American hymnals and deserves some special attention, some attempt to account for its impact. Why did gospel hymns have such appeal? In this unique study, Sandra Sizer addresses that question by discussing the emergence of Moody-Sandy revivalism and popular religion in the white urban North. One cannot account for the popularity of revivalism by generalizations about industrialization or urbanization. This book offers a new perspective by looking at the rhetoric of the hymns themselves. It also examines what sorts of events and developments in American society made hymn-singing and revivals so attractive to so many people. The author's method is a sociology of religious language, which employs the insights and methods of several disciplines, especially anthropology and literary criticism, emphasizing cultural phenomena as linguistic phenomena intimately related to particular social settings. The approach is historical, but not chronological. The task the author has set herself is an interpreta-tion of the kind of hymn found in Gospel Hymns, illuminating in the process the way in which the hymns, and the revivals, helped to create a "social religion," a community based in likeness of feeling. The community was sacred and promoted moral behavior; people gave up alcohol, were honest and gentle, in accord with the feminine ideal on which the communal feeling was based. The hymns became vehicles for articulating a widespread community defined purely in terms of feeling: they became symbols of unity against later "evils" such as Communists, Catholics, and homosexuals. The analysis in this book allows for a critical perspective on the ideas and forms of revivalism which have shaped much of American culture and rhetoric--the idea of the individual's inner states as the key to his character, the "social" as a realm which creates uniformity through bonds of emotion, the segregation of home and woman from the real world, and the potential political uses of apolitical rhetoric. This book, in short, goes far beyond the discussion of gospel hymns; it raises issues which go to the heart of white, protestant, urban America and suggests that the assumptions lodged there demand argument, not acceptance [Publisher description]

This volume collects one hundred of the most important and beloved Late Antique and Medieval Latin hymns from Western Europe. Ranging from Ambrose in the late fourth century to Bonaventure in the thirteenth, the authors meditate on the ineffable, from Passion to Paradise, and cover a broad gamut of poetic forms and meters.

The Complete Book of Hymns brings to life the stories behind more than 600 hymns and worship songs. With background on the composer, the inspiration behind the lyrics, scriptural references for devotional consideration, and a sampling of the song lyrics, this book brings forth the message of these great songs of the faith like never before!

A specialist in seventeenth-century Germany piety and devotional writings presents new translations of the prose works and hymnody from the century following the start of the Protestant Reformation

Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers' hymns, presenting the discerning child with a multitude of perspectives on religion and childhood. In addition, the agency afforded children as singers meant that they were actively engaged with the text, music, and pictures of their hymnals. Clapp-Itnyre charts the history of children’s hymn-book publications from early to late nineteenth century, considering major denominational movements, the importance of musical tonality as it affected the popularity of hymns to both adults and children, and children’s reformation of adult society provided by such genres as missionary and temperance hymns. While hymn books appear to distinguish 'the child' from 'the adult', intricate issues of theology and poetry - typically kept within the domain of adulthood - were purposely conveyed to those of younger years and comprehension. Ultimately, Clapp-Itnyre shows how children's hymns complicate our understanding of the child-adult binary traditionally seen to be a hallmark of Victorian society. Intersecting with major aesthetic movements of the period, from the peaking of Victorian hymnody to the Golden Age of Illustration, children’s hymn books require scholarly attention to deepen our understanding of the complex aesthetic network for children and adults. Informed by extensive archival research, British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 brings this understudied genre of Victorian culture to critical light.