Mention the record album Jesus Sound Explosion to a typical child of the 1970s and that person is likely to picture one of those collections that used to be shown on TV (Call now! Not available in stores!). When Mark Curtis Anderson spied a copy in a junk store a few years ago, he knew just what he'd found, and the memories of growing up in a Baptist minister's family came flooding forth. The title of Anderson's memoir is a nod to the live concert album from Explo '72, a kind of evangelical Woodstock emceed by Billy Graham. Explo's crowds of 100,000-plus signaled that enterprising evangelicals were discovering how to use rock and roll in the marketplace of conversion. Anderson was eleven that year, too young to be at Explo but old enough to wish he was. Other preachers' kids may have gazed out at the wider world and craved its movies, clothes, or toys, but he wanted its music. And not just the Jesus-rocker fare of Explo's Armageddon Experience or Children of Truth, but the real stuff, too. Jesus Sound Explosion recalls Anderson's quest for worldliness-through-rock as he came of age under the gaze, he often sensed, of his father's entire congregation. All of the backsliding and revival, idealism and disillusionment one would expect is here, told with delightfully understated humor and set against the sounds of The Guess Who, Yes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bruce Springsteen. Here is a knowing look back on a time when Jesus Christ Superstar climbed the pop charts, The Cross and the Switchblade hit the big screen, and anxious parents played their kids' records backwards in search of hidden messages from Satan.

In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. The chart-topping, spiritually inflected music created a space in popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and Christianity, thus lessening for baby boomers and their children the stigma associated with religion while helping to fill churches and create new modes of worship. Stowe shows how evangelicals' increasing acceptance of Christian pop music ultimately has reinforced a variety of conservative cultural, economic, theological, and political messages.

Life in Body contains thirteen new pieces from Saint Paul writers about life, understanding the many roles we play, enjoying the awkward and confusing parts, celebrating the complexity.

Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets’ boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.

A journalist's penetrating and controversial look at the untold story of Christian fundamentalism's most elite organisation- a self-described 'invisible' global network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. They are 'the Family' - fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the 'new chosen'- congressmen, generals and foreign dictators who meet in confidential 'cells', to pray and plan for a 'leadership led by God', to be won not by force but through 'quiet diplomacy'. Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls. The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power - not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of 'biblical capitalism', military might and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, 'We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't'. Part history, part investigative journalism, The Family is a compelling account of how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power and the no-holds-barred economics of globalisation. No other book about the Right has exposed the Family or revealed its far-reaching impact on democracy, and no future reckoning of fundamentalism will be able to ignore it.

On March 1, 1954, the US military detonated “Castle Bravo,” its most powerful nuclear bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Two days later, the US military evacuated the Marshallese to a nearby atoll where they became part of a classified study, without their consent, on the effects of radiation on humans. In Radiation Sounds Jessica A. Schwartz examines the seventy-five years of Marshallese music developed in response to US nuclear militarism on their homeland. Schwartz shows how Marshallese singing draws on religious, cultural, and political practices to make heard the deleterious effects of US nuclear violence. Schwartz also points to the literal silencing of Marshallese voices and throats compromised by radiation as well as the United States’ silencing of information about the human radiation study. By foregrounding the centrality of the aural and sensorial in understanding nuclear testing’s long-term effects, Schwartz offers new modes of understanding the relationships between the voice, sound, militarism, indigeneity, and geopolitics.

Welcome to “Jesus’ World” – where Born-Again Christians find Spiritual Encouragement to “be Jesus” to their world. This is “Jesus’ Special Invitation” to every Christian to enter into His Divine World of Witnessing. RSVP to King Jesus ASAP!! The moments and days are quickly slipping away like the grains of sand through an hour-glass. Carpe diem!! There is a Mighty King to be followed, an evil foe to be defeated, and an Eternal Reward to be gained. Today is the day to take a deep Spiritual Breath and “Go for it!” Turn the pages as you turn your life over to “Jesus in you.”