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Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.

Author Anna M. Madsen's book is a fresh and challenging look at the legacy of Martin Luther and the new reformation that is calling people of faith to action today. This book is born out of the conviction that at least two gods are currently competing for our collective trust: nationalism (and its many sub-manifestations) and quietism. Both make a case for and a claim on our allegiance, each by way of different motivations of self and institutional protection. Madsen looks at today's modern context and asks: Where will the church stand in a day that is marked by globalization, polarization, racism, bigotry, and debates about justice for humanity and for the earth itself. While the Reformation church was built on the foundation of justification by grace, Madsen calls people of faith to a new reformation that will focus on standing for justice in the world. Madsen delves into who Jesus was, and how our claim that he died and was raised establishes our faith and impacts the way we live it out. She pays attention to Luther's theology and juxtaposes it with our present context. She explores recent examples of Nazi resistance, liberation theology, black and womanist theology, and feminist theology, each of which come at social justice in their unique ways, with a common conviction that justice work is central to the Christian life. She speaks of how our faith grounding and our faith history weave together and entwine themselves into our present moment, offering both warnings and encouragement. And last, a case is made that justice, anchored in justification, is our new Reformation moment, one not inconsistent with Luther's theology, but weighted differently to address the different weighty concerns of our day. A study guide is included to encourage group conversation and action.

This original commentary foregrounds at every turn the poetic genius of the Song of Songs, one of the most elusive texts of the Hebrew Bible. J. Cheryl Exum locates that genius in the way the Song not only tells but shows its readers that love is strong as death, thereby immortalizing love, as well as in the way the poet explores the nature of love by a mature sensitivity to how being in love is different for the woman and the man. Many long-standing conundrums in the interpretation of the book are offered persuasive solutions in Exum's verse by verse exegesis. The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

What book of the Old or New Testament has generated the most commentaries in the history of the Church? Not John?s Gospel, not Paul?s letter to the Romans, not the prophet Isaiah, no, it is the Song of Songs. It is a book that is unknown to many Catholics, and shocking to those who discover it for the first time because of its descriptions of a lover and his beloved God is only mentioned once and that is at the very end. And yet the greatest of the Fathers have commented on it. Origen?s is the classic and St. Jerome says of it: ?Origen, having surpassed all of the interpreters of all the books of Scripture, surpassed himself in this interpretation of the Canticle.? St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Francis de Sales, St. John of the Cross, all have added to the great tradition of interpreting this book for they see it as God?s love for Israel and the Church, Christ?s love for Mary, for the Church, and for each of us. The author draws on all these classics of Catholic tradition to give us a verse by verse reading of the Song of Songs which will deepen the spiritual lives of all of us a deepening rooted in God?s word and the most profound Catholic tradition.

Learn a Bible verse for each letter of the alphabet