(Special section introduction) hymns beyond the congregation: constructions of identity and legacies of meaning

Abstract

We offer here the first of two special sections on the theme of "Hymns Beyond the Congregation." Divided into the two sub-themes of “Hymns Beyond the Congregation: Constructions of Identity,” and “Hymns Beyond the Congregation: Legacies of Meaning,” our authors (based in institutions both in the USA and the UK) comprise both early career and senior scholars and come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds in American history, South African colonial history, political history, the history of mission education, and historical musicology. Together, these two special issues will pave the way for facilitating new dialogues between historians, musicologists and congregational studies scholars, inviting fresh perspectives on how hymns have long constituted a powerful genre for community-building that often resists and reframes the hierarchies within which most hymns have hitherto been studied. We also hope that this work encourages the traditional binaries between secular and sacred contexts for hymn singing to be broken down, so that the migration of hymns between church services and secular spaces can also be understood as a largely inevitable societal and cultural process.

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ORCID for Erin G. Johnson-Williams: orcid.org/0000-0002-3305-5783

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