Depeche Mode or Johnny Cash? What does your music taste say about your spirituality?
Clive Marsh (left) with co-author Vaughan S. Roberts and Bobbi Jo Heyboer, Senior Director of Marketing at Baker Academic
Clive Marsh, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Lifelong Learning at the University of Leicester, has released his latest book: Personal Jesus: How Popular Music Shapes Our Souls.
Co-written with Vaughan S. Roberts, the book was launched at the American Academy of Religion in Chicago in November, and is distributed in the UK by SPCK.
It is a work of theology and culture and uses insights from the study of religion to help clarify how and why many people’s use of music proves so significant in daily life.
The book draws on empirical material from a study of music fans undertaken during 2009-10, to which Leicester residents contributed.
In this work, the authors discuss
• The importance of music for people’s exploration of their embodiedness
• How music connects people and helps shape and structure life
• How music creates experiences which take people ‘beyond themselves.’
Clive Marsh has been researching religion and popular culture issues for 20 years, co-edited Explorations in Theology and Film (Blackwell 1997) and has also published Cinema and Sentiment (Paternoster Press 2004) and Theology Goes to the Movies (Routledge 2007).
Personal Jesus: How Popular Music Shapes Our Souls is published by Baker Academic 2013.
Further information is available on the Baker Publishing Group website.
