Hearing faith: musical practice and spirit-filled worship in a contemporary African American church

Boone, Will

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Last Modified

March 21, 2019

Creator

Boone, Will
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Music

Abstract

Hearing Faith offers an experience-centered exploration of musical practice among African American Spirit-filled Christians--a group of believers whose core religious identity centers on direct experiential knowledge of the Holy Spirit. The dissertation shows how these believers use music and dance not simply as media to communicate about religious belief, but as practices that help them negotiate existential challenges and complexities. In doing so, it brings a new perspective to the thriving and contentious scholarly dialogue about black churches, and demonstrates how the methodologies of ethnomusicology and existential anthropology can help build upon and expand this dialogue. Hearing Faith's claims grow out of immersive ethnography with one independent African American congregation in Durham, North Carolina, and additional field research with African American Spirit-filled Christians in central North Carolina and Houston, Texas. Chapter 1 articulates the concept of a Spirit-filled imagination--a base of intellectual and embodied knowledge that both guides and grows out of the community's practices, shaping what worshipers do and value. Chapters 2 and 3 build on this discussion by showing how this concept operates in moments of worship. Six case studies--three in each chapter--explore how musical practice and the Spirit-filled imagination are used by worshipers to negotiate particularly complex existential issues (such as: the presence of levity within moments of gravity; the need to be empowered in a present that emerges at the meeting place of an imperfect past and an uncertain future; and the struggle to deal with unspeakable loss). African American Spirit-filled Christians embrace both Old and New Testament declarations of the mysteriousness of human life. They frequently declare that God's ways are not our ways, and that For now we see through a glass, darkly. Hearing Faith claims that working to better understand how these believers use musical practice to edify and empower themselves in the face of such inscrutability can illuminate a process familiar to most humans, that of negotiating the twin necessities of accepting the depth of life's mysteries and acting in the face of those mysteries.

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