How do you go about writing music for a climate-focussed worship album? What does it mean to sing alongside trees in a forest? How can we process the loss of animals and habitats in the music of a Requiem? As issues of climate and ecology become ever more important, Christian communities are increasingly looking for appropriate ways to respond to the current crisis in their worship and liturgy.
In this book, Mark Porter draws on more than 40 interviews with activists, song-writers, Christian leaders, and musicians to explore what it means to develop new Christian musical practices for a time of ecological crisis. Through these different conversations, the book enters into fundamental questions regarding our relationships with the world around us, the relationship between spirituality and ecology, and the different ways in which we can engage with the climate crisis which we are facing.
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This is a much-needed book. Musical Christian responses to the climate emergency are immensely varied and astonishingly creative, including musicking in well-known formats and innovations in sonic worlds that bring the human and other-than-human sound worlds together. The debates are carefully and clearly set out with remarkable respect for diverse theological and musical positions… This is an excellent and inspirational book that is an essential read for anyone concerned with Christian ecology.
June Boyce-Tillman, University of Winchester
This well-conceived and clearly-written series of interview-based case studies lifts the curtain on an important but under-studied aspect of music for the environment: the explosion of musical creativity and experimentation among progressive Christians and other faith-based groups in response to the existential crisis of climate change. A thoughtful and pioneering contribution to applied ecomusicology, this stimulating book offers a great deal to scholars, musicians, and environmental activists.
Jeff Todd Titon, Brown University
This book is a personal journey of discovery, emotionally engaged, and theologically alert [...] a pioneering and wide-ranging study of the place of Christian music in a changing, troubled world.
David Atkinson, Church Times
A rich variety sensitively explored.
Robin Gill, Theology
Mark Porter’s carefully and clearly written debate provides us with much inspiration for conversations and experimentation by musicians, environmentalists and worship leaders. By asking crucial, but as yet not fully answered, questions, such as “who needs to hear what message, in what musical form, from whom?” and “which creative possibilities remain just a dream, and which can become reality?” he brings us to ask more, similarly powerful, questions. These grapple with demands of traditions, expectations, and degrees of willingness to encounter new possibilities, and to adapt what has been tried to new situations.
Catherine Fish, Green Christian Magazine
In a polarizing world, Porter offers a thoughtful and timely contribution that moves beyond finding the “right answers” and instead focuses on finding contextually appropriate responses. […] He convincingly argues for the value of considering this diversity in practice, resisting efforts to reduce musical innovation into uniformity. […] For the practitioner, Porter offers an overview of musical responses to the climate crisis. For the academic working on ritual, liturgy, and/or hymnology, the work provokes further consideration of power relations in music and the meaning of ritual within contexts where action and transformation are desired.
Marileen Steyn, Reading Religion
the book offers a useful taxonomy of a neglected field and gives scholars and practitioners better language for discussing how music might mediate relationships among faith, activism, grief, place, and ecological responsibility. This makes the book especially valuable for readers in liturgical theology, practical theology, religion and ecology, church music, and hymnology. It would also serve graduate students and clergy who are trying to think more carefully about how worship relates to climate crisis without reducing that question either to generic activism or to vague aesthetic appreciation of nature. Porter helps illuminate a genuine void in contemporary discussions of worship music. In many church contexts, ecological concern remains underdeveloped liturgically and musically, even when it is affirmed morally. Porter’s study usefully presses against that gap. […] Porter achieves something important. He broadens the theological imagination around what faithful music-making might entail in a warming world. He shows that Christian responses to ecological crisis may take the form not only of praise but also lament, protest,requiem, and renewed attentiveness to creaturely sound. For homileticians and worship leaders alike, that insight matters. […] For the Warming of the Earth is a significant contribution to an emerging conversation, and it deserves a wide hearing among scholars and religious leaders willing to ask what faithful worship might sound like on a damaged yet beloved earth.
Brad Campbell, Homiletic
