From Publishers Weekly

In what may be the first-ever reference work of its kind, the 1,000-page Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music profiles Christian musicians, songwriters and producers, in addition to secular artists whose faith has influenced their music. Author Mark Allan Powell (who is actually a New Testament scholar of considerable repute)States he wandered into a Christian bookstore five years ago and discovered that more than a quarter of the shelf space was devoted to contemporary Christian music. There was not, however, a single book on the subject a lacuna that’ll be amply corrected by this enormous, funny, informative tome. Powell is a man of considerable opinions, whether he is defending Amy Grant’s album Behind the Eyes as possibly the most painfully honest recording ever produced by any artist or arguing about the impact of Rich Mullins’s tragically short career. On a basic level, the book will be utilized as an encyclopedia by people who con (more…)

From Publishers Weekly

According to Beaujon, contributing writer for Spin, sales of Christian music totaled 47 million albums in 2003— outselling jazz, classical music and New Age combined, with sales climbing 10% each year for the past five years. Beaujon came up with the title of his book from a T-shirt he saw at the Cornerstone Christian music festival depicting Jesus’s hands with holes in them. In addition to promoting fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, such messages, Beaujon explains, delivered in either folky ballad lilts or throat-wrenching Steven Tyleresque heavy metal screams, are strongly antiabortion (”stop killing my generation”), staunchly conservative (70% of Christian rockers and their fans are Republicans) and provirginity (”dating is prostitution”). Beaujon developed the book from a series of pieces written for Spin and, consequently, the text reads like pithy, onsite, you-are-there set pieces. In “Black and White in a Gray World,” he profiles a (more…)