Amazing Grace at 250

Global Heritage and Contested Legacies

Martin V. Clarke, Gareth Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040405413
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Christianity

This book focuses on arguably the best-known Christian hymn worldwide. From the slave trade to the civil rights movement and from obscurity in its country of origin to global recognition, the origins, history, influence, and legacy of "Amazing Grace" are uniquely complex. The volume brings together historians, theologians, literary scholars, and musicologists to shed new light on the ways in which the hymn's lyrics, familiar musical setting and its performance by leading vocalists contribute to its enduring popularity and the meanings and value ascribed to it by diverse communities across time and place. The chapters explore the literary and religious qualities of the text, its relationship with the ubiquitous NEW BRITAIN melody, its adoption and adaptation by famous singers and in Christian churches from South America to Asia. The contributors highlight significant facets of the hymn's origins and legacy, while the collection as a whole provides a focused emphasis on the importance of historical, literary, theological, and musical approaches in understanding the ways in which Christian congregational music acquires meaning and influences thought and practice in local and global contexts.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Faith’s Review and Expectation
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Global Heritage
• 1 The Enduring Textual Power of “Amazing Grace”: John Newton’s Hymn as Exemplary Devotional Verse
• 2 What is so Amazing about Grace?: “Amazing Grace” in the Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Theology and Hymnody
• 3 Awaiting Grace: A Hymn Comes Home
• 4 From “Amazing Grace” to “Preciosa Graça”: Transnational Echoes of a Protestant Hymn
• 5 “Amazing Grace” and New Britain Beyond the Anglophone World: German Paraphrases and New Texts, 1971–2023
• 6 Recontextualizing “Amazing Grace” in Hong Kong: Its Social and Pastoral Meanings
• Part II Music and Musicians
• 7 “How Sweet the Sound”: “Amazing Grace” and the Eventual Ubiquity of New Britain
• 8 “Amazing Grace,” Aretha, and the Transcendent
• 9 Retuning “Amazing Grace”
• 10 Amazing Affordances: Revealing the Idiomaticity of the Harmonica through a Classic Hymn
• Part III Contested Legacies
• 11 “Now I See”: Discussing Blindness in Hymnody
• 12 “Amazing Grace” for Lawyers: Lessons from the First 250 Years
• 13 Through Many Dangers: “Amazing Grace” as an Act of Congregational Care during Crisis
• 14 “Amazing Grace” in Virtual Space: Two Pandemic Performances on YouTube
• 15 The Making of Forever?: A Poet’s Practice-Steeped Reflection
• Index