Music and Faith
By Jonathan Arnold
Boydell, 288pp, £30/$40
Few readers of this magazine would, I imagine, challenge the idea that music is a Good Thing with a proper place in liturgy. It hardly seems a controversial statement. And it might not seem to warrant a 288-page book to argue the point. But then, Jonathan Arnold’s Music and Faith isn’t exactly an argument. It’s a voyage round the subject, written by an Anglican priest, the current Dean of Chapel at Magdalen College Oxford, and presented as a series of conversations linked by commentaries that read as though they originated in some kind of doctoral dissertation. Which is to say, they’re not a literary joy.
