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Marini's book does not provide prescriptive answers to the many questions—practical, artistic, theological, scriptural, architectural, economic, ethical, and ethnic—that swirl around the religious use of music today. What it does supply, however, may be even more basic, for the book documents the central role of sacred song in a tremendous variety of religious traditions; it explains with special sensitivity the breakthroughs (and problems) for music in the liturgical, charismatic, and seeker-sensitive revivals of recent years; it treats sympathetically the tangled web of economic-religious considerations that now beset sacred music of almost every sort; and it begins to explain why music is and has been so foundationally important for religious believers.

Marini's strategy was to hit the road in order to visit places where sacred song could be observed in practice. The book describes with as much sympathy as possible what he heard and saw, to which are added historical accounts for the groups under consideration. Marini also includes analysis of two recent hymnals (the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Hymnal of 1991, which reflected the rising conservative tide in that denomination, and the United Church of Christ's New Century Hymnal of 1995, which did more to incorporate inclusive language and inclusive ideology than any other major American hymnal). And he presents transcripts of interviews with two composers whose works are used widely in church settings—Daniel Pinkham, whom Marini calls "a nonbeliever of Episcopal background," long associated with the Unitarian King's Chapel of Boston, and Neely Bruce, a passionate Roman Catholic believer who from his post at Wesleyan University in Connecticut has long campaigned for the spiritual and artistic renewal of church music.

The great success of the book is Marini's ability to make every one of his on-site visits come alive. The great complexity that the book reveals comes from the striking variety of what he found during those visits: to the Denver March Powwow featuring Native American song and dance; a Chicano Holy Week pilgrimage in Chimayó, New Mexico; a Sunday of Sacred Harp shape-note singing at the Little Vine Primitive Baptist Church in Blount County, Alabama; a morning worship with the thousands packed into the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago's south side; a concert of klezmer music and Sephardic song in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an evening of New Age music in Ellsworth, Maine, featuring wiccan Kay Gardner; a rehearsal with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Temple Square in Salt Lake City; a visit to John Michael Talbot at the site of his community of the Brothers and Sisters of Charity near Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and personal interviews with members of the Lewis and Isaac families at the Peaceful Valley Blue Grass Festival in Shinhopple, New York. In order to make sure that music remains central in a book about music, Marini also adds a 45-page appendix of musical examples keyed to the various chapters in the book.

Marini's reports illuminate musical traditions that are often little understood, or even known, by those outside the specific groups involved. As an example, his clear explanation of how West African ritual practices, the evangelically sponsored hymns of Isaac Watts, and the performance practices of early jazz and the blues flow together into the controlled improvisation of urban African American worship makes sense out of what to first-time Caucasian visitors can sound wildly incongruous, or simply wild. Likewise illuminating is his account of how the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has exploited classical Christian repertory and good-feeling American patriotism as a powerful advertisement for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But as with so many of the groups Marini visited, Mormon musical practice contains substantial ambiguities—in this case, some Mormons who worry that their choir is not aggressive enough in propagating their faith, and other Mormons who feel that the spectacular attention lavished on this one choir takes the steam out of musical efforts at the ordinary services of local Mormon worship.

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