I will be presenting a short paper, titled "Olivier Messiaen’s 'Des Canyons aux étoiles:' How Love for Creation Inspires Creativity," and will be participating in a roundtable discussion with other musicians and theologians.
From the AAR Conference Program: "In research on Christian musical events, are there ways to speak about God reliably and credibly, especially for researchers who have theological commitments, but background them for the sake of perceived academic rigor? How might examiners of music from theological studies help to empower a theological turn in more humanistic inquiries of music? How, conversely, might the ways of seeing and understanding music prevalent in musicology, in which the music itself is typically at the center of claims, inform the work of scholars who seek to make inferences about God? In this Roundtable, we gather scholars from both music disciplines and theology in a conversation exploring whether and how empirical social scientific reflection on the embodied practice of music among Christians might also engage genuinely theological questions, and similarly how theological understandings emerging from reflection on music might change through engagement with ethnography and performance study."
