We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Music to solicit academic papers that will subsequently be published on the site. Our hope is that this will bring you fresh, thoughtful music coverage and extend the conversation facilitated at the Festival to a broader online audience. We’re confident that this will benefit our readership, and we’re grateful for the partnership.

More info from Calvin below.

Call for Papers: Festival of Faith and Music
March 26-28, 2015 
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Contact email: mmccampbell@leeuniversity.edu

Calvin College’s Festival of Faith & Music is a biennial conference that brings together musicians, journalists, academics, students and lovers of music and popular culture to discuss diverse forms of popular music and issues of faith.

Past festivals have featured performances by Emmylou Harris, Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, The Hold Steady, Matisyahu, The Civil Wars, Lupe Fiasco, and many others. Along with a nightly concert lineup, the festival has also included keynote speakers and interactive workshop presentations from a wide range of artists, critics, and academics including Cornel West, Makoto Fujimura, Chuck Klosterman, Jessica Hopper, and Cathleen Falsani.

We are interested in discovering and celebrating popular music that can be understood as rooted in conviction and/or engaged with themes of faith broadly conceived, including justice, truth, hope, epiphany, transcendence, and redemption, and in hearing or interpreting popular music from faith perspectives. Our festival is 
not primarily concerned with the Christian music industry or limited to 
discussing only those artists who publicly embrace a specific religion.
 Rather, we hope to facilitate a broader conversation about all forms of
 popular music and our response to it as people of faith.

Proposal Information: We are seeking proposals for individual 20 minute papers or 75 minute panels (3 papers) that address issues of faith in popular music and its various social and cultural contexts; these might include works of close textual analysis, sociological analysis, theological analysis, gender studies, etc.. We are particularly interested in papers related to this year’s featured artists and speakers. Updates on confirmed artists and speakers for this year’s festival will soon be found on our website.

A selection of the accepted submissions for this year’s academic panels will be published in arts magazine The Curator. 

Please email a 300-word abstract, bibliography, and speaker bio (attached in a single Word or PDF document) to Dr. Mary McCampbell (mmccampbell@leeuniversity.edu) no later than January 15, 2015. Inquiries to the same e-mail address.

Accepted papers and workshops will be decided by January 30, 2015.