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Faculty of Music

 
Prof Jeremy  Begbie

Roles

Affiliated Lecturer

Biography

Jeremy Begbie specialises in the interface between theology and the arts, and his particular research interest is the interplay between music and theology. The inaugural holder of the Thomas A. Langford Research Professorship in Theology at Duke Divinity School, North Carolina, Professor Begbie is founding Director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts, and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music. He is Senior Member at Wolfson College Cambridge.

Previously he has been Associate Principal at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews where he directed the research project, Theology Through the Arts at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts.

Educated largely in Scotland, before entering the theological world he read music and philosophy at Edinburgh University, studying compo­sition with Kenneth Leighton and piano with Colin Kingsley. Holding piano performing and teaching qualifications, he is also an oboist, and was recently made a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music.

He is author of a number of books, including Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (T & T Clark); Theology, Music and Time (CUP), and Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker/SPCK), Music, Modernity, and God (OUP). His most recent book is Redeeming Transcendence (Eerdmans).

Publications

Key publications: 

Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

With Steven R. Guthrie, eds., Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

Music, Modernity and God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Redeeming Transcendence. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018

Other publications: 
“Theology” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, eds. Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson and Tomas McAuley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
 
“An Awkward Customer: The Theologian in the Midst of Congregational Music Studies,” in Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls (eds),
Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (forthcoming, Routledge Press).
 
2013. “Negotiating Musical Transcendence” in Music and Transcendence, Farnham: Ashgate, 105-110
 

2012. "Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius." In Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by M. V. Clarke, Farnham: Ashgate,197-213.

2011. "Faithful Feelings: Music and Emotion in Worship." In Resonant Witness: Essays in Theology and Music, edited by Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 323-354

2010. "Worldview, Measurement and 'The Roots of Spirituality'." In The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, edited by Iain Morley and Colin Renfrew, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 250-256.