The American Organist Magazine delights us each month as it serves the several thousands of us who, I am told, have to be content with inhabiting a “niche market.” After having paid respects to the pipe-organ and organist niche in the paragraphs ahead, I want to explore the place of “niches” in American religion. The concern is inspired by curiosity about what matters when we talk, as we do in Sightings, about “public religion.”
The son and brother of three teachers who played the organ in worship as part of their call and calling, and someone who haunts sanctuaries when organists are noisily practicing in the quiet of a Saturday afternoon, I have a (literally) life-long passion for the instrument. Twice the American Guild of Organists has indulged that passion by letting me pretend I knew enough about the subject to speak at plenary sessions of their annual conventions.
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