Jesus of Nazareth inaugurated his earthly ministry with an announcement of the fulfilment of time as well as the nearness of the kingdom of God. The Good News he preached came as a challenge to start a new way of living in our historical process. In fact, time and history are the most important parameters of human life. The ongoing flow of time is what we call history and the entire historical process of the world is at the same time salvation history. Humans are the makers of history and they are also being formed and transformed by this history. The Church, in continuing the saving mission of Christ, tries to become the sacrament of God's presence in history and imparts to the world at large its healing and saving power. It is from the Bible that we have to derive a comprehensive and holistic meaning of time and history, and it is this salubrious understanding that should be the source of inspiration for all in approaching and celebrating the challenge of time and history in our times. The various studies in this 'Time and History: Biblical and Theological Studies' try to throw light on some of the forgotten dimensions of time and history, and invite men and women towards a more meaningful commitment to our historical process.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias (and other oppositional religious communities), music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume as a whole, then, approaches Christian groups and their musics as diverse and powerful windows into the way in which music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) between places, now and historically. It also tries to take account of the religious self-understandings of these groups, presenting Christian musical practice and exchange as encompassing and negotiating deeply felt and deeply rooted moral and cultural values. Given that the centerpiece of the volume is Christian religious musical practice, the volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.