Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements remedies a long-standing gap in music education scholarship by considering the ways in which music, education, and religion fuse together, overlap, connect, or conflict in theory and in practice. The rationale of this volume lies in the conviction that the various practical, social, cultural, ideological, and political constraints on music teaching and learning also engage with matters of religion, a thematic area that has been absent in scholarly work on music education, even when it comes to works attending to pluralism and diversity. In recognizing both enduring and new diversities in contemporary societies, the chapters in this book embrace a range of perspectives, including religious, contextual, geographic, historical, and theoretical standpoints and writings from the disciplines of music education, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history, and ethnomusicology. The timeliness of this inquiry arises from developments both within and outside the field of music education scholarship. Contemporary music education in the twentieth century focused by and large on the psychological, cognitive, aesthetic, and individual aspects of music making. The increasing prominence and prestige of instrumental music in the West, the influence of a recording industry that made musical works available in live and recorded media to a wide public, the development of formalist-oriented aesthetic theories, and a general secularization of formal education made it possible to articulate a demarcation between aesthetic musical experiences and the moral or cultural values of musical practices, with some proponents of music education even recommending that teachers consciously exclude “extramusical” understandings of musical material in their classes (e.g., Mark 1989; Reimer 1989, 1991). This separation of “purely” musical considerations from extramusical matters was urged even as some theories highlighted the conceptual and phenomenological similarities between some religious experiences and some aesthetic experiences (e.g., Reimer 1989).