[In the following review, Parry offers a positive assessment of Joyful Noise.]

Joyful Noise is an eclectic collection of essays on religion in general and the New Testament in particular by mostly young, contemporary writers including Madison Smartt Bell, Benjamin Cheever, Barry Hannah, bell hooks, and Joanna Scott. It is a pleasure to see an engagement with spirituality in a less than dogmatic manner, by writers who represent a variety of interpretations and come from backgrounds ranging from white, heterosexual, and Christian to African-American, Hispanic, gay, Jewish, and Buddhist. The editors compare the collection to jazz, hence the name Joyful Noise, various riffs on Jesus and the apostles.

Topics in this volume range from personal interpretations of Jesus to how the Gospels can affect the way we live in modern society. Among the most successful are the essays which blend personal narrative with a carefully thought-out reaction to a specific part of the New Testament. Bell hooks's “Love's Alchemy,” for example, starts with her experience of attending a class on the Bible as Literature and ends with a beautiful meditation on 1 John, on how perfect love can cast out fear and what the implications of that notion mean.

There is a fascination with the human side of Jesus, as a teenager, as a convict, as a friend to the imperfect apostle Peter, and with his physicality, including his feet. The least successful of these essays are those that seem to be primarily childhood reminiscences of God, Jesus, and the Bible and stay at the anecdotal level rather than transcending these remembrances. Joyful Noise will be of interest to those who want to think seriously about their own spirituality and relate it to their concerns about modern society.