Don Saliers is a church musician and professor of theology and worship at Emory
University. He has interviewed people and found that hymns like “Amazing
Grace” evoke “body memory” – the sound of a grandfather’s voice, the smell of a church supper, the beat of a mother’s heart. He has jointly written a book with with his daughter Emily Saliers, of the folk-rock duo the Indigo Girls, A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice.